B&O Beoplay E8 2.0: wonderful earbuds, but still earbuds

Well-crafted and good looking, solid and realized with premium materials, the Beoplay E8 2.0 come in a renewed leather charging box. Inside an inlay of brushed anodized aluminum surrounds them. Like the first version, there’s no button on the earpods: they’re completely touch-controlled. Sometimes, it can be frustrating. With such a small gadget, it’s not always easy to command them by touch: it will take some training before you can use them properly. It's pretty complicated to evoke the digital assistant, for which is required a triple touch on the right earphone that’s harder to achieve than Street Fighter’s most intricate combos. This can be awful since Siri or Google Assistant are getting more and more space in daily life. On the other hand, volume controls – with a long pressure on either the left or right earbud – are as simple as possible.  

Better battery life is the main improvement of the 2.0 toward the original model. They use USB-C instead of MicroUSB for charging. That makes sense since all the premium non-iPhone smartphones use this standard port, and to charge all your devices you'll only need a cable. The biggest innovation is the wireless charging feature: with the new E8 2.0, you’ll simply need no wire – even if a USB type C cable comes in the package, of course. The wireless charging case extra juice provides a total of 16 hours of play time according to Bang & Olufsen – a bit lesser in our experience. Anyway, that's enough for a full day of use and something more. 

From Bang & Olufsen you expect the best quality sound. Each earpiece of Beoplay E8 2.0 has a 5.7mm dynamic speaker, a small electromagnetic transducer and a Bluetooth 4.2 chip with Digital Sound Processing. The Beoplay earbuds sound good when you consider that they are earbuds. It's not to be expected from them the depth or details of the music of a premium set of headphones (that you can buy at the same cost, more or less). To customize the sound, Beoplay E8 comes with ToneTouch. It's a feature by B&O similar to a visual equalizer that lets you switch through different levels of 4 presets: warm, excited, bright or relaxed.   Sadly, almost nobody lives in that utopian world where the earbuds are only used to listen to music. Most of us will keep them on for many hours and use them to make phone calls. Good microphones and software optimization are required to isolate voice from background noise. Something difficult to achieve. It’s the Achille’s heel of most of the wireless earbuds on the market. It’s also the weakest point of the Beoplay earphones: forget to use them in the traffic, or in a busy train station. 

Apple AirPods are not for everyone. In some ears, they feel unstable and using them to commute or walking fast in a crowd will make you afraid of losing them. The E8 fit steadily in the ear and in a few minutes you’ll forget about wearing them. While there’s no noise cancellation, they isolate quite well from the environment. A unique feature called transparency, that’s activated with a single tap on the left earbud, enables audio passthrough, so you won’t be cut off the world if you don’t want to. The level of the passthrough can be customized in the app.

The app for the Beoplay E8 is called “Bang & Olufsen” (that was easy) and is a simple companion for the earbuds. This is the age of AI, but B&O apparently relies on the user’s choices and not on machine learning. After the pairing, you can set the color of your headset (manually!) and choose the preset that’s more apt for the current environment (“Commute” and ”Workout“ are some examples). It's also possible to create a new one using Bang & Olufsen’s own ToneTouch. Here you can also control the transparency level. And that’s all. Some competitors’ earbuds automatically do this, trying to guess what’s the surrounding environment, but results not always will satisfy. With the Beoplay E8 you’ll go the old-fashioned way.