Tozo NC3 Hybrid Active Noise Cancelling Earbuds Review

Today I’ve got another product review for you for these great noise cancelling earbuds from Tozo.

These are their NC3 hybrid active noise cancelling earbuds that retail for around $40 or £40. They offer both active noise cancelling and transparency modes with lots of other features for a very budget friendly price.

So let’s see what you get for your money, what the specifications are and what they sound like.

What you get

In the box you get two manuals. One is a quick start with an overview of the controls, the second a more in depth user manual, but both make sense and clearly show hoe to operate the device.

You also get a short USB C charging lead and a range of silicone caps for the earbuds so you can fit them to your ears for maximum comfort.

The earbuds themselves come in a smart carrying / charging case that’s a really nice size for your pocket and these very securely hold your headphones in place whilst they are being charged.

The earbuds themselves fit snuggly into the case and are a nice, light and compact design.

So let’s get them charged up and find out what they can do.

Fit

Let’s start with the fit and feel. The buds are nice and light weighing in at 5g each. Their size is average and they fit nicely inside the ear and are able to secure themselves against your outer ear for stability and comfort. The wide selection of silicone caps you get will ensure a near perfect fit for your ear canal whatever size you are.

I’ve been using these for a week now and I can say they are very comfortable with no sense of them slipping or falling out even with gym work and outdoor activities.

Sound Quality

The sound quality is really good. Music and speech playback is great and using the companion Tozo app you’ve got full control over every aspect of the sound profile using the built in graphic equaliser and noise reduction settings.

I guess the big feature is that they offer full active noise cancellation. This is powered by 3 microphones in each earbud to monitor both the external sound around you and the sounds being made by your body to cancel out as much of this extraneous noise as possible. Tozo claim a 45 decibel noise reduction which basically means it reduces the unwanted noise by up to 95%. This noise cancellation is also adaptive, which I guess is the hybrid part, so that it adjusts its levels depending on your environment.

Overall I’d say this works well. Whilst playing music or listening to books you won’t hear anything getting in the way of your playback. Naturally any sudden, loud sounds will only be deadened rather than cancelled, but that’s to be expected. I found the adaptive part a bit hard to judge as the earbuds managed to cancel out noise in all the settings where I used them so I guess that probably means it was working well.

The headphones also offer a transparency mode where they block out noise but allow speech through so you can have conversations in noisy areas. You can switch between noise cancellation and transparency with a single touch on the left earpiece. This worked well but I found my own voice sounded a little bit heady. Not bad, but just not quite as clear as normal.

These earbuds also work for your phone calls and for this task they are more than up to the job with good clarity both hearing the other party and in talking back to them.

So overall really good sound quality, especially considering these are a $40 pair of earbuds.

Other Specs

On the build quality side everything seems really well made. The earbuds are rated at IPX8 which means that they can be submerged for around 30 minutes in shallow water without harm, so swimming and any other forms of sweaty exercise won’t cause them any issues.

Battery life is rated at over 12 hours on a single charge, with the case providing a 1.5 hour recharge time which also extends the headphone usage to 55 hours between case charges. From my usage this week that all sounds about right.

Tozo App

As I mentioned earlier another nice feature is that Tozo have a headphone app that lets you connect to and control your headphones. This provides a whole range of features.

From your phone you can control the noise cancellation mode for noise cancellation and transparency, but also a few other settings for wind noise reduction and so on.

You also get control of the graphic equaliser functionality to better shape your sound with hundreds of presets available for you to try out, and these really do alter the way the sound is reproduced letting you get it just the way you want it.

The app also provides translation features where it will listen to what’s being said to you and translate it onto the phone screen, or even read it back to you in your own language.

Finally the app is also loaded with a number of white noise and relaxation tracks which you are free to use.

Overall

Overall then I’m very impressed with these Tozo NC3 earbuds. For the $40 asking price they have managed to pack in a lot of good technology that you’d expect to see on more expensive devices.

So if you want to get hold of your own set please visit https://amzn.to/3NqSc8D or https://www.tozostore.com/products/nc3-headphone?variant=50644513751329