Soundpeats T3 Review: GREAT OPTION under $40!!

If you remember my Soundpeats Mini Pro review, I thought they were pretty good, but the price was a little too high. Well, the Soundpeats T3 actually sounds almost quite as good, but it’s more affordable and I think I can recommend this much easier.

So, let’s talk design. These come in a black, plastic case that’s, unfortunately, still quite prone to these scuffs and scratches. I haven’t even dropped these yet, these are just scuffs from being rubbed against stuff in my bag. The good part here, though, is that the case is relatively resilient to skin oils from your fingers and such, so yeah. There’s a charging LED that also serves as a case battery indicator, although it’s quite vague. A green light means there’s 50-99% battery, a yellow light is 10% to 49% and a red light means the case has under 10% battery.

On the side of the case, you get an off-centered USB-C charging port. While I’m very thankful for the inclusion of USB-C, this off-centre placement kinda drives me nuts. But I guess it’s a small price to pay.

As for the earbuds, they’re the standard stemmed design, which is fine. They sit securely enough in the ear for me with the medium sized tips, so yeah.

Moving onto the app, it’s the same problem I encountered with the Soundpeats Mini Pro. As an add-on, I was informed by a viewer that the app has been updated to support the Mini Pro, which is great! But the app doesn’t support the T3. I’m honestly at a loss for words. Would it really be so hard to update the app to support all the earbud models? Anyway, whatever. No touch control customisation here.

And for touch controls, they’re decent. You get single taps controlling the volume, left side lowers and right side raises the volume. Double tap on either side for play/pause and a triple tap on either side pulls up your device’s voice assistant. A long press and hold on the left toggles ANC, passthrough or off while a long press on the right skips tracks forwards. Again, there’s that same problem where you can’t skip tracks backwards. I think Soundpeats is probably just leaving out that control entirely, which, well, I’m not fond of. The company could have done triple taps on either side for track skipping back and forth, and a long press on the right could be voice assistant. The train of thought here is just really questionable.

You get ANC with these and the performance is okay. With ANC on and music playing, it did remove an average amount of noise, although higher pitched stuff still comes through. Train rumbles and commute sounds are also somewhat dampened too, although you’ll still hear people talking if they’re close to you. That being said, Soundpeats does say these only cancel out to 24dB of sound, which is definitely lower than other earbuds advertising 45dB and such, so you should temper your expectations here.

These run on Bluetooth 5.2, which is great, and personally, I feel all earbuds released in 2022 should be running on 5.2 at this point. There’s only SBC and AAC support here though, but that’s to be expected since it’s cheaper than the Mini Pro which supports aptX.

As for battery life, Soundpeats claims around 5.5 hours in the earbuds and an extra two charges in the case for around 17 hours. Quite accurate I’d say, I did get close to 4.5 hours in the earbuds with ANC on. That’s not great, but it’s around the average battery life I’d expect.

There’s IPX4 water resistance, which means it’ll hold up fine to sweat and the likes if you’re planning on bringing them out for exercise.

Microphone quality is okay, my voice was typically clear, although there wasn’t much background noise suppression when I took calls outdoors. Indoors in a quiet environment though, they work fine.

As for sound quality, what you get here really depends on how loud you listen to your music. Personally, I’m always at around the 30% marker, maybe 40-50% if the earbuds are really soft. With these, I’m around 20%. They’re decently loud for me, and at 20% volume, they actually sound great. But once you get up to around 50% volume, they start to distort quite significantly, especially in the highs.

So if you’re used to listening at higher volumes, well, first off, protect your ears please, secondly, these might not be for you. But let’s talk about how they sound at a lower volume.

The bass is present, for sure, but it’s not overwhelming and boomy. There’s a slight emphasis here, but it’s quite well-controlled and you do get that impact.

As for the mids, I’d say it’s okay. The lower mids are pretty good, as are the upper mids with vocals being a bit forward than usual in the mix. Unfortunately, you do lose detail when it comes to instruments, and even in lower pitched vocals. Voices in that range just don’t feel quite as… full.

Treble is decent, at lower volumes. They’re not particularly detailed, again, but you get a tiny bit of sparkle, which is good. Of course, for me, I’d have liked a bit more, but well, how much can you expect out of $40 earbuds right?

The one good part of these earbuds, for me, is that the imaging is actually quite decent. You get a good sense of separation and the stereo imaging is not too bad. Of course, don’t expect pinpoint accuracy or a really wide soundstage, but for the price, I’m pleasantly surprised.

I couldn’t quite recommend the Mini Pro at US$80, but these at US$40, I’d say they’re a very good option if you’re looking for something under 50 bucks.