Hey everybody, I got a quick hitter for you today. We are looking at the Redmi Buds 5, the latest budget offering from Chinese tech giant Xiaomi, and these little guys offer some interesting features for the price, so let’s start.
Okay, so wireless earbuds are a massive tech segment this generation. It’s not an exaggeration to say that there are dozens of models to choose from and a super wide range of quality and features from the many manufacturers that are putting them out each month, but that’s got to be good news for us as consumers, right? Competition driving prices down, rapidly improving technology, and diverse feature sets mean you can prioritize whatever matters most to you. I still have the first pair of wireless earbuds that I got from a Kickstarter campaign years ago. Look at these tiny little things—kind of a charging case; it kind of looks like a vape pen or something. But they actually don’t sound that bad, and they still work, but the battery life’s like 15 minutes, and we’ve come a long way in technology for wireless earbuds since then. Enter the Redmi Bud 5s. You can find these online for anywhere from 25 to 35 bucks. That variance is mainly because you’ll likely be shipping them directly from China or picking them up on eBay as they’re not available in other markets at the moment, but I can save you some time with the rest of this review by saying that these are more than solid for that price. They sound as good or better than many other Buds that cost two or three times that much. Let’s run through the specs.
The Bud 5’s house has 12.4 millimeter dynamic drivers and a titanium diaphragm. They’ve got four mics across the stems for calls and voice compatibility with Siri and Google Assistant. They run Bluetooth 5.3 and have a battery life of 10 hours, and when you couple that with the charging case, you’re supposed to get another three full charges out of that, taking you to around 40 hours. But mileage is going to vary there, and we’ll discuss that more in a bit. The case does feature a USB-C and can fully charge your buds in about 90 minutes, which isn’t bad. I do want to note that they are also officially not rated for sweat or water resistance, but if you’re expecting to soak $30 earbuds or swim with them, I don’t know what to tell you. These Redmi’s also don’t advertise any kind of low latency or game mode, so we’ll test that out, but again, not sure we should expect that for the price. Probably the biggest surprise feature-wise is the 46 decibels of active noise cancellation, or ANC, that are promised by the 5s.
It’s actually useful and uncommonly good for buds in this range, is what I’ll say. As far as performance, the Redmi 5’s ship with the silicone tip options for your ears. I’ve got big old canals—very sexy, I know—so I rock the large tips, and as you can see from my very sophisticated head shake test, once you find the right fit, they’re not really going to go anywhere. The overall sound quality is well above average, with some kind of peaky mids, but when you have the bass enhance activated within the app, there’s plenty of boom there. When I was testing it out, as you know, various hip-hop and rock songs on my playlist sounded good. Out of the box, you’ve got touch controls that work well: double tap to play and pause, triple to skip tracks, and press and hold to switch between A and C in the always trendy transparency modes. I didn’t think it would have it, but the pause when removing a bud feature is there, and it’s appreciated. It’s something that you kind of take for granted in sets, but to have them in a $30 set of earbuds is pretty great. The Xiaomi Redmi app for customization is pretty standard, which kind of allows you to tweak the controls and switch between modes as you see fit. Unfortunately, there’s not a way to customize the EQ, which is mildly disappointing, but understandable, I think. And I promise I’m not making excuses when I say things like that; I just remember that I paid $30 for these buds. And for the piece that separates them from the other value-priced wireless buds in that segment, it’s going to be that usable active noise-canceling.
I was admittedly skeptical when I fired them up for the first time, and you’re not going to get that same kind of vacuum seal silence of Bose or AirPods or the higher-end Sonys, but the Redmi ANC works well enough for them to claim that feature, and that’s impressive. I know it’s hard to prove in a video review; I wasn’t able to route the sound cleanly enough to show you, but what I will do is at least test the noise reduction coming from the microphone stems and give you an idea of how they sound on calls. Alright, I’m out here on this cold winter day in Minneapolis on a freeway overpass, which is, of course, very loud. I want you to get a sense of how well the Redmi Buds 5 cancel audio from the microphone. So I’m mic’d up with the camera, of course, but I’m also recording on my phone. In a second, I’m going to play this clip back untreated so you can tell just how well the stem mics handle noise reduction on the Redmi Buds 5.
