Anker’s new Soundcore P41i wireless earbuds ($79.99) have an interesting premise. They serve up bass-heavy sound with a splash of ANC and transparency, but they’re not designed to be audiophile-grade, lacking the high-end codecs you’d want for that purpose. Instead, they aim to provide the ultimate in convenience. Anker packs such a big battery in the case that the buds can manage an entire month's worth of 40-hour workweeks before needing to recharge. The company also made it easy to charge the case with a built-in cable, which even lets you charge your phone from the case. In sound, ANC, and build quality, the Soundcore P41i earbuds don’t stack up against Anker's own Soundcore Liberty 5 ($129.99), our Editors' Choice for affordable noise-cancelling wireless earbuds. But they're $50 less and a worthy option if the convenience they offer fits your lifestyle.

Design: A Case With Extra Tricks

The Soundcore P41i are nearly as much about their charging case as they are about the earbuds themselves. Although the buds are fairly typical with long stems and silicone tips that plug into the ear canal, the charging case is quite unusual. It comes in black or a pearly white, has a basic little display on the front, and includes a built-in USB-C cable.

All of that comes together to give the case some interesting extra functions. The display makes it easy to see the case's overall charge level and rough estimates of each bud’s current charge. The integrated USB-C cable can serve as a makeshift carrying loop. It also lets you plug the case in to charge itself or even charge your phone. With the case open, you’ll find a little flip-up tab inside that works together with the lid to create a landscape phone holder. This way, you can set your phone down to charge and watch content.

(Credit: Mark Knapp)

The buds themselves aren’t very exciting. They look about like any other buds Anker has put out, just offering a little silver accent on the outside. The canal tips are clever, though. Anker has integrated a little grille into the silicone tips, helping keep earwax and other debris from getting through and allowing for easy cleaning. The buds have an additional fine mesh to prevent anything that gets past the silicone grille from going any further.

The buds include six mics for ANC and voice calls, and they tuck sizable 11mm titanium-coated drivers inside. The outside has touch-sensitive controls that are a little too easy to press by mistake. Having seen Anker shift to pressure-sensitive squeeze controls on other buds, it’s somewhat disappointing to see this fussier tech still in place. 

A few things hold the buds back. The IPX5 water ingress protection is modest and should cover you for most sports and fitness activities, but they won’t survive a dunk in water. And though you get ANC, transparency, Google Fast Pair, and Bluetooth Multipoint support, the buds are limited to SBC and AAC codecs.

Battery Life: Good On Their Own, Astounding With the Case

Since Anker anticipates you using the case to charge more than just the buds, it has built in a larger-than-average 3,000 mAh battery. It’s not enough to fully recharge a phone, but it can extend its battery life. The fun part is that the battery is simply massive for charging earbuds, providing 192 hours of battery life for the buds with ANC off and 160 hours with it on.

Even after extensive use while testing, I barely made a dent in the charge. And with the buds able to run for 10 hours on their own with ANC enabled (12 without), making it through each day has been a breeze.

App Experience: Dial in Your Exact Preferences

The P41i work with Anker’s Soundcore app, which doesn’t require an account to use. In the app, you get a basic look at battery levels and quick control over ambient sound and immersive gaming/movie modes. From there, you can dive into more extensive menus. The ambient sound modes have a variety of settings. The Sound Effects section provides a pile of genre-specific EQ settings, an eight-band custom equalizer, and a personalized option that attempts to measure your hearing sensitivity and adapt the sound to it. The Immersive Experience mode has a gaming option for low latency and a custom EQ for game sound effects, while the Movie mode applies a surround sound effect.

(Credit: Anker/PCMag)

The app allows for simple customization of the earbud controls. It also has a Safe Volume setting that can show you the levels you’re listening at and let you set a manual limit between 75 and 100dB.

Deeper setting menus allow you to test your fit, play a loud noise to locate lost buds, change auto power-off behavior, set up Bluetooth Multipoint, check your fit with an audio test, and update the firmware. 

Noise-Cancellation: Useful, But Unimpressive

The Soundcore P41i include both ANC and transparency modes, which is nice to see at this price, but they aren’t the most stunning implementations of either. In a busy cafe, most high-frequency noise—like people talking, the clatter behind the bar, and some whirring machinery—manages to slip through on the P41i. Low droning is effectively eliminated, though. Some extra modes can help. Adaptive ANC can shift the cancellation intensity as surrounding noise levels shift. There are three ANC scenes as well, with the Indoor mode better at reducing nearby voices. But making the most of the ANC capabilities will entail a lot of juggling. It would be better if the Adaptive ANC could handle all of this on its own, while a manual mode still provided some personal adjustments. The Soundcore Liberty 5 have these buds beat for ANC quality by far.

(Credit: Mark Knapp)

The transparency mode works well, though it doesn’t seem perfectly seamless in testing. It also has issues with wind. There’s a special mode to reduce wind noise, but this just seems to disable transparency mode for a little while when wind is detected, defeating the purpose of the mode entirely. It should just try to reduce the wind noise while keeping transparent, but it doesn't.

With neither mode active, the buds let a good bit of sound through. It’s not transparent, as there’s some slight muffling, but they aren’t doing a very good job of providing isolation. 

Sound: Heavy on the Bass, Lacking in Brilliance

The Soundcore P41i buds offer robust sound, leaning a little on the low-end more than the upper registers. In a track like The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” the bass triples and sub-bass quarter notes have plenty of thump, giving the track a thick feel. The lower vocal harmony also comes through well. But a little of the edge that comes from the high-end is lacking. The synth melody should reach some pretty high energy levels over the course of the song, but it never quite gets red hot. The upper vocal harmony is also a bit mellowed and harder to pick out. The brilliance from the claps and cymbals is also a bit subdued. It’s possible to put some of this energy back in with various EQ tweaks, but the sound signature keeps the high-end just a little mellowed.

(Credit: Mark Knapp)

The low-end grunt works well in a track like Kendrick Lamar’s “Loyalty,” where the P41i buds go to work on the deep sub-bass line's introduction about 35 seconds into the song. The kick drum hits hard during the intro, but when that sub-bass line comes in, it fills out the tune. The volume drops a bit on some of the lowest notes in that sub-bass line, though, making the higher notes in the line stand out as especially loud. It’ll please the bass lovers, though it’s a touch overdone and starts to drown out some of the higher frequencies in the Bruno Mars sample. Kendrick and Rihanna’s vocals are still clear.

The emphasis on bass is a poor match for Bill Callahan’s “Drover.” Callahan’s vocals are loud and clear, but the song contains a near-constant patter of kick drum eighth notes for multiple long stretches, and they’re basically an assault on your eardrums with their elevated levels. As the outro of the song builds to a crescendo, the drums are simply thunderous and overpowering. Meanwhile, the fiddle and guitars lack brilliance and presence, sounding a bit too much like a so-so recording and less like a live performance. The heavy bass also detracts from some of the song's nuance, like the faint background hiss and the sound of the snare wire being set up in the recording.

The heavy bass and lack of high-end also make the P41i a poor match for orchestral content, like John Adams’ The Gospel According to the Other Mary. Although they can hit the low notes in the song, they end up sounding a bit muddy. And with the many upper-register instruments lacking their full character, the whole performance just feels bottom-heavy.

The Soundcore P41i microphones sound acceptable. My voice is clear enough, though not loud or pronounced as you might get from a higher-quality mic. They successfully reduce some droning background noise, like fans. But in a busier cafe environment, they can struggle to distinguish between my voice and my surroundings, making it much harder to hear my voice clearly.