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- Epic battery life
- Good ANC and call quality
- Very adjustable sound
- Disappointing audio quality
- Catastrophic ergonomics
- Not especially comfortable
1MORE serves up an unlikely number of features for the £60 it’s asking for the SonoFlow SE HQ31 over-ear headphones. Huge battery life, cutting-edge wireless connectivity, exemplary noise cancellation and very agreeable call quality are all part of the package, and the company deserves congratulations for all of this.
Sound quality is rather a mixed bag, though. There’s plenty of detail available, and a nice open soundstage on which it can be revealed. However, the HQ31 manage the by-no-means easy feat of sounding simultaneously coarse and dull. If you want most of the animation drained from your music, these headphones will do a job for you.
You may not wear them long enough for this to become apparent, though; they clamp the wearer’s head quite cruelly. And when you add in a control app that can’t quite keep its footing, and some physical controls that have not been properly thought through, the ergonomic case for the HQ31 is almost as shaky as the audio case they make for themselves.
What do you get for the money?
As is 1MORE’s operating practice, not very much money at all gets you quite a lot.
In the case of the SonoFlow SE HQ31, £60 buys a pair of wireless over-ear noise-cancelling headphones with Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity and LDAC codec compatibility. It gets you control via an app, a native voice assistant and a couple of earcup-mounted physical controls. It gets you a choice of four finishes: black, pink, white and blue. And it gets you the sort of battery life that would shame alternative designs costing five times what 1MORE is asking here.
Of course, the eye-catching price of the 1MORE SonoFlow SE HQ31 means these headphones are compromised in ways alternatives costing five times as much are not. I’ll get to the specifics later, but for now, let’s just say that where materials and comfort are concerned, the 1MORE look and feel like they cost a maximum of £60.
What did we like about them?
When you see the specification of the SonoFlow SE HQ31 written down, it’s hard not to be impressed. And there are several ways in which these headphones are just as good in practice as they are on the spec sheet.
Take battery life, for instance. The 1MORE will run for a mighty 90 hours from a single charge if you leave ANC switched off, and even if you decide to switch it on, you should get north of 50 hours. Compare that to any alternative from a more premium brand; very few models, at any price, can get anywhere near these figures. Add in the fact that a five-minute charge will hold you for as much as five hours of playback, and the HQ31 will be available whenever you need them.
They’re similarly impressive where active noise cancellation is concerned. The fashion at the moment is to cram as many mics into a pair of headphones as possible – feed-forward, feed-back, wind noise-sensing, you name it – but 1MORE manages to extract very worthwhile results from just two mics per earcup. As I’m writing this, the heavens have opened outside – but I would never know without looking, and only when I take the headphones off do I realise there’s full-on thunder occurring. Without leaving any hint of counter-signal, the HQ31 decisively deal with the vast majority of external distractions.
That same modest mic array delivers good call quality at both ends of the conversation. Wind noise can sometimes be an issue, but that’s often the case here on the windy south coast of the UK, no matter how expensive the headphones I’m using are. Interactions with a source player’s native voice assistant are swift and reliable, too.
Bluetooth 5.4 with LDAC codec compatibility is not to be sniffed at, especially in such modestly priced headphones. And when given a decently sized FLAC file of Black Sabbath’s Sweet Leaf to deal with, the 1MORE’s 40mm titanium-coated full-range dynamic drivers are capable of revealing and contextualising a fair amount of detail. They do particularly good work towards the bottom of the frequency range, where the amount of harmonic and dynamic variation they describe is straightforwardly impressive.
They can create a nicely defined soundstage, too. There’s a sense of space and openness given to recordings that’s by no means a given in headphones costing so little. But despite all this elbow room being made available, the HQ31 manage to present recordings as unified performances rather than as a collection of individual occurrences.
What could be improved?
Where to begin? With sound quality, probably – after all, that’s the main reason you buy a pair of headphones, isn’t it? And for all that the 1MORE are a detailed, organised and quite spacious listen, they have some sonic shortcomings that are very difficult to overlook.
Their midrange reproduction is unsophisticated and quite coarse. They roll off the top of the frequency range to an unfathomable degree, rendering recordings rather blunt. Their overall tonality is quite dull, and there’s very little animation to any recording they get hold of. The idea of music as entertainment, as something to engage the listener, seems to have passed the HQ31 by entirely. There’s a matter-of-factness to the way they deliver a copy of Lorde’s Shapeshifter that sucks all the life out of it.
As far as comfort goes, things aren’t much better. No one’s expecting a pair of £60 over-ear headphones to be the last word in luxury, and sure enough, the 1MORE feel a little hard and plasticky. That’s understandable, but their clamping force is too great and the hanger arrangement too tight for them to remain comfortable for any length of time. I flatter myself that my head is of unremarkable proportions, but I felt squeezed by the HQ31 way faster than I anticipated.
It’s best to stick to controlling the headphones with your voice as much as possible, too. 1MORE has given one of the three buttons on the right earcup (the power button) way too much to do; as well as power on/off, it’s responsible for play/pause, answer/end/decline call and summoning voice assistant too. The ANC button is OK – it just cycles through ANC on, ANC off and transparency. But the volume rocker is the weirdest of the lot: pressing one end to increase volume and pressing the other end to decrease volume is fair enough, but if you hold ‘volume up, you skip backwards through your playlist, and if you hold ‘volume down’, you skip forwards. I’m going to go ahead and call this counterintuitive.
The control app is quite thorough, and it stores a very useful number of EQ presets, as well as allowing the end user access to an equaliser to create their own. It lets you switch Spatial Audio on or off, check for firmware updates, and even perform a ‘Smart Burn-in’ (although why this is preferable to just listening to your headphones is beyond me). But it’s laggy, it crashes, it constantly needs rebooting, and it is in dire need of proofreading by someone with a full grasp of English.
Should you buy the 1MORE SonoFlow SE HQ31?
There’s no denying your £60 outlay here buys you some good stuff: call quality, voice control, ANC and battery life all outperform the asking price comfortably. But if it’s sound quality you’re interested in, or ergonomic good sense, or even just a pair of over-ear headphones that won’t provoke a headache simply by the way they fit, you’ll want to save your money and put it towards some other headphones.
