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- What do you get for the money?
- What can the charging case do?
- How I tested the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro Max
- How comfortable and how easy to control are they?
- How well do the case’s features work?
- How good is the microphone quality?
- Is the noise cancellation effective?
- How do they sound?
- Should you buy the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro Max?
- Superb microphone clarity
- Useful AI note-taking
- Comfortable, secure fit
- Freemium subscription model
- Touchscreen control inconsistencies
- Muddy bass in default mode
For many years, the role of the true wireless earbuds charging case was simple: to serve as a battery-life reservoir and a convenient way to store and transport your buds. That all changed with the arrival of the JBL Tour Pro 2, whose case provided access to features typically only available via a companion app.
Those earbuds were released in 2023, the year the artificial intelligence floodgates opened. AI features are now being crammed into everything from air fryers to smartphones, so it’s no surprise that earbuds like the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro Max are seeking to harness the power of our LLM frenemies in innovative ways.
The Liberty 5 Pro Max’s case is the first I’ve come across to offer features like real-time translation and AI note-taking, and some of them are genuinely useful. However, the most worthwhile tool is restricted, and it feels like Soundcore has focused too heavily on AI and not enough on other key pillars of true wireless performance.
What do you get for the money?
The Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro Max are the Anker sub-brand’s flagship wireless earbuds and cost £200, which is cheaper than top-of-the-range offerings from more established audio brands. Our favourite earbuds, the Sony WF-1000XM6, will set you back £249, while last year’s Wireless Earbuds of the Year, the Technics EAH-AZ100, cost £229. Neither has a case capable of much more than charging, though. For a case with a touchscreen, your number-one option is the JBL Tour Pro 3 (£280).
The buds are dust and water resistant (IP55), available in Midnight Black and Titanium Gold, and come with five sets of silicone eartips and three pairs of stabiliser earfins. They operate over Bluetooth 6.1, support the SBC, AAC and LDAC codecs, and their multipoint pairing supports connection with up to three devices, which is superior to most of the competition.
You’ve also got adaptive noise cancellation, built-in Anka voice controls, and a whole host of audio customisation options, including HearID 5.0 personalisation, Dolby Atmos with Head Tracking and AI Sound Enhancement.
What can the charging case do?
The buds have a stated battery life of six-and-a-half hours with ANC on, a figure that drops to just four hours with ANC, Dolby Audio and Smart Voice Control engaged. The case holds three full charges, so you can expect between 17 and 28 hours of playback depending on which features you use. The case supports wireless charging, but Soundcore also includes a USB-A-to-USB-C cable in the box.
A well-balanced set of features
When the buds are in your ears, the 1.78in AMOLED touchscreen gives you access to ambient sound controls, Dolby Audio settings, playback controls, EQs, the AI Sound Enhancement options, a list of your paired devices, and a selection of wallpapers that you can add to in the Soundcore app.
That assortment of options is very similar to those available on the JBL Tour Pro 3, but Soundcore has a few extra tricks up its sleeve.
Remote Camera lets you use the case as a clicker to take photos and videos, while Face-to-Face Translation enables you to have AI-assisted conversations with someone speaking another language. One person speaks into the case, while the other speaks into the smartphone with the Soundcore app open. The app and case display translated dialogue before the speakers play it. The microphones automatically stop recording after 30 seconds, making the feature most suitable for brief exchanges.
If you require longer than that, you’ll need Real-Time Translation. Designed for presentations and speeches, this feature displays what’s said in the Soundcore app before playing it through the earbuds.
The final AI-powered feature is the AI Note-Taker, which uses the case’s microphone to record in-person conversations. The Soundcore app receives the audio files, ready for transcription and summarising.
How I tested the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro Max
I used Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro Max as my primary headphones for two weeks. I tested noise cancellation at home, in the office and during commutes, and assessed sound quality with a wide variety of music and podcasts across various streaming platforms on both an iPhone 13 Pro and a Nothing Phone (2).
To judge microphone quality, I sent voice notes, recorded voice clips, spoke on phone calls and virtual meetings and requested feedback from those I communicated with. I tested the AI features on the smart charging case in both real-world and controlled environments. I used the AI Note-Taker to record, transcribe and summarise work meetings and used Google Translate as a reference point to assess how well the Soundcore app translated English into Mandarin, French and Italian and vice versa.
Why you can trust us
All of our reviews are genuine and based on thorough testing. We provide impartial advice that will hopefully lead you to a product that you’re happy with and will stand the test of time.
Our reviewers have a wealth of experience testing technology; I’ve been reviewing headphones of all shapes and sizes for almost seven years, and have lost count of the wireless earbuds I’ve had in my ears in that time.
How comfortable and how easy to control are they?
Using the largest eartips and default earfins resulted in a very comfortable and completely secure in-ear fit. No amount of head shaking or vigorous exercise could budge them, and their seal didn’t cause discomfort, even after a couple of hours. I don’t love their appearance, but I can’t fault how it felt in my ears.
I’ve also only got good things to say about their touch controls. Using a mixture of presses, long presses and slides, they cover every key command, and in-app personalisation is available if required. Commands are acted on responsively and accurately.
Controlling the buds using the case is simple, too, though I found the touchscreen a little inconsistent. My swipes sometimes went unregistered; you have to be very deliberate with your movements.
If neither of those control methods appeals, you can use Smart Voice Control to execute commands like “Start playing” and “Pause audio”. Doing so was a smooth and painless process.
How well do the case’s features work?
The Remote Camera worked flawlessly: it’s not a game-changer, but I found it handy for taking selfies and recording videos for social media in place of a selfie stick or tripod.
The translation capabilities impressed me under controlled conditions, though I noticed a delay between text arriving on the case’s display and the speech in the earbuds. This will make such interactions slightly stilted, but it’s better than gesticulations or the classic Brits Abroad move of speaking louder and more slowly.
I tried out a few other languages, including French and Italian, and the translations were equally efficient. I can’t say whether they were word-perfect, but they were certainly coherent enough to hold a conversation. Cross-checking against Google Translate, the results looked very similar.
AI-Note Taker: A(I) mitigated success
AI Note-Taker did a reasonable job, too, but there were a few hiccups. I recorded the Expert Reviews monthly commissioning meeting, and the case’s mic picked everything up incredibly well. It reproduced voices clearly and naturally, while keeping background noise to a minimum.
Anka (Soundcore’s AI) was on shakier ground when transcribing and summarising the chat. It listed eight speakers when there were only five, incorrectly ascribed certain contributions, and renamed the esteemed Jon Bray as Sean. The “Intelligent Summary” was pretty smart, however, placing sections of the meeting under relevant headings, such as “Fan coverage for Stuart Andrews” and “Andy’s current review backlog”.
Some of the summaries were a little misleading, though, with Anka failing to pick up the contextual nuances. It summarised a discussion about testing a gaming headset as follows: “The SteelSeries Arctis Nova Elite was linked to Monster Hunter coverage. The timing was seen as favourable because a newly announced expansion made it a good moment to test the product against that content context.”
Anka got its wires crossed; there is, regrettably, no Monster Hunter content planned. Perhaps I’m being nitpicky, but it’s important to remember that humans still need to supervise AI output. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? That said, the note-taking tool should save you quite a bit of time overall.
Freemium frustrations
But here’s the kicker: transcription time is not something Soundcore is going to give you much of. For free, anyway. You get 120 minutes of free transcription and 10,000 minutes of cloud storage per month for 24 months. Anything more and you’ll need a Pro subscription. This gets you 1,200 minutes and unlimited storage duration for £8.33/mth. There’s also an Unlimited plan which costs £18.75/mth.
It’s hardly surprising that Soundcore is monetising this functionality, but such a restriction on the headline feature – and the main differentiator between the Pro Max and cheaper Pro – stings. The feature can’t be used for phone calls or virtual meetings if you have the buds in your ears either, as it picks up your half of the conversation.
How good is the microphone quality?
Outstanding. My benchmark for this is how well mics pick up and reproduce my voice in voice notes to my partner across various scenarios, and the Liberty 5 Pro Max excelled in each case. A couple of occasions when the wind really got up aside, every word I uttered while walking along a busy road between the office and Old Street station was perfectly intelligible. There were no dropouts, my tone sounded natural, and background noise didn’t impinge.
Mic performance during a strategy catch-up on Google Meet hammered home just how good the Liberty 5 Pro Max are in this department. My colleague described how I sounded as “crystal clear”, and having listened back to the recording, she was spot on. Microphone quality is the one area in which the Liberty 5 Pro Max are clearly above 99% of their rivals.
Is the noise cancellation effective?
The Liberty 5 Pro Max’s ANC performance was about what I expected from £200 earbuds; not quite top-tier, but more than capable of handling most situations.
There are five levels to choose from in “Manual Mode”. At maximum, the Pro Max proved very effective at reducing the impact of low frequencies. I tested the ANC on various noisy lines of the London Underground, a busy office on Mandatory Mondays, and the subdued confines of my bedroom, and the buds attenuated an impressive amount of low-end sound in each.
Spoken frequencies were more hit and miss – louder exchanges across the office still punctuated my listening at low volumes – but with volume set to 30%, I wasn’t able to make out what colleagues were saying on the other side of a bank of desks.
You’ve also got an Adaptive Mode, which automatically tweaks the strength in response to external noise in your environment. I noticed subtle changes when changing locations, but rarely felt like it offered the level I wanted, so I stuck to manual mode.
How do they sound?
Overly bass-heavy by default but highly customisable
The default Soundcore Signature EQ of the Liberty 5 Pro Max was not to my taste. I listen to a lot of bass-heavy music, so appreciate warmth, but I felt it was over-egged and muddy here. Mid-range clarity suffered on Stateside by PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson, and it was the same story with Justin Bieber’s Daisies.
Fortunately, you’ve got ways to adjust the sound to your liking. Soundcore’s HearID allows you to build a personalised listening profile based on a test in which you choose your preferred sound from a series of paired options. I ran the test a few times, and my results showed a preference for treble and mid-range detail alongside a healthy dose of sub-bass. Listening to the songs mentioned above with my HearID profile was a more engaging experience, especially with AI Sound Enhancement toggled on to up-res tracks.
It’s worth noting that the Liberty 5 Pro Max sound very different with and without ANC engaged. Audio is fuller and more detailed with it on, which led me to keep it on, even when I didn’t necessarily need it.
Elsewhere, there’s support for Dolby Audio with Head Tracking. This overrides any other EQ adjustments you may have made, and also blocks AI Sound Enhancement. I quite liked the spacious presentation of this mode; it enjoyably expanded the soundstage of Joe Hisaishi’s Merry-Go-Round of Life, a playful orchestral number from Howl’s Moving Castle. On balance, however, I preferred having more agency over what I was hearing and wasn’t particularly fussed about head tracking, so I stuck with customisable profiles.
They don’t sound spot-on out of the box, but there are enough tools to ensure the Pro Max’s sound pleases most people.
Should you buy the Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro Max?
The Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro Max are an “in for a penny, in for a pound” pair of wireless earbuds; if you’re buying them for the AI Note-Taker feature, one of the paid-for subscription tiers is a necessity. The feature works as well as any recording/transcription tool I’ve used, and having it as part of a wider suite of useful AI-assisted functionality will appeal to those looking to consolidate apps.
The package as a whole didn’t blow me away, though. Granted, I have neo-Luddite leanings where AI is concerned (ironic as a tech journalist, I know), but even if I were of an Artificially Intimate persuasion, the Liberty 5 Pro Max wouldn’t be my buds of choice in this price bracket.
Despite offering fantastic customisation options and all the audio support you could reasonably ask for, their sound quality is very good, not great. The same goes for their noise cancellation. They are among the best, if not the best, earbuds I’ve used for call quality, however. And they’re extremely comfortable and remain perfectly stable during exercise. So, there’s definitely a specific and not insignificant group of consumers whose needs the Liberty 5 Pro Max meet very nicely.
