Soundcore Sleep A10 Review

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Hardware Overview

A Peaceful Night

When it comes to switching off at night time we can all feel guilty about spending a little too long tapping away at screens. Distractions are everywhere and this habit can result in restlessness throughout the night. Even worse, poor quality of sleep that can leave us groggy, or in my case grumpy the next day.

There have been a few ways I’ve tried to remedy this through the years, with fairly average success. I’ve tried wearing headphones to bed before and playing some soothing ocean sounds. Great idea in theory, yet this typically resulted in the headphones making their way to the floor at some point during the night. Or even worse, sore ears and neck from the pressure they apply where your head is on the pillow. Not a comfortable solution and one I’ve never really pursued.

The Soundcore A10 noise blocking sleep earbuds aim to provide an immediate solution to these challenges. Incredibly tiny bluetooth earbuds, designed to eliminate surrounding noise at sleep time (with their own proprietary system, I’ll come onto this shortly). They are the first addition to Anker’s audio brand in this market segment and arrive at £156.99. This is a significantly lower price point than some of the big name competitors such as Bose Sleep Buds II.

The Design

Right off the bat, I have to say these are the tiniest little bluetooth earbuds I have ever seen. A circular shell for the buds themselves, they utilise a silicon ear-tip and wing system that locks into place. With 4 different tip sizes and 3 wings, the customisation helped me to find the perfect fit. Once removed from their charging case and a simple insert and twist into place they were very secure in my ears. They are almost weightless and genuinely felt like there was nothing there at all.

The pillow test was a roaring success. With my head down on a firm memory foam pillow the earbuds sat deeper into the ear than the ear lobe protrudes. Essentially, almost zero risk of falling out during the night. With 7 nights straight of testing I can 100% verify, they were still in my ears when arising the next day.

The Experience

The Soundcore Sleep A10 earbuds, provide access via their companion app to a library of sleep sounds. Whether you enjoy the therapeutic sounds of the ocean, thunderstorms or even white noise there’s plenty of options available. Cleverly when selected it actually downloads the selected sleep sound to the buds themselves. As a result it does not require your connected device to stream these sounds throughout the night.

There are an abundance of features to help you fine tune this experience. They utilise a 4-Point noise masking system to cover noise during sleep, which did an incredible job of isolating me from the world, without ANC (active noise cancelling). The benefit for me of not incorporating ANC is not having that feel of pressure between your ears during use.

If the sleep buds are just to help you drift off to sleep initially you can set the sounds to switch off after a set period of time. This is perfect for me, as the sounds of a thunderstorm at 3am are more likely to shock me awake than keep me asleep. There is also a useful alarm clock feature that gives you a very private and pleasant awakening in the morning. Tweeting spring time birdsong in the doldrums of a miserable winter? Yes please.

Measuring Their Performance

The Soundcore A10 have a very tight integration with the companion app. As long as you keep your earbuds connected to your device throughout the night it will also measure your Sleep. This tracking will help you to understand, how long you slept for (never enough for me). As well as Deep Sleep, Light Sleep, moments you’ve woken up and how swiftly you fall asleep.

My experience with the sleep tracking was a little mixed. For reasons unknown, the earbuds apparently lost connection to my device through the night on two occasions and didn’t report the sleep data. During my time testing I have already received one firmware update for them so hopefully this will be remedied and it’s promising to see that Anker are continually working on improving them.

Fine Tuned Experience

Battery life is approximately 10 hours for the buds, with a further 40 hours in the rather largely designed case. My experience fell a little shorter than this at around 6-7 hours. It can be severely affected by volume, as well as what you’ve selected to listen to. Quite uniquely to the Soundcore A10, you are also able to play your own music as well as the sounds library. A feature overlooked by Bose and many other major brands sleep bud offerings, which is a big win for Soundcore.

Overall I’ve been really impressed by the Soundcore A10 Sleep Buds. The buds themselves are tiny, robust and pack a punch in the audio department. The case design is slick with its sliding mechanism and magnetic locking system for the buds. The app is intuitive and obvious in its flow. There were just a few niggling frustrations that I think will be overcome through software and firmware. I would comprehensively recommend the Soundcore A10 to anyone looking for the best nights sleep they’ve ever had. The perfect example of technology helping us to achieve life’s most important daily task. Sleep.

Rapid Reviews Rating

4 out of 5

4

You can purchase the Soundcore A10 Noise Blocking Sleep Buds here