Bluetooth sports headphones. The market is absolutely flooded with them. Do a quick Google search, and before long you’ll lose track of how many different brands are available, and it seems like most of them are just knocking one another off with mediocre results and tepid customer reviews. It should be simple right? Well if you’ve struggled through this process, you know it’s actually quite frustrating trying to find a pair that check all the boxes and aren’t way overpriced.
I’m actually in the hunt for a pair of reliable Bluetooth headphones for regular gym use, so when a pair of MOPS Sound Pulse wireless earbuds came across my desk I figured I could put them through the paces as someone actually in the market for them and myself looking for sport headphone reviews.
You read that right, MOPS
MOPS is a newer Chinese brand that makes “smart electronics, home furnishings, and wearables for smart life solutions”. Beyond a very peculiar name, they are the brand that owns the former Avegant Glyph personal theater headset, and some portable wearable HEPA filters for highly polluted metropolitan areas.
After I finally got over the name (okay, I’m still getting over it) I decided to take a serious look at the earbuds that showed up, to see how they perform .
What features are important for Bluetooth sports headphones?
First off, sports headphones are on a different tier than regular headphones; in fact, I would argue that Bluetooth sports earbuds are even another tier all in their own right. True, many of the general qualifications would be similar, however the tolerances and needs are different. Different job, different tool as it were.
In light of that, I broke down a handful of the qualifications I look for in wireless sport earbuds, in my personal order of importance.
Wireless earbuds
For me, I don’t want to be working out with big cushions over my ears. That’s just a personal preference, and I see plenty of people rocking full on-ear headphones at the gym, but I don’t want another thing to make me sweat (or absorb that sweat).
Also, running on the treadmill, lifting, or any workout activity is inherently a high-intensity endeavor with a lot of movement. Having a cable plugged into an MP3 player or phone is a complete pain, as more often than not either the device will get yanked onto the floor or the earbud will make a violent ejection from your ear. Been there, done that, not fun. Wireless is a definite must-have, and the Bluetooth connection needs to be capable.
Sweatproof
This is pretty standard across the board for active Bluetooth headphones, but worth mentioning. If there are cloth elements on headphones they can absorb sweat and become nasty, which nobody wants. The Sound Pulse sport earbuds have an IPX5 rating, which is sweatproof but not waterproof. If you plan on swimming with headphones there are a very specific group of products in this market that are designed with this use in mind.
Fitment & design
If earbuds don’t stay put in your ears while working out, it doesn’t really matter how good they sound and you will waste plenty of time putting them back in and messing around. The Sound Pulse earbuds came with three different-sized rubber tips, which come in yellow, red, or blue. The material felt pretty durable, and fit snugly in my ear.
The left side of the earbuds houses an optical heart rate monitor, which uses the inside of our inner ear lobe to take measurements and report this in the app. The right earbud has a touch sensor, which can control music playback or fitness program start/stop/pause functions.
The inline control dongle on the left side is a bit thick and did bounce against my face while running at times, which is a bit annoying and not the best for HIIT (high intensity interval training).
Comfort is critical when considering Bluetooth sport earbuds, and for me I generally have them in for an hour to an hour and a half straight. I did notice a little soreness on one of the inner folds of my ear on the tail end of an hour and a half session, but nothing major and up until that point I didn’t notice any discomfort.
Sport earbuds better be able to take some rough treatment without having cable issues or conk out from a little drop. I haven’t had the Sound Pulse headphones for long enough to speak to their long-term durability, however they held up fine so far with normal use. I would say that the cable is a thin, round one without much of a shroud around the base of the connection to the earbud itself, so this may cause some cable wear over time.
Sound quality
This is really at the same level as fitment & design for me. If earbuds don’t stay in your ear then you can’t hear the quality if it is great, but of course the main purpose for earbuds is to hear content while you work out. Nobody wants to have weak sound, I’m just saying there is an expectation you won’t be getting over-the-ear, studio-quality headphones to hit the elliptical.
The overall audio quality was decent enough, and the individual levels were tighter than I would expect from an audio newcomer. I have heard much better sound from sports headphones for sure, but in all the bass okay (even a bit weak for my taste), the midrange was reasonable, and the treble was a little emphasized but not too terribly so.
Battery life
I don’t want to charge my Bluetooth earbuds every day after hitting the gym, and really I prefer to only do it once a week at most.
The Sound Pulse comes up short here, as competing Bluetooth sport headphones on the market (even the cheap-o ones) come packing around eight hours of continuous play, which a load of standby hours. MOPS’ offering has a four and a half hour Bluetooth lifespan while in exercise mode, seven days’ worth of standby time in Bluetooth only, and a mere three hours if you want to listen to onboard music while in exercise mode.
Fitness tracking
The MOPS app combines the heart rate monitor reading, average heart rate, pace, time, speed, distance traveled, and kilocalorie burn in both a counter form as well as a graph readout, which is actually pretty cool. In all honesty, I haven’t been interested in this before so it is not a big consideration for me personally.
There are a variety of workout modes, ranging from “Nothing” to “Maximum”, which seem to just be classifications for different heart rates, but this is unclear from the app.
The fitness instruction is basically a built-in voice that tells you when to start and stop your activity, and depending on the workout mode you choose there is a different duration associated with each. In practice, the fitness instruction is really more for a baseline measurement, where normal tracking is more beneficial for your personal application.
The heart rate monitor was extremely accurate, only varying at most 1-2BPM from the test on the gym equipment, while the distance was somewhat accurate. In the beginning it started out keeping decent pace, but was off by a couple tenths of a mile over the course of a 30-minute run.
Onboard storage
The Sound Pulse earbuds also have onboard storage to the tune of 8GB, with 7.18 GB free to use. That is about 2000 songs at 8GB, but closer to 1,795 songs in practice, give or take. Both the audio controls and the onboard storage are located in the small oblong unit in the left cable, which adds some weight to the headphones but overall they are only about 18g so it isn’t too bad. Since my audio content is either from podcast apps or streaming apps, I don’t usually need to have this storage accessible. For those who have some specific music or recordings they do want, this would be nice to have.
How do the Sound Pulse Bluetooth sport earbuds hold up?
Personally, these are not for me. I don’t do a lot of heart rate monitoring, and when I do I’m just an arm’s reach away from the sensor on the cardio equipment. The capability to monitor heart rate, steps, and other stats while seeing it on a graph is pretty cool, for those who are into that sort of thing. The app was a bit wonky in some areas when it came to the different workout levels, and they didn’t seem all that necessary.
The quality of the physical build of the earbuds was good, and I think that they would hold up to repeated gym use without much care. Sound was decent for sports headphones, and for my use they would do just fine, while staying in place during vigorous activities.
The MSRP of $129.99 is very inflated in my opinion, even if some of the elements were more finely tuned. Since a bulk of the tech involved in this is concerning the fitness tracking and onboard storage element, I think they could shave these features out and have a much more affordable option, where this product would be a good fit for a wider audience.
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MOPS Sound Pulse Bluetooth Headphones- $129.99
