QCY Crossky C30

A fitness headphone needs to walk a fine line. They need to stay put while remaining comfortable. Good sound quality is nice but clearly secondary. Since exercise can take many forms, the perfect headphones for your activity can look very different. Are you in a gym? The a headphone that hooks over your ear or a more traditional in-ear or on-ear headphone might work. Are you outside and need to wear sunglasses? That’s going to change the type of headphone that will be best. Add to these considerations ear piercings and other concerns, and it is clear there is no one “best” fitness headphone. The $38 QCY Crossky C30 has a unique design that just might be perfect for you. Let’s take a closer look

QCY Crossky C30 Specs

• Type: Open Ear
• Driver: 10.8mm Dual-Magnet
• Audio Codec: AAC/SBC
• Bluetooth: Version 5.1
• Bluetooth Range: 10m
• Battery Life: 5 hours (earbud); 30 Hours (with case)
• Charge Time: 2 hours
• Charging Port: USB-C

Crossky C30 Design

The most important and distinctive feature of the QCY Crossky C30 headphones is the design. While not unique (I’ve seen similar designed headphones from other companies), they are a fairly recent release. Often called “clip-on” headphones, they clamp onto the outside of your ear (called the helix) and attempt to aim the sound into your ear without blocking the opening of your ear canal. This design has the advantage of allowing you to wear glasses without the interference of an ear hook. They also don’t interfere with earrings and many other piercings, a common complaint with traditional headphones.

The primary concern of most people when they see this design is comfort (followed closely by aesthetics). Let’s start with aesthetics. Do the clip-on headphones like the QCY Crossky C30 look cool? Objectively, no. I’ve seen other people wearing them and they are weird. But when you are exercising, you should be covered in sweat anyhow so how cool are you really trying to look?

Comfort-wise, the QCY Crossky C30 headphones are a bit of a mixed bag for me. They felt comfortable when I was wearing them. I didn’t feel any pain from the clamping but I also always knew they were on. The weight (5 grams per headphone) wasn’t enough to make them dislodge when I was moving but were a weight that was always present and noticeable. When I removed the headphones, I did feel a bit of phantom pressure on my ears. Not exactly painful, but I could feel that I had been wearing the headphones.

App and Control

If you’ve read my QCY Melobuds Pro review, you’ll see that the Crossky C30 headphones use the same app. Because they don’t have ANC or some of the other features of the more traditional Melobuds, the app has a couple of missing controls. The app, for the most part, looks and acts very similarly. I’ll add some pics below for your reference.

The biggest issue I had with the QCY Crossky C30 headphones wasn’t the fit or aesthetics, but the control. The control scheme seemed like it should work well. The capacitance touch area is on the part of the headphone that is behind your ear. This allows you to “squeeze” the headphone for each “tap.” In theory, this should be fairly intuitive and work well.

It doesn’t.

The controls were inconsistent at best. Single taps (which I used to control volume) were often not registered. Even when they were, the delay between me “tapping” the headphone and the change in volume was far too long. Double taps weren’t much better. Generally, I resorted to controlling my content with my phone rather than trying to use the headphone controls. Maybe this is something that will improve with firmware updates.

There are other settings for the Crossky C30 headphones that you can adjust including enabling different EQ settings (I set up a “flat” EQ with no adjustments) and spatial effects. The spatial effects made content sound more diffuse which I didn’t like all that much. Game Mode reduces latency at the cost of battery life. As latency shouldn’t be much of a concern with an exercise headphone, I’d suggest leaving this one off.

QCY Crossky C30 Sound Quality and Volume

With exercise headphones, I’m less interested in pure sound quality. They really aren’t meant to sound great (though it’s nice when they do). They are meant to provide a soundtrack to your workout that (usually) allows in outside sounds in order to keep you safe in your surroundings. The clip-on nature of the Crossky C30 headphones allows external sounds in by design. This should give you access to audio cues to let you know of outside dangers or people talking to you.

In use, however, I found the QCY Crossky C30 headphones not be much better at allowing in outside sounds as other designs. They were so good at pumping the music or other content into my ears that I had to keep the volume very low in order to hear other people speaking at a normal volume. This was no better (and sometimes worse) than using a traditional headphone in transparent mode.

Also, the QCY Crossky C30 headphones were extremely loud. I also never had the volume over 30% on my phone. This usually wouldn’t be a problem except that it didn’t give me much granular control over the low-volume performance. The difference between too loud and too soft was a single click. More granular control of the volume would allow me to dial in the volume so that I could better balance my content and the outside sounds.

The sound quality of the C30 headphones was acceptable. There was a definite bass boost present with a roll off of the high end. In an exercise headphone, especially at this price point, this is perfectly fine. I had no complaints.

Use

The QCY Crossky C30 headphones were extremely good as exercise headphones. They were able to get plenty loud so that I could really enjoy my content when I was exercising. They stayed in place through all sorts of physical activity. I’ve used a number of different types of open-ear headphones that were marketed toward the more active user. The Crossky C30 headphones were the only ones that didn’t ever have an instance where they came loose or felt even slightly insecure. These stayed in place and never even gave a hint that they might fall off. At $38 a pair, you might be tempted to think that it wouldn’t be a financial hardship to replace them. But I don’t think you’ll have to. These were very secure.

Take Away

As I said, sound quality usually isn’t the focus of exercise headphones. The QCY Crossky C30 do a fine job of getting your content into your ears. By their own measurements, they aren’t very accurate. But they are loud and stay clipped onto your ear very securely. For $38, they have some challenges, but what can you expect at this price point? If you’ve wanted to experiment with this type of headphone, they are practically an impulse buy.