Aukey EP-T25 Wireless Earbuds
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RC009
How I review: (See Previous Reviews)
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YouTube: regancipher
Model: Aukey EP-T25
Price: £17.84 (Usually £25.49)
Vendor: Amazon UK
Review Reference: RC009
Manufacturer Specification:
1 x Pair Wireless Earbuds
1 x Type-C USB Battery charging case
1 x Type-C USB charging cable
1 x User manual, quick guide, warranty card
Real Life Experience
Welcome to the Regancipher review of the Aukey EP-T25.
In the UK we have have a little bit of a blind-spot for brands we can recall quickly. Take your pick of the plethora of cognitive biases at play here, but I have my own name for it - 'ankering'. (see what I did there?)
Aukey doesn't quite have the same allure as Anker over here, but the branding - AU (the chemical symbol for Gold) and key is nicely presented in their literature, and a 'cornerstone of pride' in Chinese. I often read quotes like 'The MPOW M30 were good, so the M12 or whatever should also be good as well', and without doing your research - typically beyond that of a regular consumer, why would you be bothered about OEM and ODM? Well, it means you can't rely on a brand name, that's why.
When you review Aukey's patents and core business areas, they are essentially investing all their R&D in smart home and charging. So if you buy a set of Aukey earbuds - well, they probably aren't actually made by Aukey. Here at head-fi most of us know that, but for those visiting from Reddit, HUKD or other areas I discuss and review different brands and products, it's worthy of a mention, and one that usually elicits a partisan response, sadly.
The EP-T21 are quite obviously the QCY T5 (first edition), but finding whether the EP-T25 are definitely OEM and their origin was tricky. I haven't managed it to date.
The Unboxing - 7/10
Once inside the earthy, minimalist container with a nice stencil of the design, it's the usual fare - buds, tips, cable, manual.
Similar to their other models, although this wasn't quite as impressive as the more expensive EP-N5, Aukey's branding has a mystique about it. Their marketing appears to be aimed at those who value sustainability, although given the plastic used to make the buds, I'm not sure whether that's wise or not. Whether it is or not is not for debate here - it's the angle they've gone with, and who am I to judge...all I care about is whether these sound good or not!
As per my previous Aukey reviews, the symbolic matrix style card is included again. 'The Lock to the Golden Key' is something I actually enjoy about Aukey's TWS products!!
Inside the box, typically, the USB charging cable and tips are located in a section below the case. It features 3 sets of tips, which are different from most by deploying a red-inner-colour scheme.
There is a manual and a quick start guide but in all honesty you won't need it, these are very straightforward to set up. The buds have blue stickers on the battery points - more on this later - but make sure you remove and charge before use.
The Case - 7/10
The Aukey case is nothing special to look at, but it's nice and compact - pill shaped in the same way the Taotronics SL 94 and some others are, albeit a shade smaller. The brand is embossed into the front.
The buds rest inside on the top, so no issues getting them in and out of the case. The magnet is nice and secure, and the beveled out spaces in the lid mean no chance the buds will rattle around and lose charge. The case also has four lights on the front, denoting how many extra charges the case can give the buds - very handy.
In between the L and R, denoting which earbud goes where, for those of you who can't tell your left from your right, is a red light, which turns blue after a few seconds of being open.
The case is nothing to write home about really, but it is nice and compact and well finished inside and out. It gives an extra 4 charges, taking the total charge up to 25 hours - below most earbuds, but acceptable.
The Ergonomics - 9/10
One thing Aukey never fail to get right is the fit. Once again these are ergonomically excellent. The stem lines along the jaw beautifully and like the branding, is understated. Once again, wearing Aukey earbuds is no hassle at all. The slightly bulbous design is not uncomfortable, far less obtrusive than the APP or APP-inspired-style buds, and provide decent passive noise isolation, although the finish on the mic holes is bad close up.
Despite being stem shaped, they are about the size of the Tronsmart Onyx Free - much shorter than the pictured Boltune BT-BH024, but have a nice, flat touch area to ensure good controls.
Above, pictured with the Tronsmart Apollo Bold and Edifier NB2.
Other than that, there's not much to say other than they're typical stem-based in-ear design. The flat edges mean touch controls are at least intuitive, there is a hole on the top, I assume as an ambient MEMS mic chamber, and a hole inside for pressure relief. The buds do have battery connectors on the inside, which means not advised for allergy sufferers. The IPX5 rating makes them acceptable for workouts, and the flat edge aids the touch control.
Sound Quality - 6/10 (for the price paid), 5/10 (raw score)
It is always a difficult balance reviewing raw sound quality against intermediate sound quality (i.e. sound quality against price).
Subjective tests were OK. I wasn't expecting much after the EP-N5. Actually, they were marginally better. The mids are chaotic and the low end is massively over-emphasized.
I have seen some reviews saying they don't support SBC. They actually default to SBC on Windows, because they don't support the newest iteration of AAC, instead being backwardly compatible with MPEG-2 with a reduced bitpool down from around 49-51 to 37, and whilst this probably means very little to most, it's another sign Aukey have tried to cut corners a little here, so you will get SBC on some devices, but the sound will be bad, and is not much better on AAC. No aptX support - no Qualcomm chip.
The chipset is not named, but I suspect it is one of the early BES chips. They were, let's say, market testers. This was before the Chinese had managed to recreate Qualcomm-ish quality. These early chips found balancing latency, connectivity and audio delivery quite tricky, so unsurprisingly the sound is really quite poor, the latency bad, and the mic worse.
Objective tests showed a drop of at 16.1KHz. These are the total opposite to the EP-N5 which are flat and unresponsive - these have some strange peaks around the low mids and this would explain the congestion on bassy tracks.
The spectral flatness is, well, lets just say all over the shop. These are £18 earbuds so it is hard to get too narky - if you want refined sound, you're asking a lot at this price, but these just don't cut it, and with many others now on the market at a similar price, passable sound is the very least consumers should expect. The sound stage is really narrow, and compared to buds like the Tronsmart Spunky Beats and Edifier X3, even the Alien Secret QCC010, they sound very compressed and don't respond well to EQ either.
Call Quality - Indoors - 4/10, Outdoors - 2/10
Initially, these were the worst sounding earbuds I have ever tested. I thought the Nillkin TW004 were bad, these were so bad I actually thought they may be faulty. The volume waned in and out throughout various recordings and calls with my voice impossible to decode.
This seems strange as the mic arrays are well-placed, but these MEMS mic systems seem to be a disaster in every set I've tested.
After multiple resets, they ended up settling down, but they don't isolate anything - all background noise is picked up. And I've adjusted the score because there are some far worse as I've since discovered!
Connectivity, Controls and Other Features - 5.5/10
As well as getting the booby prize for calls, these also struggle with connectivity. Not much worse than the rest, but they cut off at around 7-8m, or at least start to struggle.
Controls are, well, better than some. Nice flat, finger sized area to touch that is responsive and intuitive. Double tapping answers calls (you don't wanna do that), triple tapping activates SIRI. You can play and pause, and skip tracks, but no volume. Skipping tracks can lag occasionally.
The earbuds can, at times, remain connected to your device even when you put them back in the case, so you have to manually find them and disconnect them. The blue stickers that cover the battery connections - might want to keep those handy! This is obviously an annoyance and not uncommon, but no amount of resets managed to prevent it from reoccuring.
Battery - 6.5/10
Battery Life is pretty good - 5 hours, 25 hours total, and 1 hour charge is great - they get to around 90%, and a bit longer for full charge. They support USB-C charging, which at the time wasn't the de facto, but I have noticed the battery drain has come on very quickly. Beware! May be due to the fact they are connecting all the time!! Otherwise they would have scored much higher.
Final Comments
It's another average set of earbuds from Aukey. For £18 you can do worse, but they are still on the market in 2021 and we now have far better options often for less money.
The problem areas: the microphones, the strange charging issue, the defaulting to SBC and the poor connectivity are, even at this price point, not really acceptable.
Unfortunately, I have to give Aukey another poor rating, which I hate doing because their earbuds always look so nice, but practicality has to take precedence - these just don't pass the test.
Aukey bombarded me with emails after seeing my reviews claiming they are a poor ($1m) family business and rely on Amazon's 5-star reviews, asking me to change my reviews here and on Amazon in exchange for a $45 gift voucher. I replied politely declining. So they bombarded me relentlessly for 3 months until I reported them to Amazon, twice. Not good practice Aukey!
Price Weighted Score: 59%
Raw Score: 50%
2022 Score: 42%
How I review: (See Previous Reviews)
Instagram: regancipher
YouTube: regancipher
Model: Aukey EP-T25
Price: £17.84 (Usually £25.49)
Vendor: Amazon UK
Review Reference: RC009
Manufacturer Specification:
- Brand: Aukey
- Model: EP-T25
- Driver: 4mm Dynamic Drivers
- Chipset: Not Known
- Impedence: 16Ω
- Frequency Response Range: 20-20000Hz
- Mic: 2, MEMS
- ANC: No
- Codecs: AAC, SBC
- Earbud Weight: 3.5g
- Full Charge Time: 90 minutes
- Quick Charge: No
- Wireless Charging: No
- Input: 5V 500mA
- Single Use Playtime: Up to 5 hours
- Playtime with Charge Case: Up to 25 hours
- App Support: Not currently
- Bluetooth Range: 10m advertised
- Bluetooth: Bluetooth® 5.0
- Bluetooth Protocols: HSP/ HFP/ A2DP/ AVRCP
- Water Resistance: IPX5
1 x Pair Wireless Earbuds
1 x Type-C USB Battery charging case
1 x Type-C USB charging cable
1 x User manual, quick guide, warranty card
Real Life Experience
Welcome to the Regancipher review of the Aukey EP-T25.
In the UK we have have a little bit of a blind-spot for brands we can recall quickly. Take your pick of the plethora of cognitive biases at play here, but I have my own name for it - 'ankering'. (see what I did there?)
Aukey doesn't quite have the same allure as Anker over here, but the branding - AU (the chemical symbol for Gold) and key is nicely presented in their literature, and a 'cornerstone of pride' in Chinese. I often read quotes like 'The MPOW M30 were good, so the M12 or whatever should also be good as well', and without doing your research - typically beyond that of a regular consumer, why would you be bothered about OEM and ODM? Well, it means you can't rely on a brand name, that's why.
When you review Aukey's patents and core business areas, they are essentially investing all their R&D in smart home and charging. So if you buy a set of Aukey earbuds - well, they probably aren't actually made by Aukey. Here at head-fi most of us know that, but for those visiting from Reddit, HUKD or other areas I discuss and review different brands and products, it's worthy of a mention, and one that usually elicits a partisan response, sadly.
The EP-T21 are quite obviously the QCY T5 (first edition), but finding whether the EP-T25 are definitely OEM and their origin was tricky. I haven't managed it to date.
The Unboxing - 7/10
Once inside the earthy, minimalist container with a nice stencil of the design, it's the usual fare - buds, tips, cable, manual.
Similar to their other models, although this wasn't quite as impressive as the more expensive EP-N5, Aukey's branding has a mystique about it. Their marketing appears to be aimed at those who value sustainability, although given the plastic used to make the buds, I'm not sure whether that's wise or not. Whether it is or not is not for debate here - it's the angle they've gone with, and who am I to judge...all I care about is whether these sound good or not!
As per my previous Aukey reviews, the symbolic matrix style card is included again. 'The Lock to the Golden Key' is something I actually enjoy about Aukey's TWS products!!
Inside the box, typically, the USB charging cable and tips are located in a section below the case. It features 3 sets of tips, which are different from most by deploying a red-inner-colour scheme.
There is a manual and a quick start guide but in all honesty you won't need it, these are very straightforward to set up. The buds have blue stickers on the battery points - more on this later - but make sure you remove and charge before use.
The Case - 7/10
The Aukey case is nothing special to look at, but it's nice and compact - pill shaped in the same way the Taotronics SL 94 and some others are, albeit a shade smaller. The brand is embossed into the front.
The buds rest inside on the top, so no issues getting them in and out of the case. The magnet is nice and secure, and the beveled out spaces in the lid mean no chance the buds will rattle around and lose charge. The case also has four lights on the front, denoting how many extra charges the case can give the buds - very handy.
In between the L and R, denoting which earbud goes where, for those of you who can't tell your left from your right, is a red light, which turns blue after a few seconds of being open.
The case is nothing to write home about really, but it is nice and compact and well finished inside and out. It gives an extra 4 charges, taking the total charge up to 25 hours - below most earbuds, but acceptable.
The Ergonomics - 9/10
One thing Aukey never fail to get right is the fit. Once again these are ergonomically excellent. The stem lines along the jaw beautifully and like the branding, is understated. Once again, wearing Aukey earbuds is no hassle at all. The slightly bulbous design is not uncomfortable, far less obtrusive than the APP or APP-inspired-style buds, and provide decent passive noise isolation, although the finish on the mic holes is bad close up.
Despite being stem shaped, they are about the size of the Tronsmart Onyx Free - much shorter than the pictured Boltune BT-BH024, but have a nice, flat touch area to ensure good controls.
Above, pictured with the Tronsmart Apollo Bold and Edifier NB2.
Other than that, there's not much to say other than they're typical stem-based in-ear design. The flat edges mean touch controls are at least intuitive, there is a hole on the top, I assume as an ambient MEMS mic chamber, and a hole inside for pressure relief. The buds do have battery connectors on the inside, which means not advised for allergy sufferers. The IPX5 rating makes them acceptable for workouts, and the flat edge aids the touch control.
Sound Quality - 6/10 (for the price paid), 5/10 (raw score)
It is always a difficult balance reviewing raw sound quality against intermediate sound quality (i.e. sound quality against price).
Subjective tests were OK. I wasn't expecting much after the EP-N5. Actually, they were marginally better. The mids are chaotic and the low end is massively over-emphasized.
I have seen some reviews saying they don't support SBC. They actually default to SBC on Windows, because they don't support the newest iteration of AAC, instead being backwardly compatible with MPEG-2 with a reduced bitpool down from around 49-51 to 37, and whilst this probably means very little to most, it's another sign Aukey have tried to cut corners a little here, so you will get SBC on some devices, but the sound will be bad, and is not much better on AAC. No aptX support - no Qualcomm chip.
The chipset is not named, but I suspect it is one of the early BES chips. They were, let's say, market testers. This was before the Chinese had managed to recreate Qualcomm-ish quality. These early chips found balancing latency, connectivity and audio delivery quite tricky, so unsurprisingly the sound is really quite poor, the latency bad, and the mic worse.
Objective tests showed a drop of at 16.1KHz. These are the total opposite to the EP-N5 which are flat and unresponsive - these have some strange peaks around the low mids and this would explain the congestion on bassy tracks.
The spectral flatness is, well, lets just say all over the shop. These are £18 earbuds so it is hard to get too narky - if you want refined sound, you're asking a lot at this price, but these just don't cut it, and with many others now on the market at a similar price, passable sound is the very least consumers should expect. The sound stage is really narrow, and compared to buds like the Tronsmart Spunky Beats and Edifier X3, even the Alien Secret QCC010, they sound very compressed and don't respond well to EQ either.
Call Quality - Indoors - 4/10, Outdoors - 2/10
Initially, these were the worst sounding earbuds I have ever tested. I thought the Nillkin TW004 were bad, these were so bad I actually thought they may be faulty. The volume waned in and out throughout various recordings and calls with my voice impossible to decode.
This seems strange as the mic arrays are well-placed, but these MEMS mic systems seem to be a disaster in every set I've tested.
After multiple resets, they ended up settling down, but they don't isolate anything - all background noise is picked up. And I've adjusted the score because there are some far worse as I've since discovered!
Connectivity, Controls and Other Features - 5.5/10
As well as getting the booby prize for calls, these also struggle with connectivity. Not much worse than the rest, but they cut off at around 7-8m, or at least start to struggle.
Controls are, well, better than some. Nice flat, finger sized area to touch that is responsive and intuitive. Double tapping answers calls (you don't wanna do that), triple tapping activates SIRI. You can play and pause, and skip tracks, but no volume. Skipping tracks can lag occasionally.
The earbuds can, at times, remain connected to your device even when you put them back in the case, so you have to manually find them and disconnect them. The blue stickers that cover the battery connections - might want to keep those handy! This is obviously an annoyance and not uncommon, but no amount of resets managed to prevent it from reoccuring.
Battery - 6.5/10
Battery Life is pretty good - 5 hours, 25 hours total, and 1 hour charge is great - they get to around 90%, and a bit longer for full charge. They support USB-C charging, which at the time wasn't the de facto, but I have noticed the battery drain has come on very quickly. Beware! May be due to the fact they are connecting all the time!! Otherwise they would have scored much higher.
Final Comments
It's another average set of earbuds from Aukey. For £18 you can do worse, but they are still on the market in 2021 and we now have far better options often for less money.
The problem areas: the microphones, the strange charging issue, the defaulting to SBC and the poor connectivity are, even at this price point, not really acceptable.
Unfortunately, I have to give Aukey another poor rating, which I hate doing because their earbuds always look so nice, but practicality has to take precedence - these just don't pass the test.
Aukey bombarded me with emails after seeing my reviews claiming they are a poor ($1m) family business and rely on Amazon's 5-star reviews, asking me to change my reviews here and on Amazon in exchange for a $45 gift voucher. I replied politely declining. So they bombarded me relentlessly for 3 months until I reported them to Amazon, twice. Not good practice Aukey!
Price Weighted Score: 59%
Raw Score: 50%
2022 Score: 42%
regancipher
Yeah I've read a few complaining about the fit. Aukey just fit really nicely for me every time. No smiling issues!
I have reset them multiple times and they sorted themselves out, the mic became synchronised and it didn't sound terrible (but certainly not good) as soon as any kind of background noise was introduced.
I have reset them multiple times and they sorted themselves out, the mic became synchronised and it didn't sound terrible (but certainly not good) as soon as any kind of background noise was introduced.
