1MORE SonoFlow Review – Worthy Contender

In this review we’ll cover the 1MORE SonoFlow wireless noise canceling over the ear headphones. You’ll want to stick around for this one because these are budget friendly headphones that perform spectacular. They should be priced almost double what they are and even then, still might not be getting enough respect.

Accessories

Included in the box is a USB-C to UAB-A cable. Unfortunately, it is not full USB-C and the cable is measuring about 18 inches.

There’s also the originally mentioned auxiliary cable.

Get this, at this budget there’s a hard carrying case. This is very rare to find in this price tag, but I’m also very happy. Even some headphones that are double the price, they still don’t come with a hard carrying case.

Design & Comfort

It has a polished design. I mean, you can still argue that it has a typical looking headphone design to it, but the 1MORE logo blends in with a nice accent matching the color regardless of your choice of headphone colors. That’s because the headphones come in black, blue, and silver for the choice of color.

The black version that I reviewed has tiny hints of red accent, which I like, but they’re hardly noticeable due to the location of those accented colors. I wouldn’t have minded having more red accent colors throughout the headphone design, but that’s all good.

The headphones do support a foldable collapsible design, so they are slightly more compact when traveling and placed in the case. I’m not usually a fan of collapsing and folding headphones because it tends to make the body a little weak. However, surprisingly at this price tag, considering it’s also folding design, they’re rather sturdy, better than they should be at this price tag.

And why is that? And that’s probably because they weigh 250 grams, which is not too bad. And why is that? Well, that’s probably because it has a firm body with rather thick constructed plastic. But in addition to that, I also noticed it looks to be an aluminum fitting in the headband slider.

For comfort they’re great, super comfortable. I can wear them for about 3 hours straight, no irritation on my head and no sweaty ears, nothing like that. In fact, that comfort carries over perfectly to when wearing glasses. I can wear glasses with these headphones for an hour and a half straight again, no problem. It doesn’t matter what your conditions are, they’ll feel adequate for you.

There are several reasons for that. The first is because, of course, the headband flex isn’t too tight, but it’s not too loose either. The earcup cushioning itself is thick and soft and looking at the interior of the headband, you get a nice thick cushioning. There is a lot more padding on the interior of the headband than you would find on headphones that are significantly more expensive.

The headband adjustment is done in notches, it’s not a slider mechanism and the earcups can go up, down, forward, and back, which is great to accommodate various head shapes.

For working out, they work well in the sense that they hardly move at all. If you have to kind of shift up and down while doing certain exercises, they don’t move. They’re stationary, but they’re over the ear headphones, and when you are exercising, your ears will sweat a crazy amount and then it will be uncomfortable. So, you’ve been forewarned.

I’ve been trying to find out if these are dust and water resistant. There’s no information indicating they’re not, but there’s no information indicating that they are either. That leaves you kind of stuck in a conundrum, right? Well, I went to the 1MORE website and there’s a dedicated section for products that are water resistant. The SonoFlow is not listed there. My take is to try not to get them too dirty or wet.

If you ever need to buy replacement ear cushions, you can from the official 1MORE website. However, they only come in the black color. So, if you have one of the other two-colored headphones, they’re not going to match your design. Luckily, you can find third party vendors that also sell replacement earcups.

If you’re on the go and you’re going to put them on your neck. It’s not a great experience. Looking left and right they do tend to rub against my chin, looking down is even worse because the ear cups are kind of a little tight, so it’s hard to put my chin down.

Controls

All controls are on the right earcup. At the front is a power button for pairing it on and off and holding it will enter Bluetooth pairing mode. Tapping it will play/pause music while listening to media or tapping it will answer or hangup a call.

Your phone’s smart assistant is activated while paired to a smartphone, and double tapping the power button. In my testing I used Google Assistant with an Android device, and it worked well. There are a couple of other commands you can use with the power button, but not worth mentioning in this review, but you can always look it up on the 1MORE website.

On the back is a volume up button and a volume down button. Holding volume up will go to the previous track (you read that correctly) and holding volume down will go to the next track. Now these commands for going to the next track and previous track seem reverse because when I think of holding volume up, I always think of going to the next track for two reasons. One is that most other manufacturers set holding volume up to go to the next track. In addition, volume up is plus button, which kind of assumes going forward or higher, which usually means next. Minus for volume down means to go backwards which minus can also imply stepping backwards perhaps or going to the previous track. I’m not sure why these are reversed. You can’t adjust that in the app which is annoying because I usually end up pressing and holding the wrong button.

Over on the back top of the earcups is where you have the ANC button to rotate between active noise canceling (ANC), regular headphone mode and transparency mode, which I’ll go over very shortly.

There are two things I want to mention that are not available in these headphones, but it’s not surprising at this budget. The first is that there’s no sidetone which would allow you to hear your surroundings and your own voice. Allowing you to get an idea of how loud you’re talking when on a phone call with these headphones.

The other feature not available is passive play/pause. When listening to content with the headphones on, it’ll just play like normal. When you take them off, it’ll automatically pause the content. Putting them back on will automatically resume.

Noise Cancelling

When it comes to ANC (active noise canceling) it is amazing. Let’s put it this way, in Canadian dollars they’re $130, but they can compare to some $250 or $275 headphones that I have reviewed.

When it comes to low humming noises it’ll do a great job of canceling out, say, an engine noise from a bus, a train, etc. given the budget, it performs exceptionally well. When it comes to people talking with enthusiasm in the same room as you, maybe 5 to 10 feet away, noise canceling doesn’t do too much. In fact, it’s hard to tell the difference between having ANC on or just regular headphone mode. So just wearing the headphones with the ear cushioning surrounding your ears, I don’t notice much difference. That should be expected at this price point. To be honest, it kind of matches performance to the mid-tier priced Sony WH-CH720N headphones I’ve reviewed. Sigh, Sony’s naming convention, I just never understand it. I don’t want that to discourage you, to say it’s bad because at this price point it does well.

Passive noise canceling (regular headphone mode, no technology whatsoever) when it comes to reducing those loud humming noises from an engine or something similar, it doesn’t do well. It’ll muffle it a little bit, but not in comparison to ANC mode.

What I mentioned earlier about muffling out vocals, it is okay. People in the same room as you 5 to 10 feet away talking with enthusiasm and energy, it’ll reduce the noise substantially, but you can still make out what they’re saying, and the words being said.

One question people may have been if you’re on a budget around the price of these headphones and you want to listen to news or podcasts on a bus with a lot of people talking, is it worth it? Yeah, it’ll do the job. Don’t get me wrong, you must ramp up the volume quite a bit, but it’s possible for your needs in that regard.

There is transparency mode, which basically what it does is activate the microphones on the headphones and purposely project sound into the headphones, allowing you to hear your surroundings. Anything within 10 feet, you can kind of make out what people are saying. It’s not the clearest and you might have to ask people to repeat what they said. Anything beyond 10 feet is not that easy to hear anything. But again, these are budget friendly headphones, so you get what you pay for.

Battery

Battery performance with ANC mode on, 1MORE claims about 50 hours of usage. In my testing, I had volume up roughly 50% and I was able to average closer to 58 hours.

With regular head full mode so no technology on whatsoever they claim 70 hours, which is nuts. I achieved 78 hours.

Lastly, with transparency mode they don’t make any claim of battery performance. I would assume it’s the same as ANC (50 hours) because that’s usually what most manufacturers have (ANC and transparency mode tend to average the same), but in my performance I average 58 hours again.

Recharge time is advertised as 80 minutes, so an hour and 20 minutes. I got about the same performance. So, you’re getting incredible battery performance, like outstanding battery performance and superfast recharge time. It’s hard to argue that there’s a downside here when it comes to battery performance.

The charging port is a USB port located on the bottom of the left earcup. Okay.

Microphone Quality

This shocked me. In a quiet environment it sounds like I’m using a headset and not budget friendly headphones. I’m not sure how 1MORE got the microphone to sound this good but if you work remotely in a quiet office then the Sonoflow would work great for video and audio calls.

The good times continue when testing the microphone in a replicated noisy café environment. While talking, the person on the other end would find it difficult to notice you’re in such a setting. However, I notice just a minor strong hint on sibilance. It might have something to do with the microphone noise cancelling technology making “S” sounds come out just slightly stronger but nothing that’s annoying.

Lastly when testing in a windy environment, it still did quite well. Some wind sound will flow into the microphone audio which isn’t surprising. Thankfully most of this noise isn’t overpowering compared to my voice when I was speaking.

Audio Quality

In terms of codecs, it supports SBC, AAC and Sony’s LDAC codec, which is interesting enough.

When it comes to audio quality out of the box, at a flat profile it’s not bad. Everything is well balanced, nothing is overpowering compared to the other, whether it be bass, vocals, or highs, it’s not bad. If you just want to get budget friendly headphones, take them out of the box and put them on, this works out well.

However, the true magic is when you use an equalizer. The equalizer function in the 1MORE app (I’ll cover this shortly) doesn’t perform that well. I used third party equaliser, and it worked a lot better.

Increasing bass, you can get some deep punch, which is surprising at this price point. What’s more is that when you really crank it up just for testing purposes, it doesn’t warp or distort the audio. It still stays relatively clear.

When it comes to increasing highs, the vocals will truly stand out if the right song is used. It’s always very dependent on the song, of course, and nothing else is sacrificed.

Increasing bass and mids, they perform exceptionally well when you punch them up and nothing else is sacrificed, the song itself is still relatively clear.

The only thing that I notice a little lacking is when I punched up the highs. I didn’t notice much difference and I found highs to be relatively still flat. Again, at this price point I’m not saying it’s horrible. They are budget friendly headphones. They still perform exceptionally well, but I just found it weird that increasing the highs doesn’t do anything.

Audio leakage with glasses (due to the frame a kind of poking into the side of the earcups) I notice that bass will leak a little bit. I’ve noticed this with other headphones, particularly from Sennheiser. This is kind of expected and nothing can be done about it, this is just a physical thing. It doesn’t ruin the sound by any means. Mids and highs, they’re relatively well balanced and not too much is lost in terms of sound quality.

Software

The app is the true letdown of these headphones. It’s not a whole picture of roses and rainbows. Unfortunately, the app does tend to crash two or three times per week if I’m using the headphones daily. It’s also lackluster in features.

Going over to the app quickly, you can switch between ANC mode pass-through mode (which is a transparency mode I mentioned earlier) and regular headphone mode.

Switching over to sound options is basically equalisers. You have preset ones you can select from or set a custom equaliser. The custom equaliser has a lot to adjust here, but I find that the third-party equalizers tend to perform better.

Having the app installed is the only way to get firmware upgrades downloaded. To be honest, that’s really it for core functions.

If you go down the app a bit there are some soothing sounds, which is just a collection of white background noise. There’s something called summer rain, one of water beach noise and so on.

There’s one more thing that’s annoying, at least on the Android side I’m not sure about iOS, is that when you close the app, it never disappears from your notification section at the top, even after the app is closed. You must force close the app in the Android settings.

The app generally feels incomplete. For example, a basic function such as dual connectivity is an experimental feature. If you go to the top of the app and then you select the experimental features, this is where you enable dual connection. However, in my testing it works solid.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for budget friendly headphones with noise cancellation, over the ear, and with great comfort, this has got to be one of the top contenders for you.

Definitely worth checking out. Oh, did I mention the super battery? I just want to mention that again. It is crazy to me how 1MORE put so much into this price tag. Almost forgot to mention again the hard traveling case. You notice I just kind of keep throwing up random pros to this device as they’re superb.

The Sonoflow is not as popular as it should be in my opinion. This needs to get more hype. It really deserves it.