The Best Sub-$50 Earbuds on the Market? QCY Melobuds Pro Review
What can you really expect out of a set of earbuds that cost less than $50? Heck, I can barely go out to dinner with my wife for less than $50 (and that doesn’t include drinks)! Bluetooth earbuds for that price? Surely they have to cut some corners? Not as many as you’d think! Let’s take a look at the QCY Melobuds Pro earbuds. At $47.99 retail, they do a lot more than you think!
QCY Melobuds Pro Specs
- Multiple Adaptive Active Noise Cancelling: Reduce up to 99% Ambient Noise
- Superior Quality Call Experience: 6 mics and AI-based noise reduction algorithm isolates your voice and keeps conversations clear
- Transparency Mode: Up to 6 awareness levels to choose from
- LDAC audio coding technology
- 360° Stereo Sound
- Smart Wearing Detect Audio: Only plays when you’re wearing MeloBuds Pro — and pauses when they’re taken off your ear.
- Up to 34H Playtime: 8.5 hours of battery from your earbuds and store another 25.5 hours in the case
- Dual Device Connection: Pair with two Bluetooth devices at the same time
- QCY APP: Personalize your audio experience by using QCY APP. Explore adjustable EQ settings, custom modes, and more
QCY Melobuds Pro First Impressions
When you first touch and start using the QCY Melobuds Pro earbuds, you aren’t going to think you are holding a sub-$50 set of headphones. The fit and finish seem great, the app is fully featured, and they have all the bells and whistles of the more expensive headphones on the market. They sport all the usual features including reasonable battery life (8 hours on the buds, 20+ hours in the case), LDAC support, transparency mode, and an app for control. You’ll quickly learn that they have even more advanced features. The ANC has multiple modes (and some of those modes have levels within them), spatial audio support, and in-ear detection.
The earbuds slide easily in and out of the case and are conspicuously discrete. There is no obvious branding anywhere on the buds. The only branding you’ll see is on the front of the case. This is extremely unusual and should appeal to those that don’t love to wear branding for their products.
The QCY Melobuds Pro earbuds come with a limited number of ear-tips (three), a manual, and a short USB-C charging cable. You’ll need to connect the earbuds to your device via Bluetooth and download the app for full control. Control on the earbuds is achieved through capacitance touch on the earbuds or through direct control on your phone or app.
QCY Melobuds Pro App
The QCY app is very full featured with a battery readout on the front page (just for the earbuds, no case battery indicator), sound modes (including a customizable EQ) on the second page, and settings on the third. QCY includes a channel balance control on the sound mode page allowing you to pan all the sounds to one ear. A unique control not normally found on headphones these days.
You can customize the controls of your earbuds (single, double, and triple touch only) with an array of commands. You can certainly set these up exactly as you want. There is an EQ with seven presets and a 10-band customizable EQ. One of the presets is “Spatial sound effects.” Rather than the expected head-tracking and locking the audio in place in front of you, this seemed to be more of a DSP that was intended to make the sound seem more encompassing.
One thing I really liked about the QCY app is the sleep mode. This allowed you to completely lock the on-earbud controls until you disable the mode via the app or replace the earbuds in their case. I can see this being useful for not just sleeping but for times when you know you’ll need to handle the earbuds often and don’t want to worry about errant touches sending commands. One feature that still worked with sleep mode activated was in-ear detection. If you want your music to continue to play even if the headphone is removed, you’ll need to disable this manually from the app.
Noise Cancelling Performance
I don’t usually spend a lot of time testing out ANC (Active Noise Cancelling) modes as they tend to all work about the same. I’ll bring them up if there is something great or horrible about them. The QCY Melobuds Pro earbuds have so many modes with some having different levels to those modes that I just had to try them out. I was at my local Sam’s Club store here they have large walk-in cooler sections. These have very loud AC units blowing constantly. With this very loud and consistent background noise, I tested out a number of the different ANC modes.
The QCY Melobuds Pro have Adaptive Noise Cancellation, Indoor, Commuting, Noisy, and Anti-wind Noise ANC modes. The Adaptive and Anti-wind options are simply on or off. The others can all be adjusted for different intensities. I tested out all of these and they all worked fairly well. With no background music playing, the AC fan noise could be completely blocked out with most of them. Were there huge differences between the low-intensity Noisy and high-intensity Indoor? Not really. I expect that most people will simply find a favorite (probably Adaptive if I’m being honest) and leave it at that.
Sound Quality
As always (and as is visible in the screen shots of the app above), I set up a manual EQ on the QCY Melobuds Pro app that was flat. No adjustments. This allowed the headphones to play back all audio content with no EQ applied. Knowing the raw performance of a headphone will give you an indication of how good they perform natively and will also inform you as to how much EQ can adjust them to your liking.
With no EQ applied, the QCY Melobuds Pro earbuds presented a fairly flat overall experience with a bit of a noticeable bass boost. This is fairly typical in most headphones of nearly any price point. I ran a few sweeps through the headphones to confirm the bass boost and discovered that they also were a little inconsistent about 2kHz. Again, not surprising at this (or most any) price point.
When listening to content, the QCY Melobuds Pro provided a very enjoyable experience if not the most accurate. Some detail seemed to be lost with the overall experience sounding a little more smeared than I would have liked. At the sub-$50 price point, I really have nothing to complain about with the QCY Melobuds Pro headphones. These sound light-years better than I would have expected given the price point and feature set.
Corners Cut
As I said at the top of this review, to achieve such a low price, some corners must have been cut. Either that or QCY must be taking a both on these headphones. From a build-quality standpoint, the headphones themselves seem solid. I’ve no complaints there. The case, on the other hand, feels a little flimsy. It opens a little too easily which makes me think that the hinge won’t last. The cover also feels thin. So far, it has held up but I’m not sure how long. Of course, nothing has failed so far so perhaps I’m being overly concerned. These may last for decades for all I know.
The larger cut corner is in the overall fit and finish of using the headphones. The QCY Melobuds Pro earbuds had more idiocracies than nearly any other headphones I’ve tested (at least in recent memory). The capacitance controls were hit-or-miss, the in-ear detection was almost random as to when it would or wouldn’t work, and the headphones were constantly doing weird things. Music would sometimes start randomly when you were using an app that should be overriding it (watching a YouTube video should pause Pandora but it would occasionally start playing over the top of the video for example). It would occasionally lose the Bluetooth connection. There seemed to be bugs in the software (or hardware) that made the experience of using them inconsistent. Would this cause me to dissuade you from buying them? No! For this price, you can’t really expect perfection. But you should know what to expect.
QCY Melobuds Pro Take Away
We truly are in a golden age of Bluetooth headphones. One day, we will look back at this time when we were paying less than $50 for a full-featured set of wireless headphones and wonder how they could cost so little. The QCY Melobuds Pro will definitely come up. At $48, they have all the features of much more expensive headphones and still maintain a very good sound quality. Do they have room for improvement? Sure. But at this price, what can you expect? I certainly expected less and walked away from my time with the QCY Melobuds Pro earbuds impressed. I think you will too!
