Soundcore Space One Review – Out Of This World

The Soundcore Space One are budget friendly noise canceling over the ear headphones. They also perform stellar and out of this world. Get it? “Space” and stellar. Bad jokes, sorry I’ll stop.

Accessories

Included in the box is the original auxiliary cable that I mentioned earlier, again measuring at about 50 inches.

There’s a USB-C to USB-C cable, unfortunately it’s not pure USB-C and that’s measuring in at 12 inches.

No power adapter is included in the box, so you must use your own from say your cell phone or plug it into a computer to recharge the headphones.

There’s also a soft traveling pouch and not a hard traveling case, which is not surprising given the inexpensive budget.

Design & Comfort

Despite the reasonable price tag, I must mention they look very sleek. My version is a jet-black version which comes with a blue accent color that outlines the rim of the earcup to the frame connection. Another colour option available is latte cream, which has a very luxurious appeal to it and is available in sky blue.

It does have a folding design to make it slightly more compact, which is better for traveling. I usually have a concern with headphones that allow for a collapsing body because it makes the body rather weak. In this case, that’s not a concern, again despite the inexpensive price tag. Why is that? Because it feels sturdy in the hand, and I think because of how much material’s used.

It weighs a hefty 260 grams. Nothing uncomfortable when you’re wearing it, but that is kind of on the heavier side and no sacrifices were made on material in terms of the construction firmness of the body.

Wearing them for about 3 or 4 hours straight, my ears don’t get hot, sweaty, warm, none of that. It feels very comfortable even when wearing them with glasses, it’s very much a pleasure. I was wearing glasses for an hour and a half straight and there was no irritation whatsoever.

Let’s examine why that is. First off, is the headband flex. It’s not too tight, it’s not too loose. It’s just right kind of in the middle sweet spot if you will. Then you have the earcup cushioning that is extremely soft, very much a pleasure against the head and the headband cushioning is surprisingly very thick and soft. Again, at this inexpensive price tag Soundcore has done very well with the body design.

The headband adjustment is done in notches. It’s not a slider and the earcups do rotate up, down, forward, and back, which is great for various head shapes.

I don’t recommend wearing them for working out for two reasons. One is that when you put them on, they do slide forward about a centimeter or two when you’re looking down. When I was doing tricep cable kickbacks the headband came forward a couple of centimetres, nothing that’ll make the headphones fall off your head, but you will notice a slant ever so slightly. That’s not a big deal, though. The big thing here of course, is that they’re over the ear headphones. They will make your ear sweat like crazy when you’re working out. My recommendation is don’t use them when exercising.

Are they dust and water resistant? It is highly doubtful. And I say that with confidence because there’s nothing in the manual or online listing that they are dust and water resistance. If you go to the Soundcore website and filter by water resistant devices, Space One is not listed there.

As of this posting, these headphones are about four weeks old and so far, there’s no official ear pad replacements available. In fact, I might never happen. If you look around third-party vendor websites, they’re also not available. But I do suspect that’s a matter of time until at least third-party vendors get it out. I think Space One is just too new for them to kind of figure out which design to make.

For resting the Space One on your neck, looking left and right is a bit of a bother. That’s because the ear cups are a bit on the wider side. Looking down is also, again, a bit of a bother because the hand band flex is a bit narrow so the earcups get in the way again. If you try to be clever and fold the earcups then looking left and right works much better and looking down is simply a pleasure because the gap is massive.

Controls

Going over the controls on the left ear cup, there’s a button for powering the device on and off and holding this button will also activate Bluetooth pairing mode. Above it is a switch between ANC, transparency, and normal mode. ANC being active noise canceling which cancels exterior noise, transparency mode basically allows the microphones to turn on and have sound passthrough into the microphones and into the speaker so you can hear your surroundings more easily, and normal is just simple headphone mode with no special technology on, just the audio playing through.

That same ANC button, if you activate a feature in the app, it’ll activate bass booster mode when double tapping the ANC button. I’ll talk about how bass boost performance works as well in the audio section of this review.

On the bottom of the right earcup is a button for play/pause music or answer/hangup a call. While connected to your smartphone and if your phone is your main source of audio, when pressing and holding the play/pause button for about 2 seconds, it’ll activate your smart assistant. My testing was done with Android and Google Assistant, and it works well.

There are a couple of other commands available for the play/pause button, but we won’t describe them in this review. Carrying on slightly above that button is the button to lower volume. Pressing and holding this button will go to the previous track and above that is volume up, pressing and holding volume up will go to the, you guessed it, the next track.

There’s one annoying thing about the controls is that the play/pause button is on its own and it’s not between volume up and volume down. It should have been right in the middle between those two buttons. I’m not sure why it’s floating on its own. It’s kind of annoying because sometimes I meant to press and hold the volume down button to play the same track again if I really like a song, instead it ends up activating Google Assistant because it’s the play/pause button pressed by accident.

In case you’re wondering about side tone, it’s not available. Side tone basically means that when you’re on a phone call, you can hear your surroundings and your own voice to see how loud it might sound for the person on the other end of your call. There is a workaround for this, if you just activate transparency mode before calling someone and then you can hear all your surroundings. It’s a bit of an annoyance because if someone’s calling you and have ANC mode on, obviously you won’t be ready for it. So just something be mindful about. The fact that side tone mode is not available on headphones of this price point is not a complaint just more of a heads up since it’s usually expected in mid-tier priced headphones or higher.

One thing that is surprising to see at this price point is auto play/pause. What that basically means is that when you have your headphones on, content is playing and you’re all good. When you take the headphones off, it’ll automatically pause the content, when you put the headphones back on, it’ll detect that you’re wearing them and then resume playback. That is something you usually see on mid-tier pricing, but it’s available on these headphones surprisingly.

Noise Cancelling

It’s interesting whenever you have noise canceling on budget headphones like this, because most of the time it’s more of a gimmick. In this case, they perform surprisingly well.

When it comes to low humming sounds like being in a car or on a bus, it does suppress a lot of the noise. Not as good as premium headphones, but it does a lot better than it should at that price point. Honestly, they’re more like mid-tier priced headphones, say $250 Canadian, which is close to $220 USD. They perform almost double the value that they’re priced at.

When it comes to vocals, this is weird because with ANC mode off, just wearing the headphones because the earcup cushioning is thick and very encompassed around my ears, that alone suppresses a lot of the vocals and noise. Turning ANC on helps a little bit, so people talking around you, it’s quite muffled. You can just barely make out what they’re saying if you’re not paying audio. If you’re on the bus often and you listen to news or podcasts, which requires you to be aware of what’s being said on the audio, this is pretty good for you.

If you’re someone that’s going to be traveling on a plane and the engine noise is loud, this is borderline going to be okay for you. You may want to look at mid-tier price or premium headphones, but all in all, the performance is surprisingly good on these.

Now, going back to regular headphone mode with no technology on low humming sounds, they will come through, not too bad though. Again, the cushioning is great at suppressing a lot of the noise, but it will still come through. If you’re talking to someone in the same room as you, it’ll be hard to hear what they’re saying but you can still make out what’s being said in conversation. It’s kind of expected with no ANC mode on.

Transparency mode is okay. It’s kind of what you would expect at this budget price point, you can make out what people are saying within ten feet of you. It’s clear enough to hear what they’re saying, but it sounds like you’re talking to someone on a Zoom call on laptop speakers. Anything beyond ten feet for listening to a P.A. system or a TV, it’s a little difficult at times to make out what’s being said.

Battery

Battery is crazy good. Soundcore claims that you’ll average about 40 hours with ANC mode or transparency mode on. With ANC mode on in my testing at just about 50% volume, I was able to get 37.3 hours. Very close to what Soundcore claims. Transparency mode averaged a little bit better at 39.5 hours, again very close to Soundcore’s claim.

We can say that the claim is pretty accurate when it comes to regular headphone mode. They claim a whopping 55 hours of performance. In my testing I was able to achieve 51 hours.

Jumping over to recharge time. Soundcore claims about 2 hours to recharge. I average almost the same, so they’re again fairly accurate in that regard.

The USB-C charging port is located on the bottom of the left earcup.

Microphone Quality

The microphone performs better than it should at this price. In fact, it tends to perform better than most other headphones at this price bracket and performs more like premium headphones. The clarity in my voice sounds as expected so people can tell I’m using headphones and not a headset. However, where it performs better than most budget friendly and mid-tier priced headphones are that it doesn’t sound like I’m using the microphone of a laptop speaker.

While using the microphone in a noisy setting, it performs amazingly. Most of the background noise is cancelled and my voice comes in almost as clear as it did in a quiet setting.

Lastly, while in a windy setting it performed outstanding once again. This time my voice wasn’t as clear as in a regular noisy environment but still performed well. As for wind noise, only tiny bits came through and allowed for easy conversation with the person on the other end of the call.

Audio Quality

This is like the meat and potatoes of the review, right? It’s a bit of a weird mixed bag here. Let me explain. First off in terms of codecs, this supports SBC, AAC and Sony’s LDAC codec. So, you get some pretty good clarity.

There’s aptX support not surprisingly at this price point so that’s okay.

Audio quality out of the box, everything is well balanced. Highs, mids, and lows, it’s even across the board. One is not greater than the other. Of course, if you put on a rap song with heavy bass, it’ll accentuate the lows and get stronger.

Now, when it comes to adjusting the equalizer (in the Soundcore app, see next section) the native equalizer performance is a little odd and I replicated the behaviour with third-party equalizers. When you bump up the bass, it can get pretty good at this price point. But here’s the weird thing I can’t get the bass to work as good as Bass Booster mode (mentioned earlier in the “Controls” section of this review). If you double tap the ANC button to activate Bass Booster mode, that’s a preset equalizer in the app that gets turned on. Bass Booster mode always performs better than my custom equalizer setting. It gets stranger, is that when I save the Bass Booster equalizer mode as a template, and then I replicated it to match my custom equalizer, it never performs the same. It is impossible to get the bass that good in a custom equalizer. I have no idea why.

For some reason you must specifically turn on Bass Booster mode, which is a custom equalizer built in the app to get your thunderous roaring bass. And yeah, the bass can get thunderous. It’s damn good at this price point. As a bass enthusiast, I’m not complaining, but it’s bizarre that you can’t really tune the bass exactly how you should be able to if you’re someone who wants to get it right between flat profile and Bass Booster mode.

Here’s another weird thing, when I adjust the equalizer to make vocals stand out, I just can’t do it. It doesn’t matter if I just add a little bit or all the way. I just can’t get vocals to stand out truly on its own. I think it’s a limitation of the headphones.

Increasing highs, you can get it up there. A lot of the songs sound more energetic, although some songs, depending on which one it is, will sound a bit too sharp for my ears. Adjusting highs works just fine.

If you’re looking to use these with glasses on, there will be a slight sound leakage. There’s nothing you can do about that because over the ear headphones kind of wrap around the frame of your glasses. The sound leakage with glasses on isn’t too bad, but when you turn on Bass Booster, you’re not going to get the same bass emphasis as someone without glasses. That’s because there’s a ton of bass being pushed out, I notice a ton of it leaks out, unfortunately. Just something to be mindful about.

Software

Diving into the app, At the very top of the main screen, you can adjust between the listening mode, which is basically transparency mode, normal mode, and noise cancellation. With noise cancellation you can adjust how much of the surrounding noise you want cancelled. With transparency mode you can do the same thing, it allows you to adjust how clear do you want your surroundings to be. There’s an option to adjust wind noise reduction, I honestly don’t notice much of a difference and it’s more of a gimmick in my opinion.

Looking over to Easy Chat there’s one function that works pretty darn good. You basically touch the left earcup and hold it, it’ll suppress your music volume and allow you to activate transparency mode allowing you to have a quick conversation with someone if you want. My only gripe with this is that I wish it paused music instead, but not a big deal. Speak to Enable is a feature that allows you talk, the headphones try to recognize you’re speaking, turn on transparency mode and when you stop talking for 5 seconds, then ANC turns back on. It seems more of a gimmicky feature, but it’s kind of a given because it’s in beta mode.

Sound effects is where the custom equalizer is available. Of course, you do have the Bass Boost and other preset equalizers that I mentioned earlier.

Switching over to controls, you have some minor controls here, nothing special. For example, if you double tap the ANC button here, you see you can turn on Bass Boost on or off. You can also choose which modes to cycle between or remove them when you press the ANC button; ANC, transparency and normal.

Safe Volume detects output volume of content you’re playing and will try to read how much decibels you’re getting out. Then I’ll try to recommend if this is within safe listening volume or not.

Going over to the Settings at the top. This is where you can get some firmware updates if you want to look for them. There are different abilities to turn off or on such as LDAC, wear detection (activating auto play/pause headphone wear detection), and some other features which are not too important to go over now.

Conclusion

It’s weird because for a lot of the points, Soundcore has done great at this price point.

The price point and a lot of the pros that it has is just phenomenal. But there’s some weird things that I just think Soundcore kind of overlooked, like the button control layout (this is bizarre to me). The fact that you can’t replicate Bass Boost or truly customize this the way you want, but the preset settings work better should never be the case.

I’ll leave it up to you to decide if you want to get these or not.