Soundcore Life Q20 Review – Needs A Bit More

The Soundcore Life Q20 are noise canceling over the ear headphones that also support a wired connection. They’re inexpensive, so this might be of interest to a lot of people.  

Accessories 

Accessories included in the box is that axillary cable measuring about 48 inches. 

There’s also a micro-USB to USB-A cable. That’s right, you read correctly. Micro-USB… This cable measures 24 inches. This should have just been flat out USB-C all the way, so very disappointing there.  

Lastly there’s a soft carrying pouch. It’s not surprising or disappointing to not find a hard traveling case at this price point, this is kind of expected. 

Design & Comfort 

The body itself looks simple with a pure black design. There are subtle hints of the Soundcore and Anker logos and that is because Soundcore is a sub-brand of Anker. They’re inexpensive headphones and they’re only available in a single black color, there’s no additional color options available. 

It does use a folding design to collapse in and make it slightly more portable when traveling, which I’m not usually a fan of because it usually means a sacrifice in build quality. In this case it’s still rather firm. Surprisingly, it also weighs 268 grams, which is a little on the heavier side given the price point. All of this is surprising because they put a pretty firm constructed body in this small price package. 

You’ve got a well-designed body and that carries over into comfort. They’re very comfortable. You can wear it for a few hours straight, even if you’re wearing glasses (as I did in my testing). I could wear them for a couple hours straight no problem and that’s due to several reasons. 

One is that the headband flex is just right, it’s not too tight or not too loose either, which is good. The earcup cushioning is very soft and thick, which is great to see, and the headband padding is also thick and soft. It seems like no expense is spared when it comes to the construction of the body. It’s surprising to me how much material was used to ensure great comfort and a firm constructed body. 

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

For those of you wondering about working out with them, I don’t recommend it for two reasons. Well, the first one is kind of depending on your situation. The first is that they stay relatively stable in your head. They don’t move that much, but if you suddenly jerk your head forward quickly, I notice that it slides about two centimeters forward. Also, they’re over the ear headphones and you will sweat like crazy, very quickly. 

I looked everywhere I possibly could but there’s no information saying they’re dust and water resistant. But if you go to the Soundcore website and filter their audio products to water resistant devices, the Q20 is not listed there. So, it’s best to assume that they’re not water resistant. 

Surprisingly, with budget friendly headphones like this, you can buy official replacement earpads. You can buy them from the Soundcore website, which is surprising to me, as well as third party retailers on the Internet. 

For resting on my neck, it’s kind of a weird situation. Looking left and right is not bad, despite the ear padding thickness and how big the earcups are, my chin doesn’t rub against them. Looking down of course, is a challenge because the ear cups are right in the way. Where I have a bit of an issue though, is where there’s a gap after you extend the headband (in the headband itself) it kind of starts digging into my neck. It’s weird because this almost never happens with any headphones, but I am feeling it and it’s kind of irritating. The workaround solution is to either just put them in the traveling case, wear them, or rest them on your head but not over your ears (see video for an example).

Controls

The controls are all physical button based. Starting on the left earcup, there’s a button for powering on/off and holding this button will also activate Bluetooth pairing mode. There’s another button for turning on/off ANC which is active noise canceling. There’s no transparency mode. Transparency mode basically means that it would let sound travel in from the exterior surroundings into the microphones of the headphones and then let that pass into the headphones easily so you can hear your surroundings. It doesn’t have that transparency mode. In summary it has ANC and regular headphone mode (no extra additional technology). 

Continuing to the right ear cup. The top button is for volume up and holding it will go to the next track. The middle button is for play/pause of audio and answer/hanging up a call. The bottom button is used for volume down and holding it goes to the previous track. 

I will admit these three control buttons are annoying to press because they’re not physically separated. There’s no real gap, so it’s often that I press the wrong button by accident. It’s just kind of a weird design. 

Additional controls are not available, but I do want to mention, in case you are curious. There’s no connectivity with your phone’s smart assistant, so even if it connected with your phone, it won’t work with say Google assistant for example. There’s no side tone, which basically means that when you’re on a phone call, you can hear your own voice and your surroundings and hear how loud you are. This gives you an idea of how loud the environment is so the person on the other end of your call will recognize you’re in a noisy environment or not. Passive play/pause is also not available, which basically means when you’re listening to content headphones with headphones on, when you take the headphones off, it’ll automatically pause, put them back on and content resumes. 

Those three functions are not available at this price point. This isn’t concerning, but just more of a FYI. 

Noise Cancelling

Whenever you see noise canceling at a price point like this, it’s one of the most interesting features because it’s like, is it worth it? Is it good? It really depends.  

When it comes to low humming noises, it will do an appropriate job. If you’re in a car, for example, it’ll suppress all the noise of the highway around you potentially, or if in a bus it’ll muffle most of the noise. Electric buses, not a problem but if you’re sitting in one of those old school buses at the back where the engine is the loudest, it’s going to come through. So not all low humming sounds will be suppressed greatly. 

If you’re looking to travel often in a plane or a train that’s loud, these won’t be the best option for you. You might have to spend a little bit more money on better performing ANC headphones. 

ANC and vocals here is a challenge. It’s something you can’t really avoid when it comes to suppressing vocals with ANC mode on, it does almost nothing with people talking in the same room as me. It just comes through as normal as if ANC mode was off. So that’s ANC mode and it’s not the most effective, but it’s kind of what you expect at this price point. 

If you were to leave ANC mode off, low humming sounds will come in a little stronger. It will be suppressed slightly, but the best will do is for that car example, if you’re on the highway or the engine noise of the car, that will be suppressed and that’s best it’ll do. Traveling on a bus or something similar with people talking, not going to work that great when it comes to vocals. Again, it comes through rather greatly. It’s not the clearest but you can make out what people are saying in the same room as you, because even with the ear cushions wrapping around your ears you will kind of be able to make out what people are saying. You can make full conversation and dialog with people if you need to. 

Battery 

This is one of the major selling points of these headphones. Soundcore claims with ANC mode on it’ll average about 40 hours of battery. In my testing when I had volume between 50 and 60%, I averaged closer to 38.7 hours, very close to their claim. 

When it comes to ANC mode off (just regular headphone mode), they claim 60 hours which is nuts. I close to 62 hours. Again, very close to the claim as well. Battery is superb. 

Recharge time, according to the manual takes 3 hours, although in my testing I got it way faster at 2 hours for a full battery. 

You get amazing recharge time, and the tradeoff is excellent battery performance. 

The one caveat they have is that the charging port is located on the bottom of the right earcup and again, it’s micro-USB.

Microphone Quality 

For inexpensive headphones, they perform as you would expect in a quiet environment. Audio comes through clear and easy to understand but sounds like you’re using a laptop microphone. 

In a noisy setting it performs much better than expected at this price tag. Most background was lowered to the point it’s hardly noticeable. During this phase of testing, the audio from my voice sounded almost as clear as it did in a quiet setting. Whatever Soundcore’s engineering team has done here is magic at this price tag. 

While replicating a windy setting with a fan sitting about 5 feet away from me and the headphones, it was okay. A lot of the wind noise came through but so did the audio from my vocals, it was just as strong as the wind noise. Despite the wind noise coming through, my voice came through just as clear so people on the other end could hear everything I was saying. 

Audio Quality 

It’s supporting SBC and ANC, which is not surprising. There’s no LDAC or aptX which is not a big deal as it’s kind of expected at this price point.  

One thing to mention is that Soundcore does advertise that these are more bass focused, that they really focus on the low frequencies right out of the box. If weren’t aware of that now, well now you know. These are very, very bass focused. I’m a bass enthusiast, so I found that the rumble right of the box was incredible at this price point. 

Thankfully, despite how powerful the bass is on these headphones, it doesn’t ruin the mids, so vocals still come out relatively clear as you would expect at this price point. Where I find things a little lacking is on the highs. It’s not like they don’t exist, but it’s just that they can be pushed to the back burner even with songs that have very little bass or certain segments of a song where there’s like no bass focused parts at all, I still find that the highs are really lacking substantially. 

And here’s another bummer, there is no native equalizer for this (I’ll cover software shortly). It doesn’t exist. You must use a third-party equalizer on your phone or computer. During my testing, if I punch up the bass even higher, it’ll rumble a lot, although it gets too overbearing even for myself. Interestingly enough, it didn’t crackle or distort the audio. If you really want to notch up bass even higher go ahead. 

Shifting up the mids in an equalizer, they do become a lot more standout, but then the rest becomes isolated. It’s like it’s leaving the bass and the highs way in the back and vocals just kind of jumped too easily. Despite me adjusting the equalizer only a tiny bit on the mids, it just jumps too far out too dramatically. It’s like the headphones don’t know what to do in that regard. 

When it comes to increasing highs, it’s still lacking. Honestly, I found this very bizarre because I use different equalizers and I still can’t get it to really jump out even when I really pump it up high. So, highs in general just kind of suffer. 

Overall, the Q20 is very focused on bass enthusiasts. If you’re not into that, you might want to avoid these. 

Sound quality does get impacted with those of you that wear glasses, there’s nothing you can do about it. This is a physical limitation, because the glasses will poke out of the frame of the earpad wrapping on the Q20 earcup. I notice that bass suffers like a significant amount. You’ll notice dramatically how much it drops when wearing glasses because again, they’re bass focused headphones, you’ll notice a drop much more substantially than any other area. Mids become a little muffled slightly nothing to ruin the song, but you will notice a bit of muffling. Highs leaking out aren’t that noticeable because they weren’t that powerful to begin with, you don’t notice much difference there. 

Software 

There’s no software, there’s nothing available. There is a Soundcore app, but these are not designed to work with that app, which is rather unfortunate because even competing headphones at similar price tags will have some sort of app you can utilize. In this case, it is disregarded. 

Conclusion 

These headphones do have a substantial amount going for it. I’m a bass enthusiast and I found that the bass out of the box is crazy good, especially on certain rap songs. 

The materials used are top notch. You would think this is more mid-tier priced headphones by just picking them up and wearing them, they feel that good.  

But there are some sacrifices made, especially with the lack of an app. You’re doing a bit of give and take. 

Can you get something better that’s got a similar price point? Yeah, you can look around. They’re not awful, but you could probably get something else that’s competitive.