Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro Review – An Affordable All-Rounder TWS Experience

Background

The Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro is the successor to the highly popular Buds Plus – another highly popular pair of TWS earbuds.

Despite my skepticism, a quick look into the history of the development of the Galaxy Buds series explained the reason for their popularity.

Samsung is the owner of the Harman Institute, which in turn owns AKG, putting two of the most well-renowned audio engineering organizations worldwide under Samsung’s umbrella.

So it’s really no surprise that Samsung has consistently put out well-tuned earbuds with sound quality that has a refined yet mass appeal. Decades of audio engineering research have gone into the creation of these buds.

I was also surprised to find out that they use a two-way dynamic driver configuration which is quite rare in TWS earbuds. Each earbud also features 3 different mics to help with intelligent noise canceling.

First Impressions

Opening the box, I found a well-built pair of earbuds with a stylish shiny finish that felt light and solid in my hands. 

The design for these is ergonomic and focuses on an understated elegance that I could appreciate.

The buds come with 3 pairs of ear tips of sizes small, medium, and large, so it’s only a matter of finding your fit. Once I picked the right size, the fit was comfortable and never loose or intrusive. 

The case was also fairly small and featured a LED on the inside and outside to let you know how much charging it had. 

You also won’t be struggling to find accessories for the case if you’re into that sort of customization.

Features

First, let’s cover the features to look forward to in the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro.

Touch Controls

The touch controls work using capacitive touch on each earbud and provides a fairly good response even to lighter touches. Learning to control them is a fairly intuitive task.

Controls take care of most music listening functionalities, such as a single tap to pause music or take a call and a double tap for the next song, and a triple tap for the previous.

There’s also the option of touch and hold for three seconds to enter pairing mode and a fairly handy customizable touch and hold option that lets you choose from several options, including swapping from ANC to Ambient, volume up or down, or launching Spotify.

Battery Life

The battery life on the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro, while not bad, is basically average. They’ll provide up to 5 hours while ANC is active (generally always active), and this goes up to 13 more with the case. 

Without ANC, this goes up to 8 hours, with 20 more in the case. Furthermore, 5 minutes of charging can give you an hour of playtime which comes in handy fairly often.

Overall, the battery life isn’t impressive, but it’s serviceable depending on your frequency of usage.

Audio Codecs

While Bluetooth 5.0 is decent, if you’re picky about the audio format itself, then Samsung’s own Seamless Codec will encode 24-bit audio and provide a near-lossless music listening experience.

Active Noise Cancellation

The ANC on the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro is supposed to be intelligent and adjusts itself to the noise around you.

However, I found it a bit lacking in blocking out higher-range frequencies. It gives more of a bassless feel to the world rather than tuning it out completely. 

This doesn’t mean that the ANC is bad – it just has room for improvement, and some people prefer not tuning the entire world out.

Speaking of which, there’s an ambient mode feature available that does this and allows external sounds to enter while you’re listening to your music. This feature is handy if you’re waiting for announcements or trying to multitask with people around you. 

Water Resistance

Another impressive feature is the IPX7 rating which will let your earbuds survive for up to 30 minutes in a meter of water. 

This is great if you’re someone who likes taking your buds out during the rain, in the shower, or just washing them under a tap.

Sound Quality

Now, on to the sound quality part of the review. 

I planned on being harsh on the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro, but they never really gave me any opportunity for it. However, I didn’t exactly get any qualities to overtly praise them on either.

Let me explain what I mean – I found their sound to be well-balanced, inoffensive, and quite pleasant to listen to through all ranges, but that wow factor never hit me. 

I’d describe their sound as being tuned to a warm V shape. For the uninitiated, this means there’s an emphasis on slightly raised bass and treble for a more consumer-friendly sound that works for most music.

Bass

The bass is punchy enough but never goes overboard or bleeds heavily into the mids. 

While never overstated, it’s still good enough to be a fun experience when listening to tracks requiring a responsive bass and sub-bass.

The bass-boosted tuning may interfere with the lower mids at times, so beware of that if you’re someone who prefers to keep their bass on the down low.

On the opposite end, if that’s still not enough bass, the bass boost EQ setting will probably give bass heads what they’re looking for.

Mids

The mids are lush and smooth with a fun and warm sound. 

The midrange is fairly detailed and communicated well with good layers of separation. Shoutiness was never really an issue, and it’s an easy listening experience, even on higher volumes.

However, the emphasis on the lower mids combined with the bass-boosted tuning sometimes resulted in some bloat around the vocals for busier tracks. 

Personally, I would’ve liked it if there was a bit more separation of the lower mids and bass to let them keep their individual sounds more. Regardless, this isn’t bad enough to disregard for most casual or non-picky listeners. 

The mids will generally serve you quite well unless you have experience with much more expensive TWS earbud models.

Treble

The treble is, as expected, quite lively and well-executed. 

The emphasis on a consumer-friendly sound is clear here as we get that bit of sparkle in the treble that makes it nice to listen to. 

The integration of the frequency range from the mids to the treble is smooth, and they seem to have almost executed it perfectly. “Almost” is the operative keyword, as there are still some higher frequencies that can lead to a fatiguing peaky treble.

Conclusion

While I have my minor criticisms, it’d be unfair to call the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro a bad pair of TWS earbuds. 

I can’t give them the label of “excellent” either (as I’m afraid of the audiophile community), but for the options existing in this price bracket, they may as well be the best available.

The features are excellent, besides the ANC and average battery life. Plus, the sound is well-balanced, generally clear, and provides a lot of fun for the vast majority of music genres.

For any remarkable difference in sound quality, you’d have to go several tiers up in prices in the TWS earbud market, which is something I wouldn’t recommend to casual listeners because of the concept of diminishing returns.

Therefore, I’d feel safe recommending the Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro as an excellent budget option for Hi-Fi sound quality if you’re running on a bit of a budget.

This post was last updated on 2023-03-28 / Some images from Amazon Product API & some links may be affiliate links which may earn us a commission from purchases.