No Frills, but Great Clip-On Earbuds

These Soundcore C40i open-ear earbuds are simple, effective, and comparatively affordable. And what a breath of fresh air that is.

Soundcore C40i

The Soundcore C40i over ear earbuds keep things simple with no audio noise cancelation or other frills, but does provide easy setup, good sound, and respectable battery life.

Pros

• Easy to connect
• Still comfortable after several hours
• Plenty of battery life
• Very simple and effective button controls

Cons

• The over ear design means no ANC
• Occasional audio crackling

Price and Availability

You can purchase a pair of Soundcore C40i earbuds directly from the official Soundcore website or off Amazon for $100. Putting them in competition—at least in terms of pricing—with several of the best wireless earbuds of 2024, and about $50 less than Nothing Open (ear) earbuds.

They Don’t Go In Your Ear

In-ear earbuds have their benefits, to be sure, but they also have drawbacks. Particularly for someone with ears that don’t really play well with that kind of canal-plugging design.

It’s tough to say whether the shape of Soundcore C40i buds is superior or inferior to other open-ear devices, but they’re definitely not bad. Maybe a little uncomfortable at first if you’re unfamiliar with open-ear earbuds and have trouble finding the right angle, but those are just growing pains. And if they’re a little loose, one of the two sizes of included ear grips should sort you out.

Once a good angle is figured out, they’ll be surprisingly comfortable. Or, to put it more accurately, they don’t really have much of a physical presence at all. It’s not so unintrusive that you’ll forget they’re there, but it’s also very easy to ignore for several consecutive hours, even if you’re also wearing glasses.

There’s a kind of elegant simplicity to the design of the C40i buds. Each piece only has a single button on the back, which is slightly recessed and roughly the size of a fingertip. It’s very easy to find by feel and just as easy to press (and know that you’ve pressed it).

Press and hold both buttons for three seconds to enter pairing mode. Press the button on the Left or Right bud once to answer a call, pause audio, or play audio that was paused already. Press either button twice in succession to skip to the next track, end a call, or reject an incoming call. Or press and hold the Right bud button to increase volume, and do the same on the Left to reduce volume.

Having a total of two buttons does limit the functionality a small bit, of course. If you’re used to more complex earbuds, you might find them lacking a few control features. Even so, they accomplish just enough with two buttons to still be quite useful in practice.

Great for Calls, Less So for Recordings

The audio quality of the Soundcore C40i buds is… a bit of a mixed bag. But that’s largely dependent on your own specific needs and expectations.

When it comes to listening, they sound pretty good. Audio comes through clearly and amplifies the sounds that are typically more difficult to notice with regular speakers—much like any headphones or earbuds. However, because these are open-ear earbuds, noise-canceling (even noise reduction) is simply not a thing.

This might be a dealbreaker for some, as the ability to mute or otherwise avoid external noise is often a big draw. However, someone who prefers to still be able to hear what’s happening around them while listening to music or taking a phone call probably won’t see an issue here.

You might think a lack of noise-canceling would make it more difficult to hear audio or end up projecting whatever you’re listening to out into the world around you, but nope. Despite the open design, the C40i earbuds still come through clearly but also won’t annoy anyone in your vicinity who doesn’t want to hear whatever you’re listening to—at least at regular, non-damaging volumes.

Call quality is also perfectly serviceable, with incoming and outgoing audio both coming through clearly. That said, using the C40i earbuds to record audio for something like a video isn’t such a good idea. The microphone quality may be just fine for phone calls, but in video playback, it sounds very tinny and has a bit of an echo.

Of course, if you’re looking for a good microphone for audio recording, you probably don’t want to go with earbuds in the first place. That calls for a more traditional microphone, like the JBL Quantum Stream Studio.

An Okay App

As of writing, there’s not really a whole lot to be said about the software side of the Soundcore C40i earbuds. While the official Soundcore app, available for iPhone and Android, does support the C40i earbuds—despite the list omitting them in the App Store description—it’s still pretty basic.

Sounds can be adjusted a bit to boost volume, enhance bass, simulate 3D surround sound, or set up a custom equalizer. The single-button controls can be customized if you want to mix up what does what (or add a command to turn on a paired device’s voice assistant), but call controls can’t be changed. Other than that, you can also manually check for firmware updates, toggle the low battery warning on or off, and manage what devices are currently part of the Dual Connections feature for Multipoint Bluetooth.

Okay that last one is kind of handy. The C40i buds can be paired with however many Bluetooth compatible devices you’d like, but Multipoint Bluetooth also allows them to work with up to two devices simultaneously. The Dual Connections function makes it easier to pick and choose which two you want to connect with (out of all of your previously paired devices) on the fly. Or you can turn Dual Connections off and keep things simple with a single device at a time if you prefer.

This is also probably as good a place as any to talk about the occasional audio glitch that’s come up in testing. It’s tough to say whether this was due to hardware problems, internal software issues, or some kind of connection error, but there have been a handful of moments where the audio would cut out for a split second or start to crackle—sometimes both.

This happened fairly often when paired with a Nintendo Switch, though that wasn’t the only instance. Audio glitching has also happened a few times while simply sitting in front of a paired MacBook.

Distance was a factor only once, with the sound on the left bud (always the left, for some reason) crackling and cutting out while at the extreme end of a small NYC apartment. But that also wouldn’t happen every single time that much distance and that many walls were put between the buds and the paired device. Even so, that they continued to work at all under those conditions was still rather impressive.

A Pretty Good Battery

When it comes to battery life, the Soundcore C40i earbuds are fairly respectable. At a full charge, it took the charging case roughly a week and a half (possibly two weeks) of intermittent earbud use to start doing the angry red Low Battery Blink—then charging it back up to full took maybe a little over an hour.

The buds themselves hold up pretty well with extensive use, too, lasting for as long as a few hours of fairly regular listening without running down to nothing. In more quantifiable terms, they also held on for a two-hour and 15-minute call, dropping to about 60% from a full charge.

Bud-off

Comparing the C40i to other earbuds depends largely on what other kinds of earbuds you might be looking into. They’re more affordable than the aforementioned Nothing Ear (open) buds, which might offer better sound quality, but those also have to hook around the ear, so they might not play as well with glasses as the C40i.

Of course, since the C40i buds are open-ear they don’t provide noise cancelation like QuietComfort Earbuds, and they don’t measure up to Bose’s advertised 30 hours of battery life with noise cancelation turned on—but the C40i also cost $80 less.

Really, the Soundcore C40i earbuds sit in a bit of a middle ground where they’re more expensive than budget buds like the Sony WF-C510 (but are also easier to use and keep on your ear), while being more affordable than models that start to tiptoe into premium territory.

Should You Buy the Soundcore C40i?

As always, the decision of whether or not to buy a thing is yours to make. If nothing you’ve read here makes them seem worth the $100 price, then you’ll probably not be excited about buying them.

If, however, you like the idea of a set of open-ear earbuds with good sound, respectable battery life, and that are really easy to use (and not much else), the Soundcore C40i might just be the buds for you. It’s probably best to think of them as a good, solid, middle-of-the-road workhorse kind of earbud. No fuss, no muss, but nothing surprising or exciting, either.

Soundcore C40i

The Soundcore C40i over ear earbuds keep things simple with no audio noise cancelation or other frills, but does provide easy setup, good sound, and respectable battery life.