Value-priced Open-ear Sports Headphones – Review Geek

Open-ear headphones allow sounds from the outside world to pass through while you listen to music. Some brands favor bone conduction, which delivers its sound through your cheekbones, while the SoundPEATS RunFree Lite use what they call air conduction, which works like speakers close to your ears.

While by their very nature, open-ear headphones can never match the sound quality of in-ear or over-ear headphones, they can provide greater situational awareness. The extra breathability the open-ear design affords also offers the advantage of greater comfort for your sweatiest workouts.

The RunFree Lite has an aggressive price point and competitive feature set. If you’re in the market for an open-ear headphone, the low barrier to entry and its overall quality make the RunFree Lite well worth considering.

Pedestrian Looks With a Thoughtful Design

The package is as bare bones as it gets. In the box, you get the headphones, a just over 9in (229mm) USB-C to USB-A cable, a user guide, and a SoundPeats App Introduction guide.

The RunFree Lite’s charging port cover is very difficult to open with short fingernails. Even my wife, who has longer nails, had great difficulty. Once the USB-C charging port is open, it takes a maximum of one and a half hours to reach a full charge from any USB port capable of providing at least 1A of power.

The charging light is red while charging and white once fully charged. After the battery is juiced up, long pressing the headset’s power button for three seconds turns on the device. When the white light is on, the headset moves to its pairing mode, with the light alternating quickly between red and white. You then select SOUNDPEATS RunFree Lite from your device’s Bluetooth pairing menu to make a connection, with the headset providing voice prompts for each step, such as “connected.” I used my Apple iPhone 14 Pro Max, but any Bluetooth audio-capable smartphone, tablet, computer, or other device would have no issue pairing with the RunFree Lite’s V5.3 Bluetooth protocol, which is the newest standard at the time of this product’s release.

The all-black design, with a mix of glossy and matte elements, provides a classy look, but little sizzle. Unlike some competing open-ear headphones, like the pricier bone-conducting Aftershokz Titanium that sit just outside the ear canal, the RunFree Lite goes over the ears. Despite blocking a portion of the ear’s auditory canal, outside sounds, and thus your situational awareness, are not noticeably impeded until higher volume levels.

Regardless of the RunFree Lite’s low weight, without proper load distribution, wearing headphones like these that essentially sit on the top of the ears would eventually hurt. While the RunFree Lite doesn’t completely sidestep this issue, especially after wearing them for a few hours, SoundPEATS did a great overall job of maximizing comfort. Because the rear of the headphones protrudes out, you can’t lie down with these, so they’re more for sitting and active usage, such as walking, running, or bike riding.

Its IPX4 water resistance rating means it can easily handle sweat, a damp cleaning cloth, and even rain, but you can’t submerge the RunFree Lite in water. This means they’ll hold up to pretty much any type of activity, save for swimming.

Physical Controls and Battery Life

The SoundFree Lite has three physical buttons on the right bulb that sits just behind the ear. The far left button, which faces the back of your head, is the flattest, the middle button is raised the most, and the far right button is somewhere in-between. This is a great way to distinguish between the three buttons simply through touch.

The far left button is primarily the volume down button and has a minus sign on it. A short press lowers the volume. A long press moves to the previous track.

The middle button is the workhorse of the three buttons. It’s primarily the power button and has a circle on it. Long press this button for three seconds to power off. The headset will also power off automatically if there’s no audio signal for three minutes. Short pressing this button plays or pauses the audio. Triple tapping this button enters or exits Game Mode, which helps to reduce lag when trying to wirelessly sync audio with video. Short pressing this button answers or hangs up a phone call. Long pressing this button for approximately one and a half seconds rejects a phone call. Double tapping this button lets you switch between two calls or activates your device’s voice assistant.

The far right button is primarily the volume up button and has a plus sign on it. A short press raises the volume. A long press moves to the next track.

Although it’s difficult to estimate real-world battery life that’s dependent upon several factors, including volume levels, I’ve easily gotten more than 10 hours in my own usage. As such, the manufacturer claims up to 17 hours of mixed usage for both calls and audio seems reasonable.

An App for Finer Control

Although you can simply pair the RunFree Lites with your device and listen to audio, the SoundPeats App on Google Play (Android 6.0 and up) or the Apple App Store (iOS 13.0 or later and macOS 11.0 or later with M1 chip or later) provides firmware updates and additional functionality. The additional functions include Adaptive EQ, Custom Equalizer, 8 Preset Sound Effects, Mode Switching, and Volume Control. Future app updates may add to these features.

Unfortunately, the app is not entirely English-localized, so you’ll be seeing some Chinese characters and dodgy grammar. There are no showstoppers here, but it would have been nice to have a little more polish with a product targeted at English speakers. In addition, the app itself is used across all of SoundPEATS headphone lines, so it’s not necessarily optimized for the RunFree Lite.

Registration was nevertheless fairly smooth, requiring me to set a username and password and confirm a number over email. Once logged in, I was prompted to update the headset’s firmware, which took about 5 minutes.

The most useful feature of the app was enabling Adaptive EQ, which runs through a series of hearing tests to further customize the sound profile. For me, it did seem to offer some improvement over the already solid stock sound profile.

Audio Performance: Highs and Lows

Even though it’s an open-ear design, when listening at modest volume levels, it’s difficult for anyone else to hear your audio unless they go right up to your ears. Only when you really crank the volume up does enough sound leak out where those close by will be able to really hear anything.

At its maximum volume levels, levels that frankly would be unhealthy to listen at, the RunFree Lite never once distorted the music it was playing. It’s a neat trick that many headphones that cost considerably more can’t pull off.

I picked up occasional muddiness in its sound profile, but overall, vocals and instrumentation in music were well-defined with good bass, both before and after enabling Adaptive EQ in the app. These are no match for the sound quality of high-end in-ear or over-ear headphones, but the SoundFree Lite has few actual audio playback faults, especially for an open-ear design.

In spite of the manufacturer’s claims of a noise reduction optimization algorithm and a beamforming microphone array, the built-in microphone seems like mostly a usable afterthought. Taking calls indoors is fine, but outdoors the microphone can pick up a lot of external sounds, including wind, which creates some static. You can hear a sample below.

While I wouldn’t recommend this headset for regular audio calls, these still work well enough for occasional, quick usage.

Should You Buy the SoundPEATS RunFree Lite?

Similar open-ear products like speaker hats and audio sunglasses leak far more sound for even less privacy and tend to cost more, so the type of design used by the RunFree Lite is arguably the best compromise. Wireless earbuds like the Apple AirPods Pro (Gen 2) can exceed the functionality of open-ear headphones with superior audio quality, active transparency, and noise cancellation to shut out the outside world completely, but also have a much higher price point and a less secure fit in some ears.

If you like to listen to Spotify at its highest quality setting, audiobooks, podcasts, or just about any other audio source, the RunFree Lite can easily keep up. The build and audio playback quality are both excellent, and the low price helps to further distinguish the headset in a crowded field.

While I would never recommend open-ear products as primary headphones, as a secondary device for specific active use cases where you need to be more aware of your surroundings, the RunFree Lite is a great choice.