Review on Cleer Audio Ally Plus II True Wireless Noise Cancelling Earbuds - Long Battery Life of 33 Hours - Top Bluetooth Earbuds with Smart Controls, Cleer+ Mobile App - Midnight Blue by Amber Berry

These headphones have a very elegant, unique design and sound great for a mid-range pair of headphones. I test many different earbuds and headphones; If there's one thing that interests me the most, it's audio production. These were my first Cleer branded in-ears and I was most impressed and even better with hope for the future of these headphones. The earbuds have a distinctly rounded appearance, with a slight protrusion at the bottom front when the earbuds are pointing outwards. , which appears to point the microphone toward your mouth when making calls. My ears are medium sized for a grown male and the buds sit almost flush with my ears. The attachments that come with it (M) fit me perfectly, so I didn't change them for any of the other options. The sound quality is very good. It's a little warm, bassy, which is fine for most modern music, but overall it's fairly neutral and seems to play the music fairly accurately. I can't say anything bad about the sound. They may not be as detailed and detailed as my full-size Sony headphones, but they cost a third of the price of the headphones. They sound very good to me, so at this level I'm happy with them. Features is where things get a little muddled. They advertise ANC and also have a pass-through mode to let through ambient noise. When I first got them, the ANC was ridiculously bad. I literally couldn't tell the difference between the ANC on and off, other than the major disappointment that the ANC made horrible wind noise when I was wearing it during my workout. Passthrough works quite well in a static environment. When I'm working from home at my desk, I can use pass-through to hear if my wife or kid is calling me. When I'm exercising, pass mode just means horrible wind noise, as does ANC. They have a dedicated smartphone app that lets you toggle ANC and pass-through on or off, as well as make some adjustments to the equalizer. Equalizer tweaks are useful because they allow you to customize an already good sound to your preferences. It's frustrating having to use the app to change the ANC. Also frustrating is that ANC is enabled by default. You can change the touch settings to be able to use the headphones to toggle ANC/passthrough on or off, but this sacrifices other touch capabilities (track skipping). So more touch controls would be a huge benefit. Fortunately, the touch function is neither overly sensitive nor inoperable. It does what you set up in the app. The last few paragraphs probably sound pretty negative and to be clear there are some functionality and usability issues but there was already a firmware update for the headphones (again delivered via app - don't buy them unless you install the app on your smartphone) and I noticed an improvement in the ANC. It's still not best in class (and probably not even average at this price point), but it's better than before. This gives hope for further improvements. Hopefully they can also use future firmware updates to improve touch functionality. Disappointing aside, they look good and sound great, so they're not a bad choice if ANC isn't that important to you. If you want an ANC in a similar price range with the same good sound quality, check out the 1More ComfoBuds. They have surprisingly good ANC for the price. The same applies here: If ANC is not that important to you and you want to update it again and again via the app, you get good and attractive headphones, which in my opinion offer more good than bad.