Thank you 1MORE for sending us this product to review!

UPDATE: This pair's right channel went quiet, just like the ComfoBuds Z (and eventually, PistonBuds Pro).  I can't recommend these until this issue is addressed.

The EVO is 1MORE's latest set of Bluetooth earbuds, and is their new flagship wireless product. Often when a company touts a new product as their flagship, they intend to put their best foot forward. And being the audiophile that I am, I get pretty excited for stuff like this. I know, I'm easy to please - and yet, this EVO is likely to satisfy many (most?) ardent audiophiles - I know I'm quite pleased!

First impressions, even when opening the box, are that a premium product is inside. It has a textured finish, with the Hi-Res Audio and LDAC certifications prominently displayed. When you open the box, it shows design art and displays Luca Bignardi's signature prominently. (Luca is a four-time Grammy award winning sound engineer that 1MORE is partnered with.) You also see the earbud case itself, and I was immediately impressed with the obvious premium finish as soon as I picked it up. The earbuds themselves also exude quality, with the shiny ceramic touch surface, surrounded by a brass trim finish. They are also fairly small though weighty, and feel great in my fairly large ears. The eartips have an oval shape, which naturally matches the ear opening, and while a unique shape as far as tips go, feels great and does a good job of creating a nice seal. It's also very comfortable.

I spend a lot of time testing these, and they do a whole lot right. I've already mentioned that they look great and are comfortable, so I guess it's time to attack the biggest reason we sometimes yearn for flagship audio products like this one: how they sound. 1MORE has promised that these EVOs will sound just as good as quality wired earbuds - a target that's not easy to reach, because Bluetooth is a low-bandwidth protocol optimized for lower power and low energy moreso than perfect lossless audio.

And yet, since Apple first decided to be 'brave' and stop including a 3.5mm headphone jack, music lovers everywhere have had to decide what is more important to them: audio quality or convenience.

Wired headphones are purely analog devices - the electrical equivalent to analog sound waves travels through the wires, and directly excites the drivers on the headphone. This is then converted, as directly as possible, to sound waves; the limit in fidelity then becomes the electromechanical interface between the electrical impulses and your ear, a.k.a. the driver(s). While no perfect sound reproduction device exists as all designs have tradeoffs, the dynamic, or 'normal' speaker is very well understood. Another, newer technology called a balanced armature (BA) is an earbud-only technology that allows for a much higher resolution result, but doesn't always offer the 'slam' of a dynamic driver. The reason that these, and many other earphones are now using multiple drivers is that you can take advantage of the strengths of both - in this case, the dynamic driver offers more exciting bass, and the BA driver handles the treble for what hopefully becomes the best of both worlds. 1MORE originally became famous by offering one of the early wired triple-driver designs at a price that normal listeners could afford.

So, armed with a pair of high-quality drivers, the next challenge to retaining audiophile-level sound is to deal with the communications medium. Since wired isn't always an option, in our current era we need to deal with the limitations of wireless connections. Unfortunately, Bluetooth doesn't have the bandwidth for (or support) a pure PCM transmission method, since it would require a lot of power and it's simply not available in the Bluetooth spec. So we have to work within the limitations of it. To do so, Bluetooth supports various codecs to compress the audio signal on the source device (in this case your phone, PC, etc.) to send it over the air via Bluetooth, to be decompressed in your earbud before you can hear it.

For those not aware, a codec is a COmpression and DECompression algorithm that turns the original analog audio into digital bits, then turns those bits back into the analog waveform. Lossy means that some data is lost, even if the fundamentals are there, while lossless is bit perfect; many audio codecs are lossy because of the otherwise necessary tradeoffs of size/bitrate, and needed processing power. These support the standard SBC audio codec, which is pretty much a baseline for most Bluetooth devices, AAC, and LDAC. When it comes to codecs, SBC is the baseline, AAC and AptX is improved, and LDAC is the best. All are lossy, but each one is progressively superior. Apple designed the AAC codec, so all of their products use those, and is the best codec available on Apple products; Android supports more, and many support the excellent LDAC that supports bitrates up to 990Kbps, as well as up to 32 bits per sample, and at a 96kHz sample rate. While the bitrate is just a bit short of lossless, it's still quite impressive and is considered as close to wired quality as currently possible; close enough that the Japanese Audio Society has certified LDAC with their Hi-Res Audio Wireless certification.

So with the 1MORE EVO having a solid driver configuration to reproduce high resolution content, and using the best Bluetooth codec currently available, most of the important pieces are in place for a great-sounding headset. However, they believe that many people have different preferences on what sounds good to them. Out of the box, they are tuned a bit thin - they sound quite good, but have a bit less bass than many would probably prefer. Anyone who knows me knows that I hate it when bass overpowers the rest of the frequency range, so trust me when I say it needs more bass!

In order to deal with these and more preference issues, they turned to Sonarworks' SoundID system. It's a really neat system that works well once you get a profile you like - but I found it really difficult to do so. It took me close to a dozen tries before I finally figured out how to use this system well; before I would get results that sounded really bad. Part of the problem with SoundID is that in order to tune it, you need to listen to one of a set of preselected music tracks that you likely have never heard before, and tune your entire audio experience with them. After figuring out how it works, I thought I would share some tips to help get the best result; once I did, I was extremely pleased with how it came out. Until I did, I hated SoundID and was this close to giving up on it entirely.

The way SoundID works is that it presents you with the same audio track with two different slightly altered tracks, where each one has a different EQ profile. You choose A, B, or No difference. Do not choose No difference unless you really can't tell - it seems to choose something in between the two rather than do nothing, so listen carefully!

To start with, I recommend knowing generally what you want. In other words, if you want to add a little bit of bass, know that - but don't just accept anything that adds more bass. If you hear something that has more, chose that the first time, but the next time it offers you bass and more bass, listen carefully - in my case, I had to choose the option with less between the two, otherwise it sounded way out of balance (for me). Do the same with treble, midrange, and so on. I found that the first choice boosted both bass and treble, so in order to get the balanced sound I wanted, I had to later choose an option that brought the treble down a bit - then I brought it up again a bit later while trying to get the balance just right. It asks you to compare sounds about ten or so times (I never actually counted) so it's really important to take the time to really listen, turn up the volume as needed, and take the time to get it just right - once I did, the results were spectacular. I was this close to writing the whole thing off until I stumbled on the excellent settings I am using now. When the process is complete, it uploads the SoundID profile directly to your earbuds, so it's always there even if you connect them to other devices.

Speaking of other devices, there is an experimental feature that is absolutely amazing - though it does get buggy once in a while, the hassle is worth it. What you can do is have your earbuds connected to more than one device - at the same time. Once audio playback stops on one device, you can begin it on the other without having to disconnect from the first! I absolutely love this feature. If you get a call while listening to something on your computer, you can answer it. If you want to play a game (that isn't latency sensitive) you can - and then deal with your phone once you're done. I use it for work Microsoft Teams calls - I connect my earbuds to my phone and my work PC, and switch between the two all day as needed. And with the eight hour battery life of the earbuds, I almost never have to worry about battery life, either. It's fantastic.

To enable the feature, you need to install the 1MORE MUSIC app from the Play Store (or perhaps the iOS equivalent; that's untested). You need to make sure you're on the latest firmware. Once your earbuds are connected to Bluetooth and you're in the app, touch the red 1MORE logo on the upper right. You should see a 'secret' menu - from there, tap on Experimental features, and enable dual-device mode. As I said, it can be a little quirky, but I found the tradeoff more than worth it.

Since I tested this with so many devices, pairing with them all probably seems like a hassle. And in one sense it is, but the EVOs seem to have a decent memory of about four to five devices, so switching was sometimes as easy as clicking 'connect' on your device of choice, and whatever your second connected device was would be switched over to this new one. (My phone usually kept priority in my testing.) In order to pair with a new device, you can do this one of two ways: either open the case (with the earbuds inside) and press the case's button three times quickly to go right to pairing mode and connect from the client, or disconnect the earbuds from all devices and then pair them to the new one. On some systems, when pairing I would be asked to confirm a pin number, but not always. The main thing is that once I figured out the quirks, it was relatively quick and easy.

One thing to note about the app: it likes to run all of the time, and by default it will show you a notification constantly if you let it. Thankfully, I am happy to report that 1MORE removed the Location permission requirement for these earbuds! I was thrilled beyond reason when the 1MORE app didn't ask me to access my GPS in order to manage my earbuds. Thank you 1MORE for listening to feedback and implementing this change as soon as they could!

I find that leaving the app running, while a minor nuisance, is more useful than the nuisance suggests. I can quickly turn on or off SoundID, enable or disable 'Smart Playback', or change the listening modes. It also reports on battery life in a really useful way, including not just each ear, but the case battery life as well. I'm using them nearly constantly, after all.

One thing to note is that on the 1MORE PistonBuds Pro I recently reviewed, I noted that those things were incredibly resilient to signal issues, like from my microwave for example. Unfortunately, these act more like a 'normal' Bluetooth earbud; if the microwave is running, you better get far away from it - because you're gonna get drops. That's just the way it is. I also noticed occasional drops while LDAC is enabled - some of the time. Sometimes it works great with no issues, and other times it acts up. I can't say I know the rhyme or reason on why that is. It's important to note that in the 1MORE MUSIC app, there is a setting called 'Bluetooth connection setup'; if you choose 'Priority on Stable Connection', it disables LDAC but keeps a stable connection that's resistant to the microwave just like the PistonBuds Pro are.