Close to eighteen months ago, I reviewed Anker’s first attempt at creating a pair of sleep-focused earbuds. The Soundcore Sleep A10 was an impressive debut, with good battery life, decent comfort even for side sleepers, and a useful amount of noise isolation.
The A20 model was released a few months ago, and I’ve now had the chance to put it through its paces for a couple of weeks. Until my review sample arrived, I’d still been using the A10’s most nights, so it’s been easy to compare the two and see what’s improved (and what hasn’t) in this updated version.
Features and Design
Like its predecessor, I have to point out that the A20 doesn’t have any built-in noise cancellation. Instead, the buds come with a selection of silicone tips and wings to help secure them firmly in your ears and passively block outside sound.
In my experience, that approach does a reasonable job of dialling down the outside world, similar to a decent pair of earplugs, but don’t expect complete silence if you’re in a noisy environment.
More on that in the noise reduction section below, but for now, just know that if you’re sleeping beside a foghorn snoring partner or your bedroom backs onto a nightclub, these won’t be the earbuds for you.
The upside of that is better battery life than most of the competition. The marketing material suggests you’ll get up to 14 hours between charges if you use the inbuilt sleep sounds, or 10 hours if you’re streaming over Bluetooth. That’s up from ten and six hours in the past. Again, more on that below.
Anker emphasises the importance of getting the right fit for maximum noise reduction and comfort, and to that end, there are more tip and wing options available than the previous model.
The buds ship with four different sizes of sealed silicone tips, three breathable tips, and three wings, so you can mix and match to find the combination that works best for you. The sealed tips block out more noise, the breathable ones are better for avoiding sweaty ears in hot rooms. Nobody likes sweaty ears.
Three small lights on the front of the case let you know when it or the earbuds are charging, and roughly how much battery life is left. The case can charge the buds five or six times before you’ll need to plug in the (USB C) cable.
Putting the buds back in their case to charge is a bit unintuitive the first few times: for me at least, it always felt like they needed to sit in the opposite direction. Fortunately they’re magnetic, so will satisfyingly snap into place when you do get it right.
There’s been a slight color change between models, with the charging case, buds, and tips switching from white to beige. The earbuds are slightly flatter than before, and the design of the wing and tips has changed to make the buds slimmer overall.
Other small quality of life improvements include an alarm that plays through the earbuds even if they’re not paired with your phone at the time, and a “find my buds” feature for tracking them down from wherever they’ve disappeared to during the night.
Fit and Comfort
Thanks to those extra tip sizes, I found it easier to get a snug fit with the A20’s than the earlier model. After experimenting for a while, I settled on the medium sealed tips for both ears: I could have got away with the large size in one ear, but it was slightly less comfortable.
Despite the new shape, inserting the earbuds works the same way as in the past. It takes a bit of practice to put the bud in (wingtip facing up) and then twist it 90 degrees anti-clockwise to lock it in place, but it feels normal after a few tries.
Once the buds were in my ear, they stayed there. Every morning during my two weeks of testing, I’ve woken up with the buds still firmly in place. I can’t say the same for every set of sleep earbuds I’ve tested over the years!
For front/side sleepers like me, the biggest issue with any kind of sleep buds is comfort. So many have promised the world, only to end up pressing too hard into the ear that’s resting on the pillow after a few minutes or hours and waking me up.
The A10’s were some of the best in-ear sleep buds I’d used as far as comfort goes, and I’m pleased to report that the A20’s are even better. That flatter design makes a noticeable difference, to the extent that I haven’t had any ear pain even after several nights of use.
I use a memory foam pillow that’s just on the softer side of medium, which helps a lot while wearing earplugs or earbuds like these. If you get pain while sleeping with something in your ears, a slightly softer pillow can make a big difference.
Noise Reduction
As I mentioned up top, there’s no active noise cancellation built into these earbuds, so you’re relying on passive isolation and whatever you’re playing at the time to help keep the outside world at bay.
I live in an inner-city neighborhood that can get noisy at weekends but is quieter during the week, which gives me a good mix of testing environments whether I like it or not.
I tried both the sealed and breathable tips on different nights, as well as wearing a single earbud, both of them, and a mix of an earbud in one ear and a foam earplug in the other.
Most of the time I relied on the, shall we say, ambient noise of my neighborhood to do my testing, whether that was people noisily leaving a nearby pub, garbage trucks rolling by, or the dawn scream chorus of Australian birdlife that I suspect I’ll never grow to love.
Using the best-fitting sealed silicone tips and a podcast playing at around 20% volume, enough outside noise was drowned out that it very rarely disturbed me. I’m a light sleeper at the best of times, so this was a distinct improvement.
Playing music or a soundtrack of people snoring (because of course that’s a thing) on a speaker beside my bed, however, and the limitations of passive noise isolation became more obvious.
The earbuds themselves reduced the volume of those sounds, but certainly didn’t eliminate them. To drown them out, I really had to turn up the volume of whatever I was listening to, to a point where that would keep me awake anyway.
In terms of comfort or noise, I didn’t notice a difference between having both earbuds in versus an earplug in one ear and an earbud in the other. If you think that might work better for you, there’s no harm in trying.
Unsurprisingly, the breathable tips didn’t do anywhere near as good a job of keeping the noise out. If you sleep in warm, quiet rooms, you might prefer them, but they didn’t do much for me.
App
Anker’s done a bunch of work in its Soundcore app to remind you that the A20’s are sleep-focused earbuds, although not all of the features are equally useful.
There are a bunch of preset equalizer settings, or custom ones if you prefer. You can also choose whether you want to play music all night, or have it switch to the inbuilt sleep sounds once you’ve fallen asleep.
It’s a good idea in theory, but I found it quite jarring in practice. Often, I wasn’t quite asleep enough when it triggered, and the switch from podcast voices to rain, crackling fires, or piano sounds was enough to wake me up again.
You can also configure what a double or triple tap on the side of the earbuds does, although I found myself turning it off entirely for my left ear. That’s the one that’s usually on my pillow, and it accidentally triggered just a bit too often as I moved around.
In a move that I wish every other manufacturer would copy, you can choose to turn off audible prompts when the battery level gets low or hits empty. When I’m sound asleep, I really don’t need to be woken up to be told that my earbuds have gone flat!
There are a few different inbuilt sleep sounds to choose from, or you can design your own from a wide set of samples. If you find the sound of thunderstorms or someone typing restful, you’re doing better than me, but some of the others were more relaxing.
There’s also a couple of “snore masking” sounds, which are really just white noise at different frequencies. They didn’t do much to block out the snoring sound track I mentioned earlier.
Finally, there’s a comprehensive set of tracking data, collected when the earbuds are connected via Bluetooth. As well as sleep and wake times, there’s a graph of light versus deep sleep, and even how many times you rolled over and which side you prefer to sleep on.
I wear a Fitbit to bed each night, so it was easy to compare the data between the two devices. There were some big differences, with the A20 consistently thinking I’d slept longer and more deeply than the Fitbit did, with little to no time spent awake.
I suspect the Fitbit is more accurate, partially because the numbers showing my “awake” time match when I remember being awake during the night, and partially because the Soundcore app tracked over 11.5 hours of sleep when I accidentally left my earbuds beside the charging case after I got up!
Battery Life
One of the most obvious upgrades in the latest model is the battery life. While I managed to get more than the official six hours of streaming out of the previous version, it was always touch and go whether the earbuds would last the entire night.
There’s far less to worry about with the A20’s in that regard: you’re now looking at ten hours of streaming, and up to 14 hours if you find those inbuilt sounds more palatable than I do.
In my testing, even those streaming numbers seem conservative: it hasn’t been unusual to wake up after eight or nine hours and still have half the battery life remaining.
I suspect that’s partially because I have the volume quite low, and also because I’ll only line up a couple of podcast episodes when I go to bed. Most of the time I’m asleep by the time they finish, so there’s only really two or three hours of streaming going on each night.
Audio Quality
While the A20’s are obviously designed as sleep aids, there’s nothing stopping you from using them as a normal pair of earbuds during the day. Nothing, that is, except for the audio quality.
Don’t get me wrong, these things are surprisingly loud at maximum volume, and sound perfectly fine for the kinds of music and other audio that you’re likely to listen to as you lie in bed counting sheep.
It’s just that small, flat buds with a 10+ hour battery life don’t have a lot of room left inside for large, high-quality drivers. If you’re looking for booming bass or impeccably sharp mid-range, you’re not going to find it here.
I’ve endured much worse sound even from general-purpose earbuds over the years, so I’m definitely not complaining. Just set your expectations accordingly, I guess.
Verdict
So, the big question after all of this is: do the A20’s actually help give a better night’s sleep? For me, at least, the answer is yes.
In most environments, they block out enough outside noise that it doesn’t stop me from falling asleep or jolt me awake at 3am. That’s helped by whatever I’m streaming into my ears giving me something else to focus on.
As with most things sleep-related, I think having a routine helps get the best out of these earbuds. In my case, that means I have two or three podcasts that I listen to when I go to bed, all of which are just one or two people calmly talking for an hour without music, sound effects, or other distractions.
They’re the most comfortable sleep earbuds I’ve used, and the only ones that haven’t given me even a little ear discomfort or pain after a week or two of using them every night. Battery life is impressive, and you should expect at least an entire night of use.
I don’t get a lot of value from the sleep tracking or inbuilt sound library, but other people might, and there are enough design and quality-of-life improvements from the previous model that even owners of the A10 should consider an upgrade.
The A20’s sold for just under $150 at launch, which is at the top end of what I’d consider reasonable for a set of dedicated sleep buds without noise cancellation.
Fortunately now, a few months later, it’s not unusual to find them discounted by at least 20% on either the Soundcore or Amazon stores, and sometimes more. At those sort of prices, they’re a much more compelling buy.
Recommended.
All images via author
