Alongside the launch of theXiaomi 13and13 Prosmartphones, Xiaomi also introduced a new pair of true wireless headphones – the Xiaomi Buds 4 Pro.
Following on from the Buds 3T Pro, which were released last year alongside theXiaomi 12Series, the Buds 4 Pro promise an upgraded design, improved noise cancellation and better battery life.
However, perhaps most notable is their price. These buds will cost £240/€240 (Xiaomi doesn’t ship to America), pushing them past the cost of some of their biggest rivals and making them the most expensive Xiaomi buds that we can remember. Do they justify their price tag? Here’s our review.
Xiaomi Buds 4 Pro
The Xiaomi Buds Pro 4 look the part and have some inviting features and functionality, but at their current price, they don’t have the performance behind them to match up to the competition.
Design and battery life
Just like the 3T Pro did, the Buds 4 Pro opt for an AirPod-esque stem design, with the earbud part sitting at a slight angle to help it to sit more comfortably and securely in your ear. They’re lightweight too, so you can pretty much forget you-re wearing them once they are in.
The buds come with interchangeable rubber ear tips, which helps them to stay put too - there-s a choice of small, medium or large - and they come in a choice of Star Gold or Space Black, the latter of which is the colour we tested.
They look lovely, with a chrome strip down their outer edge to help them stand out from the increasingly large true wireless crowd. It’s subtle enough that it doesn’t looking flashy or cheap and creates the premium look and feel that it was intended to.
This is mirrored in the bud’s capsule-shaped charging case, which is matte black with the same gunmetal grey chrome for its lid. As you open it, the buds are facing you rather than being tucked away in a fiddly charging ravine, and so can easily be removed with one hand. The magnets are really strong too, so they snap back into place with reassuring security.
The case is charged via USB-C, and there’s Qi wireless charging support too, with a pretty impressive nine hours of playback from the buds on a single charge. Including what the case can offer, there’s 38 hours of listening time here, which is up about 14 hours on last year’s model. For a fast charge, you can get three hours of playback after five minutes of charging, with a full charge from just 30 minutes in the case.
A bit like Apple’sAirPods Pro, the stems of the Buds 4 Pro hold all of the controls for music playback, and they’re activated by a force sensor. There’s a slight dip in the stem, to help you find it easily while wearing them, but you then have to squeeze it to activate the functionality. We didn’t get the hang of getting this right, first time every time, during our testing period, so it can be a bit fiddly, but it’s definitely something you get better at. You do hear a little audible click when you do manage to get it right though, so you know it’s been registered.
A short press does the usual pause/play or handles calls, while a double press will skip tracks and three will go back, as we’ve become used to with touch controls. There’s no way to handle volume on the buds themselves though, so you will need to control this at device level.
A long press toggles between having the noise cancelling and transparency modes – there doesn’t appear to be a way to have it off entirely from the buds, but an AI mode does intelligently identify how noisy it is around you and will choose how much you need, from three settings.
If you prefer, there are actually a total of six manual ANC modes that you can choose instead, but you’ll need to download the Xiaomi Earbuds app to access them. This is alongside three manual transparency modes - ambient enhancement mode, regular transparency mode and enhanced voice mode - all available via the app.
The sticking point here is that the app is only available from Google Play - there is no app for iOS users, so Apple owners won’t get the customisation options that Android users do. It makes them a bit of a hard sell for Apple users when the Airpods Pro are available around the same price - but that’s probably exactly the reason Xiaomi hasn’t bothered investing in it.
The wear sensor works pretty smoothly from our experience, meaning that when you remove an earbud, your music will pause automatically and then restart when it is back in place.
Performance
Delivering the sound in the Xiaomi Buds 4 Pro is Xiaomi’s customised second-generation 11mm ultra-dynamic dual-magnet driver. It’s a warm, upfront sound, and so as soon as you press play you are pulled right in. We appreciate the energy, and there’s plenty of fun to be had with these buds.
The big sticking point with the Xiaomi Buds Pro 4 is their price. At £240/€240, they are putting themselves firmly among the biggest players in the business – and in some cases, even cost more than them. And that’s tough because, in pure performance terms, they can’t really keep up with what we’d expect at this price.
There’s nothing controversial about the way the Buds 4 Pro handle music. Play your favourite music through them and you’ll find it pleasing enough to listen to – there’s no harsh edges or distortion here (which is good because they aren’t the loudest), and they’re a smooth and comfortable listen if you’re a casual listener. However, with a more critical ear - as their price demands - there are some things we’d like them to do better.
Firstly, the bass here can be a little heavy handed. That can work for some genres and some tastes, as long as it’s of good quality, but here, it lacks some definition and doesn’t actually reach as low as you might think it would.
For example,Under Ground Kingsby Drake has a deep, low bassline that runs throughout the song and the Buds 4 Pro really struggle to handle it with any real authority. The rumble is there, but there’s none of the subtlety or texture that you’d hear in the B&W Pi7 S2 or theBose QuietComfort Earbuds 2. You can’t hear as the bass notes shift deeper either - it’s just one long rumble that loses confidence and presence when that bass note drops to its lowest point.
They do upper bass better, and can put some considerable welly behind the bouncing bassline inNo Church in the Wild. There’s plenty of punch and power in each drum kick, and the track has all the energy it requires. However, the vocals are in a fight with the low-end for the spotlight, and lack some much-needed presence and solidity in such a busy track.
In fact, whenever there’s a lot going on in the mix, the Buds 4 Pro can start to sound a little disjointed. While they’ll happily keep a handle on all the different elements of a track without getting flustered, they don’t necessarily bring them together to create the most cohesive presentation. This ultimately comes down to a lack of fine detail, and you’ll hear much more insight and connection between the frequency ranges in something like theSony XF-1000XM4.
Our final niggle is that they lack some space to their presentation too. Listen toHeart Shaped Boxby Nirvana and everything is just all upfront and in your face, and there’s not much headroom here for them to scale up into and back again. This has a knock on effect on dynamics, and the difference between loud and soft isn’t as explicitly detailed as you’d hear on something more accomplished.
If it sounds like we’re being picky, it’s because of that price. Knock £100 off of the cost - which could happen with price drops and Xiaomi bundle deals - and many of these issues become much more par for the course. But at a premium prices like this, we just expect a bit more refinement and detail than we hear here.
Noise cancelling - which at 48dB is the best of any Xiaomi headphones - does a decent job at blocking out the big noises. We used these on a plane and with music playing, it managed to cover the drone of the engine for all but take off.
When your music isn’t playing you won’t get the almost eerie silence that the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2 can offer, but then very few can. These will do a good the job at taking the edge off all office humdrum and continuous traffic noise, and help make your music listening much more focused.
A quick mention about dimensional audio, which is supported in the Xiaomi Buds 4 Pro. This is where the earbuds can identify your head position and adjust the sound placement in the headphones as you move your head around, creating a more realistic 360-degree experience. It usually works best with movies, and is a feature that the AirPods Pro also offer.
From experience there, it’s not a feature that everyone loves, but Xiaomi is trying to make it more accessible by bringing the computing of the 3D audio into the earbuds themselves, to make the feature available on more sources. The biggest problem for us is that the feature is switched off by default and can only be turned on via the Xiaomi app - which iOS users can’t access. We’ll update this review when we’ve been able to try it out, but we don’t expect its performance here to change our feelings on their performance. It’s a nice-to-have, at most.
The Xiaomi Buds 4 Pro struggle to impress at their current price. While their build quality is good, battery life is great and noise cancellation is decent, the sound quality just isn’t up to scratch with what we’ve come to expect at this price.
They aren’t for Apple users, in the same way AirPods aren’t really for Android users, so that’s not a negative point - just something to be noted in case you’re on iOS and found yourself considering them. With no access to the app, you do lose out on a fair bit of functionality.
With a price drop, they make much more sense - for Android users at least - and that’s what we’re both hoping for and sort of expecting. With that, some of these audio quality niggles become a lot more expected and forgiveable.
Until then, there are better sounding true wireless earbuds out there that cost the same or less.
