OK, so here is my second attempt at finding budget wireless headphones that can replace the Apple AirPods that I have not managed to purchase yet. My quest started with the quite dreadful Philips ActionFit SHQ6500 wireless earbuds which ticked no boxes and in fact couldn’t even find the boxes they were so bad.

The VERVE LOOP+ set come in at £59.99, but I managed to purchased them for £54.99 from a luxury audio boutique I know… called Argos. I paid my money, queued up with a selection of tracksuited people and then waited a very long time for one of the guardians of the goods to find my product and take my receipt.

They do not scream quality in any way because they are very light and formed from generic plastic with the buttons feeling especially toy-like. The flat cable is of course a benefit and something about the Motorola logos on each ear piece and the colouring lifts the aesthetics up enough to make them feel ‘good enough’ to carry with you and stick them in your ears.

So, my first task was to spend some time fiddling with the ear buds attachments to ensure the best possible fit for my ears and to then fiddle with the skeletal orange fixtures which are designed to ensure they never fall out of your ears. After some time I realised that the orange fixtures did the opposite for me and actually stopped them from staying in my ears 100% of the time. However, these are light earphones and to date, 3 days in, they have not come out once. This means that they look like normal earphones and they are also extremely comfortable, to the point that I forget they are in after a few minutes.

Connectivity-wise they have also not faltered and have also worked 100% of the time. When they are in range (up to 45 metres apparently) they connect immediately and at no point has the iPhone struggled to discover them. It’s a good start meaning that 2 common problems have already been dispelled.

The buttons are quite clever; you get + and – volume buttons plus one more in the middle. Press the middle button to play/pause the audio or to answer/end calls. Double-press the button to jump to the next track and triple-press for the previous track. Press the + and – buttons at the same time to change EQ settings and do the same in a call to mute yourself. You can also use the same button combination to reject an incoming call and pressing and holding both buttons lets you issue a voice command (Android only I believe).

There are no special tricks like those found in the AirPods, but you get what you need for general music and podcast playback with the ability to make and receive calls as you would want. It all works well and even the battery life has been impressive, but there is one area where wireless earphones often fail and that is audio quality.

I am pleased to report that the audio quality is very impressive in the VERVE LOOP+ earphones and I would go as far as to say that they offer a deeper and richer sound than Apple’s EarPods. I spent a lot of time swapping between the two to test them with different styles of music and the VERVE LOOP+ won every single time. It’s been a bit of a shock actually and you need to spend time making sure that they fit correctly, but if you do so you should be happy with the result.

So, great battery life, comfortable, they stay in my ears, they look OK and the sound quality is excellent. I will likely be holding off on the AirPods for a while and doing something more useful with the £105 I just saved.

Categories: Music, Product Reviews