Anker Soundcore Spirit Pro review

Great review…I hate how those controls look horrible and hard to press exactly the right button just by grabbing it. They really need to make the plus and minus buttons raised or have the central play button raised higher than the other two

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Excellent review @SZak2015 , thanks for sharing :thumbsup:

I agree with others, not feeling the love for the new button design, either volume or the play button needs raised to help you distinguish them quicker…

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great review! good job! :blush:

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@AnkerOfficial Yes, serious headscratcher on 5.0 drop to 4.2. 5.0 offers longer range and less power consumption. It should have been a no brainer to put 5.0 in new devices. There are also other advantages to 5.0.

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About that… On my original Soundbuds slim, I had the same issue. Fed up with it, I heated up my soldering iron and pressed a nice circle-shaped “divit” into the volume up button- Now I can feel the buttons with ease. Still wouldn’t recommend doing that, though.

Hey @AnkerOfficial, feel free to use my soldering iron technique. It works great.

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I already delivered your feedback to our product manager, we will optimize the feature in the future generation.:innocent:

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Great review. Mine is going to arrive in a few days. Can’t wait to try :slight_smile:

Excellent review! Thanks for posting.

Addendum

After testing some more and playing a few games and really paying attention to the Bluetooth delay factor, sorry to say that I have found the Bluetooth audio delay to be abysmal for the Spirit Pro.

Here are the approximate delay times (on iOS, using an iPad mini 4 and iPhone 5s; the elapsed time when a key is pressed on the virtual keyboard until when the sound is heard) for all of the wireless Bluetooth headphones I have:

Anker Soundbuds Slim +: ~.5 second
Anker Soundcore Spirit X: ~.25 second (negligible)
Anker Soundcore Spirit Pro: ~1.5 seconds (!)

If you’ll just be listening to music with the Spirit Pro, they are fine. If you’ll be playing games or videos where audio sync is important, maybe look elsewhere.

Note that I tried multiple times to delete the pairing to all devices, reset Bluetooth on the headphones (connect to charger, press and hold “+” together with “>”) to get the delay to be tolerable but nothing I did would diminish the delay.

Just telling it like it is…no sugar coating.

Have you considered the additional delay may be due to the audio codec in use? I have confirmed that, in addition to Aptx, and fallback SBC, the Spirit Pro is also compatible with AAC— which I believe Apple devices use by default. This codec is also notorious for high latency with Bluetooth audio. Your tests should be repeated with SBC for Apple devices, which presumably the cheaper headsets are using. Ideally though, the comparison tests should be run with something Aptx compatible, IE. Android or other Qualcomm based device. That is, after all, one of the big feature bumps!!

Great review and photos @SZak2015 :grin:

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Thanks for this informative review!

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For my own use personally, I’m not actually feeling the button shape or height itself to find it but rather the order which helps me locate the correct button. As long as I find the topmost button (which is +) on the control pod, locating the others in the button row (> -) is not an issue.

Does these pauses the music when you put them together on their magnets? I’m looking to buy a pair !!

Great review!!!

Sorry to say that they do not pause the music (or anything else for that matter) when they are stuck together magnetically.

@AnkerSupport @AnkerOfficial I just received my Spirit Pro. I have been using the Spirit for a while, when I saw it available in Amazon I immediately ordered it expecting it to be a better version also wanted the AptX support which I have been missing. But I just found out that I cannot multi pair it with my phone and my laptop. I usually listen to music on my phone, and whenever I have an incoming skype or other call for work purposes, I just turn off the music but pick up the call. In the spirit it works seamlessly with multipoint pairing. This does not seem to support multipoint? If that’s the case, can you confirm so that I can return this.

You could contact our customer support team to confirm this.
Send email to support@anker.com

In order to pair two devices you need to have bluetooth 5.0, which the pros do not have which is why it can only pair to one device at a time

I bought the pros under the assumption that they had 5.0, seeing as the non-pro models have it. I got them today, and looking at the amazon listing and the box, I noticed they don’t state the Bluetooth version anywhere on either, I only found it stated in the User Manual. But if you look at the Amazon pages for the other Spirit earbuds, and the older earbuds like the Slim, they all clearly state it in the title.

That is a bit deceptive by Anker.