SoundPEATS GoFree 2 Open Ear Headphones

The SoundPEATS GoFree 2 Open Ear Headphones are a very good but occasionally frustrating solution to listening to content without restricting ambient sound. They're comfortable and the sound quality is good, but their controls don't work with gloves or under ear coverings, and their on-off and Bluetooth pairing behaviour with devices sometimes leaves a bit to be desired.

Bluetooth headphones have come on hugely in the last few years, and what used to be quite expensive devices are now available at relatively low prices with good performance. At £76 the SoundPEATS GoFree 2 feel and look nicely made, and there's an accompanying app for customisation. The buds are IPX5-protected, meaning they can survive heavy rain or even wearing in a shower – though not total immersion. So stay out the swimming pool...

As with pretty much every pair of headphones today, the case is the charger and is good for around three recharges of the headphones. A full charge will give you around nine hours of listening, the buds taking one and a half hours to charge, the case two hours. Charging is via a provided USB-C cable.

Each earbud only weighs nine grams and fits nicely over your ears, even if you're wearing glasses. Of course, not all ears and glasses are the same, but both my wife and I found them comfortable to wear for long periods.

The key feature here is the open-ear design, which means the driver unit sits outside of your ear rather than inside it. This means you can easily hear other things around you – traffic and fellow riders when you're on the bike, and you can hear the doorbell, children, dogs and so on around the house. I'd frequently come to wear the GoFree 2s only to find them missing, my wife having purloined them to listen to audiobooks while doing housework.

You can choose to wear either bud individually or both together, as both talk to your phone or laptop separately. On one train trip my wife and I shared buds, so we could listen to the same podcast simultaneously. A parental hack is to do this on long car journeys where your desired content may not suit children listening in.

The buds turn on as you remove them from the case, and turn off as you replace them. If the case is flat or you can't find it, you need to press and hold both buds for about 12 seconds to turn the buds off. If you forget this, or if you didn't read the manual first, you have to manually go into Bluetooth settings and disconnect/forget the buds to stop playback and reroute phone alert audio (ringing/messages) to the phone speakers, not routed into the buds.

SoundPEATS really should enable some sort of case-insertion feature, so that regardless of the charge they turn off when put back in the case.

On a few occasions they didn't turn off even when they were inserted into their charged case, and they got confused between our phones resulting in a faff of disconnecting/forgetting and re-pairing.

SoundPEATS says the case has a multicolour LED to show charging status, but it only ever showed green for me regardless of charge state. Likewise there are supposed to be LEDs on the buds themselves, but I never saw any. I suspect this may be a website typo.

To control playback and volume you touch the buds. It's not a tap, it's a touch – so no, they don't work if your hands are wet or in gloves, or if your ears are covered by a skullcap, scarf or snood. And when it comes to cycling, this touch-not-tap limitation is rather annoying.

A double touch will pause, a single touch to the right or left will turn the volume up or down and a long press on the left or right will skip the track forwards or back, and it's similar to control phone calls.

The app tells you each bud's charge level, lets you set the volume, choose a preset equaliser setting and also to set an 'Adaptive EQ' – this takes you through a multi-frequency hearing test to determine how well your ears respond. This was better than a gimmick, and I found it did make audio clearer. For me and my 51-year-old ears, that meant a subtle boost to treble and bass. You can also set your own EQ parameters.

The app lets you turn off the touch controls and leave it to your phone's playback and volume buttons. This is handy if – like my wife – your hair is long enough that you're constantly and subconsciously putting it behind your ears.

You can pair the buds to two devices at once. I paired them to a laptop for a work Microsoft Teams call that worked well enough – the voice wasn't quite as rich as expected, but perfectly usable.

Turning the buds up or down is gradual, so to go from full to half takes seven taps, sorry, touches, on the left earpiece – there are 15 steps in total up or down.

The fact the buds are an open design means you still get the usual wind noise at speed – I couldn't tell any difference with the buds removed or worn.

You don't need to turn the audio up too loud to hear it clearly and you can still hear vehicles behind you, assuming you aren't going so fast as to render that impossible. The buds' design meant I was never concerned for their security, and they were easy enough to put on and take off, even when I was wearing a helmet and cycling glasses.

As mentioned, carrying out the Adaptive EQ training improves clarity, but for on-bike use I preferred the 'Classical' EQ to boost the treble. You may prefer to boost treble even further using the manual mode, though all of us will be slightly different on what works with your hearing and to counter wind noise.

Using them to take a phone call worked well enough around a quiet house or office, but these aren't £300 devices with multiple smart noise reduction – so your caller will hear any background noise if it's present. On the bike wind noise is considerable to callers. SoundPEATS barely mentions phone calls in its manual, though, so it's clearly not a priority function.

Value

As with any consumer tech, comparisons abound: they are much cheaper than the £200 Oladance Open Ear phones that Josh found excellent. As with the SoundPEATS these are a genuinely separate left-right design so they won't interfere with your helmet or headset.

This isn't the case with the Shokz Openrun Pro Headphones, which have a band around the back of your head linking the two phones, but Steve still found them light, comfortable and with a great sound quality.

The nearest comparison is the £83 OneOdio Openrock S earbuds that Dave liked so much.

Conclusion

I enjoyed using the SoundPEATS GoFree 2 headphones, when I was cycling, travelling and around the house. They won't replace my noise-cancelling in-ear buds for plane/train travel where I really do want to block out noise. The touch-not-tap controls are a design choice that limits their usability in colder weather, but it's not a biggie. If you keep the case charged then the on-off issue is mostly a moot point, though sometimes they still didn't power off, and mostly they behaved when swapping between phones. Critically, the ease of wearing them and their comfort is high – and for £76 they're a very decent choice for listening to music or podcasts while still being able to hear your surroundings.

Verdict

Very good option for listening without restricting wider awareness – with some minor drawbacks