The best headphone mic we've ever tested

0:02Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of active noise cancellation. I'm your friend David Pierce and today on the show we're talking about headphones. Specifically, we're talking about headphone microphones, which I have long believed are just a severely underrated bit of technology. We do a lot of headphone testing here at The Verge. We all wear headphones all day. We all care a lot about sound quality and if you read a lot of headphone reviews, you can get super deep into noise cancellation, features and you can get super deep into the interface. You can get super deep into sound quality.

0:35And then there's always just one line that's like a microphone does calls. I want to know more. And so every once in a while on this show, we get somebody to bring us a bunch of different devices and we test their microphones. I care about this just as a person, but also because I think this technology matters, right? Like we all make calls increasingly on these devices increasingly out in the world. And knowing how you sound to other people is important, both because you want to be a good person who doesn't make everyone's lives miserable, and also because there is lots of evidence, scientific evidence, that shows if you sound good, people take you more seriously.

1:10It's just a real thing. At the same time, if you think about the way that we are all learning how to interact with AI systems, a lot of that is by voice. A lot of that is through headphones. The difference between a good microphone and a bad microphone is the difference between having a good AI experience and a bad AI experience. This thing matters. It also just makes for really fun and often terrible podcast audio. So John Higgins, The Verge's senior reviewer, is gonna come on. He's got a bunch of stuff. He is, I assume, somewhere very noisy, and we're gonna do some tests. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today.

1:44This is 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, June 17th, 2026. Big smart home day. The new Matter 1.6 smart home spec launched today. And stop me if you've heard this before, but it is supposedly going to make it easier to control your smart home. Specifically, Matter 1.6 includes this new feature called Joint Fabric, which makes it easier to set up a smart device like a light or a sensor or whatever and immediately have it be controlled by Alexa, Apple Home, Gemini, and all of your other stuff all at once. Supposedly, it all just works. There's also a new NFC setup feature that lets you tap a device to your phone to set it up rather than scanning a QR code.

2:19As with all things Matter, these are good ideas and I really hope they work. And as with all things matter, I am not remotely holding my breath. Meanwhile, the Google Home speaker, Google's first smart speaker in six years, is finally up for pre-order and finally has a ship date. Next Thursday, June 25th. The speaker was announced last fall, and for$99, it promises to be the best way to get Gemini smart home control into your house. It also looks really good in red and apparently sounds really good. There is a remarkable, interesting smart speaker thing happening right now. Alexa Plus, Apple Home, Siri AI, and Gemini are all promising these big AI upgrades to how you control your home.

2:58It's all been kind of iffy so far, but we'll see how much these new things really change the game. And finally, reviews for Toy Story 5 are starting to come out, a movie in which the bad guy is basically an iPad. Hi there, I'm Lilypad. Let's play! Extinction! Not again! What's not surprising is that virtually everyone, including my colleague Charles Pulliam Moore, seems to love it. What's more surprising is that it seems to be a remarkably, maybe uniquely thoughtful look at the good and bad of what it means to be a person in a world filled with screens. Leave it to Woody and Buzz, man. They get it.

3:32You can read more about all of this at TheVerge.com. That is 90 Seconds for Wednesday, June 17th. Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over$1 ,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to 90 % of vet bills. You can use any vet in the U.S. and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to FetchPet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's FetchPet.com slash save.

4:40it. AI on, risk off. Vanta.com slash TPRM.

4:47All right, now let's test some headphones. We like to do this every once in a while because I think we review a lot of headphones and we talk about headphones a lot and we talk mostly about sound quality. And that's fine and good. That's very important. But as we live in a world where we spend more time talking to our devices, whether we're talking to assistants or we're talking to various dictation apps, the microphone actually matters a lot, especially if you believe in AI and we're all going to record our lives and do everything. The microphone in your headphones becomes very important. So every once in a while, we come on this show and we test some microphones.

5:21Joining me now to help do it, The Verge's Senior Reviewer, John Higgins. Hi, John. Hey, David. Where are you right now? I am in the beautiful San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California. I am sitting at a coffee shop on Ventura Boulevard, facing west down Ventura Boulevard for the Tom Petty fans. It is right around lunchtime, so there's a bunch of traffic right there. We just missed a hawk having a bird fight right above me. So, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on. I like this. This is about as brutal an environment as you could like on a day to day basis find yourself. Right. Like we've we've done some of these that are sort of deliberately out of scope of a normal time.

6:09You would take a phone call or spend time talking to your phone. But this is like there are probably people near you on phone calls or talking to their computers or doing Zooms or whatever right now. So this I think I feel like this is a fair test in a way that I really like. Exactly. I actually was worried when I sat down and really listened to everything that was going on around me. And I thought, this is just going to be chaotic. But there was a woman at a table right next to me that was on a phone call with some AirPods. And I'm like, well, yes, it might be chaotic, but it's very truthful.

6:43This is what people do. This is right. Yeah. For better or for worse. So this is also one of the reasons I like to do this episode from time to time is to make people realize the horrors there are putting onto other people when they take calls in environments like this. Like you should know what it sounds like to the other person when you do this to them. Yeah. What headphones are you on right now? these are the wired ear pods they are the lightning version which i have through a lightning to usbc adapter um but yeah the wired you can see there's the microphone here uh which is on the street side i uh never use these yeah so these are these are like the 20 headphones that are floating around somewhere in most people's houses yeah the funniest thing about this microphone to me is you sound great.

7:33Like it's actually just as a microphone, very good. And I recommend these to people all the time as sort of backup podcast microphones because it's a good mic and you sound good, but it picks up every little tiny bit of background noise. Every tiny bit. And so this is like, this is one that you're totally fine to use, like walking around your house, but I really do not recommend using out in the world. Yeah, well, they don't have a, a noise suppression really happening with them. They're just like, here's what you get. Good luck. Yeah, it is a microphone and nothing else. Yeah. So you've brought a bunch of stuff to test.

8:12And I think the one I want to start with, I want you to guide us a little bit, but I want to start with the AirPods Pro 3 because that I think in terms of like, as a useful control, I think that's a good one. That is, it's a very mainstream. Lots of people have them and we're about to see kind of what's better and what's worse. but I want to see the sort of basic, most mainstream options. So let's switch to that and see how we do. Does that sound good? Okay, sounds good. Let's do it. Let's go. I am now on the AirPods Pro 3. Okay, this is fascinating. So you're clearly in a very noisy place because the AirPods Pro 3 actually do a pretty good job of like sort of normal DIN noise suppression.

8:54Like if you go on an airplane, the AirPods Pro do a pretty good job of canceling that out. But I'm hearing a lot of background noise still. It's interesting too, because a lot of people talk about the call clarity of the AirPods Pro 3 or AirPods Pro in general. I mean, since they were released, it's been sort of a talking point. And I've always been like, they're fine? Yeah. But they're not the thing to focus on. they're not the the the end all be all of call quality they're just okay you can hear me can hear other stuff too i'm sort of thrown by this one because what i expected and what we get from a lot of these earbuds and what i suspect we'll hear some of here is they compress the crap out of your voice in service of getting rid of all the background noise and so it's like you don't sound as good but i don't hear the background as much this is kind of splitting the middle in both cases like yeah your your voice is less rich than the ear pods but i'm getting less background noise but i'm not getting no background noise like i just heard a sound that sounded like somebody wheeled a shopping cart right past your head that was a uh person that just pulled up on their ducati motorcycle and stopped like they just parked on the sidewalk okay perfect example on the ear pods on the ear pods i would have heard a motorcycle oh yeah this made it sound like a shopping cart so like that's actually that is a perfect example um but it doesn't it's not unpleasant to listen to but it is i am very aware that there is a lot of background noise here and it's not it's it's very like beam formed on your voice which i can sort of hear but i'm i'm not as impressed with this as i expected to be actually that is i feel a common response when i talk to people and tell them.

10:49And like when I do comparisons, because that's one of the things I do with reviews is I have whatever earbuds I'm reviewing and then I bring along a couple others and I will talk to somebody that I trust their opinion on audio quality. And I'll switch between I'll do a call. I'll be like, okay, let me call you back. And I'll switch over to something else and I'll call them, but I won't tell them what I'm on. And quite often when I tell them, oh yeah, those ones that you didn't like, those were the AirPods. They're like, what? But I use those all the time. They're like, yes, you do. Okay. Yeah, I am confident everyone has either made or received a call from a pair of AirPods Pro 3s.

11:33This is really interesting. Okay, so let's actually play this game your way. I want you to switch to one of the other ones you have with you, but I don't want you to tell me which one. And we're going to see how it feels. So let's pause here and switch and get to the next one. Here we go. Sounds good. Okay, you've switched. I'm immediately hearing next to no background noise, but let me hear what you sound like. So these are brand new earbuds that I switched to. Well, not brand new, but these are newer earbuds that I've switched to. I'm going to keep talking because the traffic has actually died down a little bit.

12:06So I want there to be a little bit more representative Yeah, there's some Jeeps that are going by. But yeah, these came out last October, I want to say. Okay. So this is what I expected the AirPods Pro to sound like, which is I'm getting basically no background noise. It's almost all gone except for like the occasional little flare of background, but I'm hardly hearing anything. You sound terrible. Okay. That was my next question is what the compression would have been like on these as well. It's very compressed. I can hear you clearly enough, but it sounds like you are in a tin can. Yeah, I'm having trouble figuring out how I feel about this, actually, because this is actually more...

12:53If you and I were going to spend two hours on the phone right now, I would rather have this than the AirPods, just because there's not so much constant noise. Right. You don't need to do as much mental work in order to understand what's happening. Exactly. But then like somebody just honked and I heard it like that. There's just like little moments that I'm hearing, but that's about it. Well, let me see if this will affect your feelings. OK, these are less than half the price of the AirPods. What are these? Even when the AirPods Pro 3 are on sale for around 200 bucks, these are half the price or less.

13:31What are these headphones? These are, oh, am I going to get this name right? Because there's so many words to it. These are the EarFun Air Pro 4 Plus. That is, okay. So this is, if I'm not mistaken, EarFun is one of those kind of random Amazon brands that pops up out of nowhere every once in a while. The like straight out of a Chinese factory somewhere kind of brands. I wouldn't put them quite in that same category. having met and conversed with the owners and members of the company. It's not quite the level of pop-up Chinese company that just pulls a whole bunch of OEM stuff and throws stuff together.

14:13They actually do research and they develop things, but they are very much an inexpensive brand. Their hallmark is stuff under$100. Yeah, your fund, if I remember correctly, is at the top of a lot of lists of best cheap headphones. Like if you want a really cheap pair of headphones, this is a brand I've heard more and more recently as like, this is just the right place to start if you want whatever,$7 ,500 headphones. How much are these specifically? These are list price,$99.99, but are almost always on sale for about$80. $80, okay. So this is, we're looking at like a third of AirPods Pro prices.

14:56From their full price, yeah. Wow. And I'm sure they don't sound as good audio wise and whatever. And like, they sound fine. Yeah. That's, that's how I would describe this too, right? Like this is, this is completely normal, fine phone call. You sound kind of like you're on speaker a little far away from your phone. Uh, but I, this so far of the three that we've tried, this is like, you don't sound the best, but this would be the most pleasant phone call to have of the three that we've tried so far, i think yeah yeah they make good stuff i'm i'm a fan of uh of most things that they come out with yeah you're fun who knew and they use orcast which i really love to what is orcast for people who don't know orcast is a bluetooth standard that allows you to connect to um other orcast broadcasts so what you as opposed to like multi-point connection on bluetooth where you can connect to two devices.

15:56AuraCast is an unlimited amount. It's found a lot on hearing aids, so it's a great way. It's a great accessible feature that I really am just waiting for it to really take off and just be found everywhere. There are TVs that have AuraCast. The LG OLEDs have AuraCast and you can connect to them. It's a really great technology. But yeah, I'm just ready for it to take off and be everywhere. Airports, lecture halls, anywhere where you need hearing assistance. Yeah, that's super cool. All right, let's switch. And I assume everything you want to try here is more expensive than these. These are bound to be the cheapest ones.

16:41These are the cheapest. Whoa, okay. This one says you get a free phone if you switch. Hey, this one also says you get a free phone if you switch. Yeah, they all do one. Huh. The T-Mobile one says their customers had the lowest wireless bills versus the other big guys over the past five years. And their latest experience plans have Netflix included, plus a year of Dash Pass by DoorDash. Hang on, let me see that. Oh yeah, we're switching. That's what I'm talking about. Do we clap now or... At T-Mobile, get savings that keep stacking up. That's value you can feel every day. And right now, bring your phone to T-Mobile and we'll give you$400 when you switch.

17:24Savings based on Harris X billing snapshots from Q3 2021 to Q4 2025 compared to average AT &T and Verizon bills. Comparison excludes discounts, credits, and optional charges. $400 with new account on qualifying line, unlock device credit, boarded in 90 plus days with device and carrier, and timely redemption required. Virtual MasterCard typically takes 14 weeks, no cash access, and expires in six months. Card issued by Sunrise Banks, and a member FDIC. Visit T-Mobile.com. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough. So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?

17:54Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

18:25Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

19:07This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+.

19:34What do we have now? These are the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro. It just came out a few weeks ago. This is like multiple orders of magnitude better than anything we've tested so far. This is nuts. Isn't it? You like just recently reviewed these, right? Yeah. They're the best quality I have ever heard on a pair of earbuds or headphones. I am blown away by how good this is. What is Soundcore? That's not a brand I'm super familiar with. It's the audio brand of Anchor. Oh. Oh, I spent a bunch of time with Anker headphones kind of at the very beginning of their headphone journey. And they made a lot of like pretty good, pretty inexpensive, like on the level of the ear fund stuff we were talking about a few minutes ago.

20:24Absolutely. These are significantly more expensive than that, right? They are more expensive than what they normally have done, which is$100 around or less. But they're not AirPods. They are$170. Okay. so like dead center they have a more expensive version which is um 230 uh but the earbuds in both are exactly the same the only difference that you're getting by stepping up is a case that has a larger um touch screen on it and um it also has uh ai transcription and summary uh technology if you like record a lecture or something like that it'll it'll transcribe it and then give you a summary okay got it i i mean yeah i cannot believe how good these sound i'm hearing no background noise like flatly none there's a lot of traffic happening right now yeah nothing and you are you're still a little compressed um but not nearly as compressed as as even like the the earphones we were looking at, this is almost exactly the balance you would hope for.

21:38Because I'm willing to give up a tiny bit of your voice fidelity to not hear background noise, and it feels like I'm only giving up a tiny bit of fidelity to get no background noise. I am blown away by how good this sounds. Yeah, these are amazing. Every time I use them, I feel great. Is your sense that there's any new or unusual technology in here? What did anchor do to make this work this well uh they created their own chip that they're calling the thus chip i hate the name uh t-h-e-s oh yeah i don't like that at all so it's you know similar to uh like apple's h2 chip right apple makes their own chip they put it only in apple products and beats products eventually uh and um you know sony has their chip that they put in to their processing to do the processing uh so this is anchor just sort of making a making a bid um to compete against them uh and my understanding is that ship will be used across the anchor lineup so we're talking about soundcore and we're talking about uh smart home things and robot vacuums and So they're going to try and sort of connect their entire ecosystem with this thus ship.

22:55See the terrible name. It really is a terrible name. It's just hard to say. There's a fascinating Anchor story in there that is like Anchor really came up by taking that sort of direct out of a Chinese factory stuff and up leveling it a little bit. A little better design, a little better quality, just kind of improving everything and building a brand around it. But now to start to do things like its own chip is really, that's a leap ahead in what this company thinks it can be. And I mean, just based on this, it's on to something. Like this, are these good headphones otherwise? I think they're great.

23:28Okay. The sound out of the box isn't the best, but they have this sort of hearing preference test that you do. They play a sound, a music clip twice, and then they say, which one do you like better? and then they do two more clips which one you like better and they do that seven times and it fine tunes uh the audio to be something that you enjoy listening to and um i've i really like the way that it tuned it uh it fixed an issue that they had with the mid-range frequencies like voices and snare and stuff uh made it more present and snappy um and kind of tamed the bass which is I enjoy bass, but this was a little excessive for me.

24:14Fair. Yeah, I find a lot of headphones now really, really, really just want to beat you to death with bass. Yeah. It's like TVs in brightness. They're just like, what if we just go super duper hard on this one thing? You're going to love it. The noise canceling on these is also great too, just to say. They are some of the top noise canceling. like as good as the airpods pro 3 so this immediately goes on the list of like best headphones you can buy uh and especially for that much less than the airpods that's pretty competitive yeah yeah it's my my top uh recommendation i would say fair enough score one for soundcore geez um all right i think you got one more right you want to you want to switch to the last one i feel like i i feel bad not saving this one till last now because I don't think there's any chance.

25:04But hey, let's see what we can do. All right, we got one more. Let's switch. All right, we're on our last one. You look a little like you're wearing like air traffic control earmuffs. What do we have this time? These are the Sennheiser Momentum 5s. Just came out like a week ago from when we're doing this. So I'm very curious to get your impression on how they sound. So this is an interesting one. the the voice fidelity is pretty solid but i would even put this as like slightly above airpods pro 3 level like you you sound good not great um but like but good um but i'm definitely getting more spikes in the background noise than a couple of the other ones we've tried like it's doing a pretty good job uh like in the it's sort of like where the earphone one was where like most of the normal noise seems to be gone, but then I'm like hearing spikes of people talking and stuff behind you as you're going.

26:05Yeah, there's been some people that have sort of walked by as they can chat. And then when you talk, the background noise picks up, which the Soundcore one was doing a really good job of not doing. Oh, interesting. So I'm getting more background noise when you're talking than when you're not. So you can sort of hear it processing. It's one of those sets of headphones that I can listen to the processing as we're talking. Which is super distracting. in my opinion. It is kind of distracting. I agree, especially when it's like, it's coming and going as we have a conversation. I am neither impressed nor disappointed by these, I would say.

26:36Well, they're 400 bucks. Yeah. In general, it seems like the over-ear headphones don't tend to have great mics. Like, is that just a physics thing? Because the other ones can actually point their microphones towards your mouth and use beamforming that way? Yeah, I think the earbuds are usually better at beamforming. they also usually have some form of bone conduction that they're using in order to localize where your voice is coming from and with padding that doesn't really work nearly as well. So they really rely on beamforming that's coming and some do it better than others. Sony generally their headphones do a good job but they don't they don't match the earbuds generally.

27:26Yeah. But yeah, it's very funny. When you're not talking, it does really good noise cancellation, but it feels like the more you talk, the more background I hear, which is weird and not what I expected. Yeah. Yeah, I can see that because it's trying to figure out when I'm talking, it makes it more difficult for it to figure out what to pay attention to. Right. And so, you know, my frequency range is going to match or be close to a lot of the noise that's happening around me. So it just has trouble deciding what to let in. What's your take on the Momentum 5s otherwise? There are a lot of people at The Verge who feel like Sennheiser deserves more shine and credit in the high-end headphone space.

28:06Interesting. I was not aware of that. I think that they are good, generally. I tend to not be a huge fan of their sound tuning they sometimes are a little bit more what we call audiophile tuning which can sometimes push the high end a little too much because most audiophiles are older and have lost their hearing so it's not something that I generally gravitate towards they don't sound bad by any means it's just not for my taste in general yeah okay that's fair all right I think I think we're done here switch back to the sound cores which spoiler alert won this test and let's let's finish up here so switch back to those and then let's let's talk this out I have to say it's like it's like my heart just relaxes when you switch back to these headphones it's so much better okay so last question and then i'm gonna let you go here it feels to me like we've been doing these tests a long time uh and microphones aren't getting sort of hugely better i think like part of the reason i'm so surprised by these sound cores is they're the first meaningfully better set of headphones in terms of mic quality kind of that I can remember since we've been doing this test.

29:46Everything else is kind of variations on a middle ground. What is your sense of whether this is just some very hard physics problem to solve or it's just low on the list of things that microphone or that headphone manufacturers care about? Like, why aren't these getting better at kind of a rapid pace that you would hope for? I think it's a little bit of both. I think it's incredibly difficult to cancel out noise that is unpredictable. It takes a whole lot of processing power. Also, the person that has purchased the earbuds is not hearing that. They're not the ones that are experiencing it every day.