Sleep A10

Nov 13 an update went out that has actual white noise. I just wish the quality/bit rate of these sounds were a bit better but at least this is encouraging the library will be updated.

In the soundcore app, go to the screen where the picture of your a10s are with the battery icons. Tap the battery icon and a screen showing new sounds will appear. Note, you have to be in music mode to see this and download them

I'm a light sleeper and find I do best when I leave brown noise in the background so these sounded like they were perfect. They are really close but not quite there for me. The app is really well written, the sound through the buds is clear and very adjustable. The app allows you to configure up to three patterns of sound overlapping with volume control for each separately. One thing missing right now is the standard white, pink and brown noise patterns! I did contact customer support through the app and they got back to me within a day. Those are supposed to be coming in the next few weeks. The first night I had an issue with ear comfort so I sized them down one notch from the default and the second night was no problem with comfort. The right side ran out of battery after about six hours, the left at seven. That probably wouldn't have been an issue except my phone gives me a bleep when each bud disconnects, waking me up. :( If they had 12 hour batteries they'd be the best.

These are not your regular premium earbuds. They are specialized for sleeping. Because of that, there are many design tradeoffs that were made to optimize for sleeping usage. If you are looking for just a good pair of earbuds, there are many options out there with ANC/transparency, wireless charging, good microphones, multipoint connection, voice assistance etc etc, that will easily outperform these buds at this price point. Generally speaking, these buds will be suited for people who already have a good pair of headphones and want to optimize sleeping usage with another pair.

Unlike the popular sleep buds from Bose, these do provide bluetooth functionality to allow using these as a regular pair of earbuds. I appreciate the ability to put on these buds right before beds for some music and video without having to switch earbuds right before falling asleep.

Comfort and fit is probably the most important thing for buds like these. The buds came with 4 pairs of ear tips and 3 styles of hooks. For my small ears, I find the fit to be ok and not great. With the smallest ear tips as well as the default hook, I needed to push pretty hard on the ear tips to wear the buds. There is some ear fatigue for me after wearing silicone ear tips for the entire night. I find myself needing to catch a break wearing earbuds during the day if I wear these at night.

The tiny earbud body is a clear tradeoff call made for sleep usage. The driver is small so the sound is really just ok. I’d say the sound is tiny compared to other popular premium buds (including Soundcore) in this price range. Not a big surprise. It does make the earbuds themselves very small and flat. Soundcore advertises that these buds make you forget you are wearing them when you are sleeping on your side. I think they are great, but I can definitely still easily feel them. However, I would agree these buds are a great step up from the smallest regular earbuds (e.g. Soundcore A40, or Galaxy Buds plus) for side sleeping comfort. 3 out of the 5 nights I wore them, I woke up with one or two buds falling out of my ears. I’d say that’s actually good results since when using regular earbuds or ear plugs, they usually fall out 100% of the time for me.

The noise isolation and masking is effective for me. I am not quite certain it is significantly better than a regular pair of earplugs yet, but I am starting to appreciate some of the software features. I do like the sleep sounds and intelligent sound management, and I found myself falling asleep faster than usual. I can remember the buds automatically turned on the sleep sounds a few times when my room got a bit noisy, and I was able to drift back to sleep again. I was getting better sleep early in the morning when my family and neighborhood got busy.

The sleep tracking feature works, but not as good as your dedicated fitness tracker. I wore a fitbit every night to sleep (which is known for its good sleep tracking capability), and the deep sleep and overall sleep time very roughly match. I would say if you have a fitness tracker, you probably would not care about this feature from the earbuds as a good fitness tracker generally can monitor a lot more things and monitor them better.

I ran into a repeated issue using these buds. Every night when I put them on and switched to music mode, the right earbud always failed to connect for some reason. I had to put both buds in the case and take them back out to get them both to connect.

Overall, I think these are very interesting and can help some demographic out there. I hesitate to recommend it to everyone at this price point. It is a nice attempt from Anker. I can see if comfort and functionalities further improve, products in this class can become a general consumer product in the future. For now, you could be an early adopter to get these, or stick with regular earbuds or earplugs.

I have many other Anker products and they have all been great. The soundcore by Anker, Sleep A10 Bluetooth Sleep Earbuds, Noise Blocking Earbuds are also great.

There are 4 sizes of ear buds so you should find one to fit. The only issue I had was it was slightly difficult to put the buds on the speakers. Once on they fit my ears and feel great.

The sound quality is great for their intended purpose.

I purchased the A10 after my Bose Sleepbuds finally gave up after 3 years. I had purchased the Liberty Pro for my workouts so I looked forward to the same level of performance that I had before. From the begining, there was an issue of connecting the buds. I would put them in my ears, then after a few seconds one or both would disconnect. The batteries never lasted more than 5 hours. And of course, when they either disconnected during the night or lost power, the alarm would fail to go off. Please go back to the drawing board and fix this!! I ended up buying the Bose again, mainly for realiablitly and no problems.