1MORE Dual Driver ANC Pro Review: Awesome Earphones, IF You’re Okay With Neckbands

I’ll be brutally honest, I hate neckband-design earphones. They’ve always looked odd to me, and I could never fathom why someone would want to wear something constantly chafing at their neck. The 1MORE Dual Driver ANC Pro, however, has changed my mind enough that I might be willing to consider neckband earphones under certain conditions.

Let’s talk about the design first. You get a silicon neckband that houses the battery, charging port and more. Because of the neckband, the earbuds are able to be kept to a more reasonable size. The controls are all on the band too, with buttons for power, volume up and down, play/pause, ANC and wind noise.

That’s right, 1MORE is trying to solve the wind noise issue with ANC earphones, and their implementation actually does a pretty good job. It does have a downside of reducing the effectiveness of the ANC though, but overall, I’d say the earphones benefit from the wind noise reduction feature.

There are two levels of ANC on the earphones in addition to the wind noise reduction and they can be toggled through with the ANC button on the neckband or via the 1MORE Music app. Personally, I’d stick with the “Strong” setting, but I can see the “Mild” setting coming in handy when exercising with these since you need to pay attention to your surroundings.

Exercise is probably another driving factor for people to purchase neckband earphones. You won’t want to drop and lose your earbuds when running outdoors, and that concern is moot with these. The neckband is also incredibly smooth with no seams at all to rub against your skin when wearing.

There’s also IPX5 water resistance so no worries about sweat or a light drizzle causing damage to the earphones. Adding on to that, it’s just 44g, so it’s light enough that the wearer could just forget about them once worn.

The earbuds also have magnets at the rear to keep the left and right earbuds attached when not worn. All in all, I commend 1MORE on their thought process when designing the Dual Driver ANC Pro earphones. There are plenty of small QOL features that you wouldn’t even think about or miss until they’re gone, but it makes for an overall great experience.

But let’s move on to sound. I was honestly very impressed with the first 1MORE product I tried, the EHD9001TA. The Dual Driver ANC Pro has the same dual-driver design, with a 13.6mm dynamic driver and 1MORE’s balanced armature driver.

As a result, you get a pretty balanced sound. The bass is present, but laidback enough to stand up to a good amount of tweaking with the EQ function. The mids are clear and you get a good sense of each instrument, while the highs do get a little more emphasised if the ANC is turned off.

What’s more, the Dual Driver ANC Pro supports Sony’s LDAC codec, which is excellent. The downside? With LDAC and ANC turned off, you get approximately 7 hours of playback. It’s not the worst, but it’s not great either. But if you turn off LDAC and ANC, you get a more respectable 20 hours in total with AAC, or 17 hours with SBC.

The earphones run on a Bluetooth 5.0 connection, and I didn’t experience any disconnections or stutters even when walking away from the connected phone. There’s very little latency as well, so users won’t experience audio sync issues when watching movies or shows. Playing games might cause some issues though, but these earphones have the ability to be connected via a wired connection to the USB-C charging port on the left side of the neckband.

Overall, it’s a pair of great-sounding earphones. For the general consumer, this will play nicely with most mainstream genres, and even if it doesn’t, the earphones hold up well to EQ adjustments.

So who should get it? Anybody who doesn’t mind neckband designs should definitely consider this, since it sounds excellent and it’s priced quite competitively. People looking to exercise with their wireless earphones should also give this a go. But if you don’t like how the neckband design looks, this will definitely be a tough sell.

For more information about the 1MORE Dual Driver ANC Pro (S$249) or to support us, you can get it on Amazon here.