A good set of fully wireless earphones. The sound quality isn’t outstanding but they do a good job and perform well for the price.
Avanca Minim True Wireless Earphones Review
True wireless is the latest trend in earphones and means having two earpieces that aren’t even joined with a wire between them. This offers the advantage of never getting any wires tangled, but it does mean it’s easier to lose one earpiece and you are reliant on a snug fit in your ear stopping one bouncing off down the pavement.
Sound Quality
As far as bud earphones go the Minim offers pretty good sound quality. It does lack a bit of bass, as is often the case with smaller bud earphones, but they do still provide a very decent sound, with reasonable definition. It’s not the kind of quality you would want for relaxing at home with your favourite music but is easily good enough for listening during a daily commute.
Design
Like almost all Bluetooth earbuds they are quite bulky, especially as both pieces need to have their own batteries and Bluetooth receivers. The fact that the majority of this bulks tucks up in your earlobe is not only better for fitting to the ear but also looks better in use, preventing the need for a lot of earphone hanging out of your ear.
The buds are well made and include a power and volume up and down buttons built within the buds, although the small size of these buttons does make them a bit fiddly to use.
The Minim earphones do a surprisingly good job of fitting in the ear and we found we were never concerned about losing them. Rather than hanging down from the ear like Apple’s Airpods for example, the Minim earphones sit up at the back of the earlobe and so are held in place by more of the shell of the ear than with regular in-ear earphones.
Battery life
The small size does mean battery life is fairly restricted and you will only get a couple of hours use out of them before they need charging. Charging is done by putting them in a pod – which has a battery of its own so you can charge them on the go.
With the pod battery included Avanca says you can get up to 12 hours of listening time without having to charge the pod again, but as you will need to charge the earpieces to get this kind of listening time obviously it won’t be 12 hours of continuous listening.
We did find you sometimes had to wiggle the buds within the pod to make sure they were charging with the buttons turning red to indicate they were charging.
Setup and Bluetooth
Pairing the earphones is a pretty standard process for a Bluetooth device, although each earpiece will need turning on separately. It pairs through a primary earpiece which then transmits to the second bud. This does mean there will be a bit of a delay in transmitting the sound which is fine if you’re listening to music but can cause some lip-syncing issues when watching videos.
We also did experience some intermittent issues with the transmission between the earpieces, with the sound on the secondary bud occasionally dropping out. While this was annoying it wasn’t consistent enough a problem to be a major issue.
Price
Priced at around £90 they might not be super cheap but they are still just about a budget option. If you don’t want to stretch to this much we would recommend looking at the exceptionally good value Brainwavz BLU-100 wireless headphones.
Verdict
A very good pair of true wireless earphones. If you want a small pair of wireless earphones they provide a good level of quality for the price. Sound quality isn’t up to that of a larger, or more expensive, pair of headphones but it is more than good enough for the average commuter.