Beats Solo Pro Review: Bright color, Tough Design, Buffalo Battery, Disappointed Sound

Beats Solo Pro has been made with more attractive designs and colors, in addition, fast and smart connectivity thanks to the powerful H1 chip, and active noise cancellation. Beats Solo Pro is also advertised to deliver a more balanced and detailed sound quality than its predecessors, but unfortunately not. This is an audio product we are disappointed with, why read the Beats Solo Pro review below:

Design

Beats Solo Pro has a very simple yet artistic design. The headphone control key is located on the earcup and has a flat design with the surrounding surface to prevent accidental collision and the wrong button presses. The signal LED is also very bright, but not so prominent that it affects the overall design of the headphones.

Beats Solo Pro Review

The straps for the earcup extensions are made from electrostatic aluminum and can be easily pulled out or shrunk without the use of excessive force, and will not force too much on the sides of the head when wearing headphones. The headset has a function that automatically turns off when it is folded, and automatically opens then connects to the device when opening the earcup on either side.

The improved Beats Solo Pro’s earpad allows you to wear it more firmly to your ears without too much tightness, but when you use it, you’ll still feel like you are wearing a headset on your head that you do not find as comfortable as it seems in other premium headsets. In general, wearing Beats Solo Pro to listen to music or make phone calls for about 1 ~ 2 hours in a row is still comfortable, but if you listen for too long, you should take a break of 5-10 minutes and then continue.

Beats Solo Pro is sold in six color options: Black, Dark Blue with More Matte Collection, Gray, Ivory, Light Blue with More Matte Collection, and here we have the Red with More Matte Collection for the review. The outside color with the matte surface has a high aesthetic quality, the color is quite amazing.

The only physical key of the headset is located at the bottom of the earcup and has the following features: press once to activate Active Noise Cancelling (ANC), press once more is the Transparency mode to listen to external sounds without removing the headset. Double-press will turn off the noise and Transparency modes, meaning there is no feature to select different noise cancelling levels. The rocker key on the headset is for manipulating volume controls, skip songs, take calls and activate voice assistants.

A commendable detail is that the Beats pro wireless has 36% recycled plastic, and the headset case is also made of recycled plastic, which makes it more environmentally friendly. The product box is also built to a modest size to reduce environmental waste with 70% recycled material.

Active Noise Cancelling

Beats Solo Pro has built-in active noise cancellation, which is a bit unfortunate, does not support the conversion of many different noise levels. Instead, Beats will own intelligent algorithms to identify and adjust the noise level on a case by case basis, so you can listen to music or talk more conveniently without having to manipulate too much. Beats says its proprietary noise-canceling algorithm is capable of generating noise filters like those on Airpods Pro, scanning up to 50,000 times per second.

In terms of noise-canceling performance, the Beats Solo Pro, although not as good as Bose NC700 or Sony WH-1000XM3, but generally evaluate a fairly good range. The passive noise-canceling design of the headphones will account for 70% of noise-canceling performance, while the ANC noise-canceling technology will further optimize to give the user the best audio experience. Transparency mode results are impressive when you can hear what the next person says, almost in the same way when headphones are not worn.

Battery

Beats Solo Pro was introduced with a battery life of about 40 hours of music or 20 hours when noise canceling is turned on. The headset is equipped with a Lightning charging port with Fast Fuel technology, providing 4 hours of listening time with only 10 minutes of charging. A drawback of beats solo on-ear headphones is that there is no 3.5mm jack to plug into the music cord on non-Bluetooth devices, such as in-flight entertainment screens. The headset also comes with a Lightning port charging accessory, and allows for both charging and listening to music.

Sound

We do not identify much at all. In the beginning, when we listened, we tested heard Fragments of Time, few disco versions of Daft Punk felt a bit cold and detailed. Left it for 1 or 2 days and then listened again and our conclusion is that it sounds very bad when people call it a “fashion headset”.

We tested The Alan Parsons Project- Eye in the Sky, the cymbals and hi-hat were very intense and could not be removed. Meaning they are bright, stiff, and pushed quite high, so we have a feeling that the details are, in fact, the treble is much worse than Power beats Pro. Beats Powerbeats Pro separates the high range somewhere, not the first one and then shoots into the eardrum like this one.

We also tested the Metro Area – Soft Hoop version. The bass plays well on upper-bass, this is our feeling when we first heard it. But when dropping deep bass, it seemed to be in reverse. That means you “see” the bass, a loud bass, but it spreads out to both ears, not giving us the feeling that this bass is blending into the music. If you listen to this version with Momentum Wireless, you’ll see the beautiful, sparkling space with extremely smooth detail, WH-1000XM3 also can do that as well, but it will more treble so it cannot be cracked.

So here’s the thing, we do not write much, but we find it quite disappointing when Beats made this one after the great success of Powerbeats 3 or Powerbeats Pro, so we’ll have to write it all down. We use examples to make people understand what we mean better. For example, in the old days when Beats was accompanied by HTC, it was a Beats, or UrBeats with quite rough, thick and dark bass, Urbeats (2016), good sound quality, but more compact, and have more decent details already.

Beats Studio, through the development, they sound better, but still, retain the high and the chaotic upper bass style of Beats, in EDM or Neo Techno tracks, this sound is very suitable. As such, they all have a unique identity of Beats. As for Solo Pro, we feel that it doesn’t have any identity at all, it’s so different, and those differences are not so good to provoke or interest us to listen to it in a long session. This is a new move, but in a very unfairly, Beats!

Final line

So, according to his review, the Solo Pro is a good headset for the needs of talk, entertainment, media player, but is not too concerned about the sound quality or for the ear buffalo. Excellent battery life, good fast charging, good noise cancellation, and combined with Apple ecosystem gadgets such as excellent connectivity with iPhone, iPad, Macbook, this $299.95 headset should be your mate as it is already available to buy on Amazon.com and Bhphotovideo.com online stores.

If someone just buys a headset based on good sound quality, we want to stop them for Sony’s WH-XB900N, WF-1000XM3, Sennheiser Momentum Wireless or at least the Bose QC35-II, these headphones are actually valued your money when listening to music.

About Ankeet Solanki

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