AuSounds

AU-Flex ANC earphones

£229.95

I need several different pairs of headphones to different jobs – wired designs for monitoring and recording, portables for wandering around listening to music, and wireless for when making phone calls on the move. The £229.95 AuSounds AU-Flex ANC has proved to be a fine jack of all trades, and master of some.

An interesting hybrid design, it uses a planar-magnetic driver to cover the midrange and high frequencies, plus a dynamic drive unit for the bass. The two sides are connected to one another by a band that sits on the neck and shoulders, so the headphones can comfortably hang when not in use, and then be inserted into the ear with a reinforcing clip at a moments’ notice.

IN USE

To switch on, hold the button for a couple of seconds and the headphones find the last Bluetooth pairing with a confirmatory beep. There’s an Auto Noise Cancellation facility that requires another button push and provides a claimed 25dB of noise attenuation, furnished with a couple of mics in the casing. You can also cycle around on the same ANC button to ‘monitor mode’ to hear people talking, or indeed switch it off. As is usual with these things, I found the best quality audio is with all signal processing off.

The battery is charged from a USB slot at the end of the neckband, and provides over twenty hours of use in non-ANC mode, and ten in ANC mode. The charge time yields eight times the equivalent time in usage, handy for an emergency walk charge!

To pause the music, you can magnetically hold the two headphones together around your neck like a medallion, which is an innovative stop mechanism! Using the AuSounds extensively, I found that I would leave them around my neck all day, and take calls or listen to music as and when needed. The quality of the speech microphone is excellent and improves vastly on the built-in iPhone microphone on my new Pro Max. When a call comes through, it takes a button press on the iPhone to switch to the headphones, and a couple of seconds to get up and running. The AU-Flex ANC uses Bluetooth 5.0, as does my iPhone, and the headphones will handle 24-bit/96kHz comfortably.

This is the first time that I’ve seen a Bluetooth standard that can seriously compete with a wired solution. These days with Apple losing the headphone socket, good Bluetooth is the only sustainable option. Of course, you can use a Lightning connector and wired headphones but, in my experience, these adapters get lost easily and are expensive to replace. There is talk of Apple losing the lightning connection in the future, and Bluetooth will be one of the only remaining options.

The unit is supplied with silicon earbuds, which sell the potential of the headphones massively short in my opinion. Of course, everyone has different ear canals, and it’s impossible to simulate what someone else is hearing, but changing the silicon tips provided for some compressible foam tips was a game-changer for me. With a tight seal made by the correct size buds, bass came into focus and the voicing was pretty close to my ideal preference. With silicone, the best I could achieve was a bass-light version that lacked body. Properly fitting earbuds can improve the performance of decent in-ear designs by as much as fifty percent, I’d say.

THE LISTENING

AuSounds AU-Flex ANC headphones are something out of the ordinary at this price point. Playing a large orchestral piece such as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under Manfred Honeck, I loved the classic planar-magnetic sound. Smooth and sophisticated, orchestral colours were painted beautifully with a silky, refined texture and great dynamism to boot. When Beethoven’s hell-raising explosions arrived in the last movement, the headphones had the imagery to portray the weight of the orchestra effectively and emotively.

I have heard planar magnetic headphones three times as expensive do this – but never in this price range – so as you can probably see I am highly impressed. This design solves the Apple conundrum, is light and easy to use and works brilliantly for humble telephone conversations. And then there’s the sound quality, which is really special given the price point. Hear these headphones if you can, you won’t be disappointed.

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