Status Audio Between 3ANC Review

 [[MSRP $250, $199 on direct from Status on Father’s Day sale]

[Tl;dr: These headphones are really inconsistent in sound quality; they sound amazing for some tracks and genres, and pretty lousy for others. The biggest problem with them is that they’re in the same price bracket as some really exceptional offerings that they just can’t really compete with. When they’re good they’re great; when they’re not, they’re really not, and I am clearly not their target audience (though they’re marketing pretty hard to me, all the same).]

Scores:

Cost-agnostic: 6 out of 10 Denalis

Cost-sensitive: 3 out of 10 Denalis

Intro. Four or five people have asked me about these as I’ve posted various reviews of true wireless earbuds over the last few months and I’ve been seeing their ads a lot, so I decided to give them a shot when I saw them on a pretty decent (20% off) sale right before Father’s Day. Depending on what you listen to and how you listen, these may be right up your alley. For me, though, they’re a little too inconsistent and don’t sound good on some albums and artists that I really love; enough that they’re not going to be my go to.

The 3ANC’s big claim to fame is three separate drivers in each earbud. I’m, as a general rule, skeptical of multi-driver earbuds that aren’t super high end, as it often feels like a gimmick to try to cover deficiencies with each individual driver (it’s way easier to design multiple drivers with smaller ranges of sound than a single driver that covers the gamut well), and that certainly seems to be true of these. They’re shine on full-sound and modern-mastered tracks, but struggle with tracks that leave individual drivers isolated and working alone, and they seem to also struggle a bit with albums mastered before the 90s or anything being listened to at quiet volumes.

All in all, while the 3ANC are marketed as prosumer- or audiophile-grade, I’d put them solidly in the high-end consumer market. [i.e. fine for most folks, but probably not going to be a go-to for me.]

Sound. Man, after the first few tracks I listened to with these I got really excited about the sound quality. At their best, they’re rich, deep, and nuanced. The sound stage is genuinely incredible for earbuds; on Bill Wither’s iconic “Use Me” the instrument separation was amazing and I’ve never heard that song this way. The panning on Beyonce’s “Hold Up” is nothing short of a marvel, and something I’ve never experienced from earbuds that aren’t running Apple’s proprietary Spatial Audio standard.

[A quick note: the 3ANC has a couple of EQ modes as well as some reasonably granular controls. I found the Status Signature sound setting way too bass-y and muddy (think Beats’ sound profile) so I did pretty much all my listening on the Status Audiophile setting.]

Treble: The treble generally sounds pretty good. It’s clean and crisp, and only rarely drifts into sibilance. They pretty accurately reproduce the highs on Vampire Weekend’s “2021” (my go to for testing trebles because they’re badly recorded/mastered in a very specific way). The high synths on Jamila Woods’ “Zora” (a track y’all should listen to right now) are clean and nicely separated from the rest of the mix without being overbearing.

Mid-range: This is also mostly a strength. The reproduction of Bill Wither’s voice on “Use Me” or Jamila Woods’ on “Zora” is clear and present without being over emphasized. Kendrick Lamar comes through cleanly on “LOVE”, and Owl Eye’s ethereal vocals on Flight Facilities’ “Clair de Lune [live with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra]” float through and play within the mix in a really lovely way.

Bass: This is where things get confusing. At its best, the bass is nimble and clean on things like Nightmares on Wax’s “Damn” [sampling Al Hirt’s “Harlem Hendoo”, which will be familiar to anyone who likes De La Soul], Tiesto’s “The Motto”, and Maxwell’s “Ascension”. It’s even pretty good on Janet Jackson’s “Got ‘Til it’s Gone” (my go to for checking low end bass), but it starts to get splatter-y and clip-py when all the drivers are going full-blast on things like Anohni’s “4 Degrees”, Rationale’s “Fuel to the Fire”, or some of the drums on Jimi Hendrix’s “Electric Ladyland.” It seems particularly challenged by heavily-accented bass notes, especially where there are other sounds in the bass range going at the same time. Makes me wonder if the main (bass) driver is pretty limited so the crossover is feeding “bass” to the other, smaller drivers that can’t really handle them.

Overall: If you mostly listen to top 40 pop, you will probably like these headphone’s sound a lot. It does well with modern mass-market mixing where none of the drivers are left alone and unsupported; if you like other kinds of music (particularly those that are detail-oriented or have a lot of isolation of specific audio ranges), less so.

Side note: sort of damningly, Born Gold’s “Bodysongs” album sounds really good on the 3ANC. This is an album that I love but is mastered so poorly that it sounds awful on a decently resolving pair of speakers or headphones, and I’m skeptical of anything that makes it sound good.

Standard disclaimer from other Bluetooth reviews: It's still Bluetooth so you're always getting a lossy signal and it gets more complicated when you start using the on-board mic for phone calls.

Noise canceling. The noise cancelling itself is pretty decent; it’s not up to the standards of say the Bose 700s or QC25s (or even the AirPods Pro 2 or Max) but it’s pretty decent at blocking out background music or office noise. It does its job.

Transparency: I was excited to try a non-Apple version of a transparency mode, but that was maybe the most disappointing “feature” of the 3ANC. Whatever algorithm they’re using to determine which things to amplify and which to tamp down makes some VERY strange choices. The wind gets really amped up, as do things like chainsaws, gravel crunching, and dog noises, but not humans attempting to talk to me. And, maybe most damning, it consistently decides to wildly amplify the sound of cars racing up a hill a few blocks away, to the point where I was pretty convinced that someone was bombing a modded Honda Civic down my street, not up the hill two blocks away. It’s bad enough that I just turned it off after the first few days; it was incredibly distracting and misleading about what was going on around me.

Spatial audio. Nope!

Controls. These are weird and pretty non-standard. I’m used at this point to most headphones intended for use with cell phones to follow the usual (Apple-created?) standards of double-tap to skip forward, triple-tap to skip back, etc. These … don’t do that. A single tap on either ear piece pauses or plays, but skipping is accomplished by a double tap on the left earpiece for back and the right for forward.It’s suboptimal when you only have one hand free, like when you’re, say, walking a dog.  I also couldn’t find a way to turn ANC/transparency on or off without opening the iOS app, which requires clicking a bunch of buttons to get connected before you can make changes. The controls do work well once you internalize them, and I mostly didn’t inadvertently do things after the first couple of days.

So the controls are mostly not bad, just not what I expect in the year of our Lord Steven Jobs 2023.

Connectivity. Bluetooth only. It’s not as slick as AirPods, but honestly nothing really ever will be. They connect easily to my various iOS devices, Apple laptops, and PC laptop/tablets and I never had a problem getting them connected.

Charging is accomplished using a USB-C cable, and they’re near-field charging enabled. This is nice, and I would like Apple to get their act together and adopt the USB-C standard for things other than iPads.

Comfort. The design is a little odd in that there’s a plastic rectangle that hangs off of the ear buds which took a little getting used to, but they’re generally comfortable enough that I forget that they’re there. My two gripes are that the design makes it feel like they’re fall out when I’m walking around (and especially when I’m sweating), and that every time you pull them out of your ears the silicon tips turn inside out and they don’t fit in the case until you manually flip them back down. The box includes four pairs of silicon tips and I’d guess that almost everyone will be able to find a pair that fits them (for me, I moved up one size from the ones that came pre-installed. Fair warning; getting the new tips attached is way more annoying than it should be).

Construction. They’re pretty typical ear buds: lightweight plastic and silicon. The case feels pretty solid, though the way that the buds are inserted into the case makes it difficult for those of us with sausage fingers to get them in and out at times (especially while sweating).

Appearance. They’re stylish. I prefer the cleaner look of things like the Beats Studio Buds or the Campfire Orbit, but they’re no dorkier than the AirPods that I wear all of the time and at least they come in multiple colors that aren’t bright white.

Comparisons. These exist in a pretty crowded market space right now, with the AirPods Pro2, Campfire Audio Orbit, and a couple of the Beats offerings at the same basic price point, not to mention a bunch of things by B&O, Sennheiser, Jabra, Bose, Sony, etc. $250 is a crowded space for true wireless with some great products out there.

Talking just about sound quality, I don’t think these can meaningfully compete against the AirPods Pro 2 or the Orbit. Both of those headphones use a single, custom-designed and really excellent single driver to give a full range of clean sound, while the 3ANC sometimes feels like the drivers are fighting against each other. Crossovers are complicated and hard to get right, as far as I can tell, and I’m not sure Status has cracked that particular nut yet. I do think for a lot of my listening that the 3ANC are better on sound quality than things like the Beats Studio Buds or the Jabra Active 65t, but they’re also 2-3 times more expensive than those offerings and I’m not sure that they’re that much better. They’re more fully featured than the Orbits (ANC, transparency), but I don’t think I’m willing to drop sound quality this much in order to get those features.

Especially if you’re already in the Apple ecosystem (with iPhones, Mac laptops, etc.), these just cannot compete with the AirPods Pro 2 at all. I understand that this is a really unfair comparison (Apple is one of the largest manufacturers in the world, with a large team of dedicated engineers, the ability to custom design, print, and build bespoke audio chips, drivers, and other components and making inventory in the tens or hundreds of thousands of units), but that product is SO DAMNED GOOD that it’s really hard for any product to meaningfully compete. It’s always going to be the standard that I compare new things against.

Value. At MSRP, these are $250 which is the same as the AirPods Pro 2. The 3ANC appear to often be on sale, but the Pro 2 have been on sale at Costco for around $200 for as long as I’ve been paying attention.  At this price point, I would absolutely rather have the full-features of the Pro2 or the singularly-excellent audio quality experience of the Orbits. Nothing I’ve experienced with the 3ANC makes me think they’re worth the $250 price point; if they were in the $100-150 range they’d start to be a consideration.

Overall. These are a really interesting pair of headphones that provide a good (and occasionally great!) listening experience across specific kinds of music. Overall, though, they can’t really compete with other things in the market at this price point, and some of the flaws in their audio reproduction are jarring enough that an audio nerd like me probably won’t ever reach for them given the available alternatives. I’d really love to see more independent audio companies breaking into the market and offering great options, but I think this just isn’t it yet.

#reviews #headphones #apple #anc #bluetooth #spatialaudio #inear #beats #meh #statusaudio #2023