Soundcore Liberty 5 Pro Max Review: Wireless Earbuds With Enough Features to Make Your Head Spin

It seems like every pair of wireless earbuds has loftier ambitions nowadays. Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 are vehicles for real-time translation and heart rate monitoring; Nothing has integrated ChatGPT into its buds; researchers (and also potentially Apple) are working on cramming cameras inside wireless earbuds, which, needless to say, would open the door to quite a few features that we’ve never seen before.

As it turns out, Soundcore, a sub-brand of Anker, is also clearly very interested in elevating the form factor. Its newest pair of wireless earbuds, the $229 Liberty 5 Pro Max, is built from the ground up to do more than buds of yore. Like… a lot more.

Another Pro Max enters the chat

The Liberty 5 Pro Max—Soundcore joins Dell and Xiaomi in copying the iPhone’s Pro Max moniker—have a lot more going on than your typical pair of wireless earbuds. In addition to audio playback, the Liberty 5 Pro Max promise a few other features, including AI transcription and translation. Before I get into those, there’s something else worth addressing that you don’t see every day: a case with a screen.

Undoubtedly, the charging case with a 1.78-inch AMOLED display will be the first thing most people notice about the Liberty 5 Pro Max. I’ve tried other transcription earbuds with screens on them in the past and found them to be mostly frivolous and lacking, but I like the Liberty 5 Pro Max’s screen. It’s bright, smooth, and appropriately sensitive to touch inputs.

Swiping (which you can do in four directions) feels mostly refined and intuitive, and allows you access to all sorts of features inside the buds, including translation, transcription, noise cancellation modes, EQ, device connectivity, and settings. There’s also a battery readout and a menu that shows you what audio is playing. There were some failed inputs from time to time, though I don’t know if they rose to the level of aggravating. The swipe up to access the features menu could be smoother.

There’s an option to turn the case into a shutter button with a remote camera feature, which is interesting. You launch your camera app and then press the button on the charging case’s screen to take a picture. Most people will probably just opt for the timer on their phone, but I guess it’s an novel idea. There’s a slight delay, but it does work.

What’s extra nice about having a screen with so much functionality is that you don’t have to go into your phone and pull open an app to control your wireless earbuds. Yes, you still have to grab a device and navigate menus, but it feels like less of a liability than getting sucked into the vortex of apps, notifications, and other BS your phone offers. I will say that the case is fairly large, though, so if you’re not the type of person who can deal with a little more heft in your pocket, these aren’t the wireless earbuds for you.

Still, the case makes the Liberty 5 Pro Max feel like a distinct kind of device, which is apt since there is quite a bit you can do beyond listening to your favorite podcast.

More than meets the eye

As I mentioned, there are two banner features inside the Liberty 5 Pro Max: transcription and translation. To activate transcription on the buds, you have a couple of options, but the easiest is to just double-tap the back button on the case’s rear, which then uses its built-in mics to listen in. You can also navigate to the feature through the case’s screen if you like doing things the long way.

Once activated, you’ll see a simple UI on the front of the charging case with a pause button, the recording duration, a checkmark button to end the recording, and (my favorite) a flag button for bookmarking important parts of the audio file.

The result is pretty great. I recorded part of a lecture playing on YouTube as well as short conversations in real life, and both were captured and transcribed with a high degree of accuracy. I like that you can listen back to audio on the Soundcore app, and then it breaks each phrase into small chunks so they’re easy to digest. There’s also an “intelligent summary” that works for overviews of what the transcribed audio contains, though it does take a little bit to generate.

If I were doing an interview, I wouldn’t hesitate to use the Liberty 5 Pro Max for transcription, though I’m not sure that everyone will find the features useful. If you’re in meetings often, and you want to remember what you discussed, it could really come in handy. Or maybe if you’re a student who needs to parse lectures? Whatever your reason for recording and transcribing things is, the Liberty 5 Pro Max are a good way to do so.

Translation is also pretty seamless, though with some caveats. While other wireless earbuds with translation features rely on a phone in addition to the buds themselves, Soundcore incorporates its case. That means you can use the case as a microphone for someone to speak into and also use it to play the translated words you’ve said out loud. You speak into your phone with the Soundcore app activated, and then the case plays your translated phrase out loud. Whoever is holding the case can then press the microphone button on the front, and the translated phrase will either play on your phone or in your earbuds if you have them connected.

There are a few quirks with this method: one is that it’s not real-time technically; you have to press a button, say a phrase, and then wait for the translation to occur. It also means you have to hope that you’re in a low-ish volume situation where someone can hear the case audio, though I will say it plays fairly loud (and is adjustable via the case’s screen). I suppose if someone needed to, they could hold the case up to their ear, also, though that’s not ideal.

I tested the translation feature by speaking to my partner, who is bilingual (Spanish and English), and having her hold the case. The translation process isn’t lightning fast, but it’s quick enough, and it was fairly accurate. Having to press a button made things a little stilted—sometimes the microphone would activate a hair too late, and it would miss some words. It’s also imperative that you speak quickly because the microphone has a habit of turning off prematurely when you take a pause between words.

Still, it was mostly functional, even if I don’t think it was leaps and bounds better than using Google Translate or other purely phone-based translation methods.

Currently, there are dozens of different language types and varieties in the app, including English, French, Spanish, Japanese, German, Italian, Korean, Chinese, and Indonesian, as well as several variations of Arabic. There are also two different modes for translation: one is two-way, which I mentioned above, and the other is real-time/one-way, meaning it doesn’t translate your speech; it just translates a speaker as they say words and then transmits to your earbuds. This is a mode that I also tested by having my partner speak in Spanish, and it worked fairly well, though you do have to wait a beat for the translation to occur, so take “real-time” here with a grain of salt.

Overall, I was more impressed with transcription than I was with translation, but both are solid executions of features that could be useful to some people, though not everyone. Worth noting: both transcription and translation appear to rely on the cloud for processing; neither worked when I disconnected my phone’s internet connection. I’ve reached out to Soundcore to confirm whether or not there is a subscription for transcribing and translation audio and will update this review when I receive a response.

What about the normal earbud stuff?

At the end of the day, these are still wireless earbuds, which means sound is also important. The Liberty 5 Pro Max are not exactly the best-sounding earbuds I’ve used, but they’re still better than a lot of pairs.

I listened to the usual suspects like Steely Dan’s “Any Major Dude Will Tell You,” and was pleased with the soundstage, which did a good job of separating frequencies—vocals were clear, guitars weren’t muddy, and the low end felt present but not overpowering. Electronic tunes like Daft Punk’s “Da Funk” were also solid; drum samples had a sense of space, bass was punchy, and the gritty synths felt well-balanced in the mix. It was all solid, but I wasn’t blown away. The soundstage felt more cramped compared to high-end competitors like Sony’s WF-1000XM6 or Samsung’s Galaxy Buds 4 Pro, which is a bummer if music is the main reason you want new wireless earbuds, which I assume is the case for lots of people.

I, as always, highly recommend using the Soundcore app’s personalized EQ, called HearID, which tunes the wireless earbuds to your specific hearing. In this case, it amplified higher and midrange frequencies that I have a harder time hearing, and while it didn’t vastly change my opinion on the sound quality (good but not great), it did make everything a little easier to hear.

Speaking of pretty good, we need to talk about active noise cancellation (ANC), because the Liberty 5 Pro Max are fantastic at blocking out noise. As a test, I simulated subway noise at home by having my partner play subway sounds through a Bose Bluetooth speaker while I listened to music, and I could barely hear a damn thing. In fact, I had no idea how loud the volume was until I took them out and realized that it was actually hurting my ears. It was loud enough to send one of my cats fleeing and hiding under the bed, but at 70% volume, I was blissfully unaware. In fact, it was probably louder than the actual subway, and I had no clue.

Apparently, Anker’s new chip, called Thus, which is debuting in these wireless earbuds, is a big part of that improvement. Soundcore says it’s handling both ANC and ENC (environmental noise cancellation) for calls, which, as you might imagine, is also excellent. I called someone and played the simulated subway noise at high volumes, and they said they had literally no idea that I was in a noisy environment. They rated the call a perfect 10/10—if you need to take a call in a loud place, these are the wireless earbuds to do it with.

I think a big part of the ANC goodness is the fit. These wireless earbuds really get into your ear, which is great since it creates a tight seal. They also manage to remain comfortable while doing so. Whether its passive or active noise cancellation stealing the show, it doesn’t matter much to me—I can’t hear a damn thing when I have these buds in.

Features, on features, on features…

If there’s a downside with the Liberty 5 Pro Max, it’s that there’s almost too much going on. Normally, the excellent ANC would be the whole focal point of my review, but there’s so much else to wade through before you can really appreciate it.

Inside the app, there’s a whole host of other features that I haven’t even gotten to. There’s adaptive ANC, conversation awareness, which pauses the music when it detects your voice, and a transparency mode so you can hear yourself when your earbuds are in. Those all work well, especially the transparency, which I would describe as better than average—no tinniness like transparency modes from cheaper wireless earbuds.

There are all sorts of sound modes, like Dolby Audio, various EQ presets, custom EQ, and, as I mentioned, HearID, which personalizes the EQ to your hearing. My personal favorite is one called “AI Sound Enhancement,” which uses AI to upscale crappy audio. I used it on a Buffalo Bills podcast that I listen to frequently, which doesn’t always have the best audio quality, and it sounded cleaner and clearer. Dolby Audio, which is meant to add a sense of space to stereo tracks, I could do without, since I feel like it ruins the mix of music, but almost all of these AI spatialization features suck, so Soundcore isn’t alone here.

There’s also all the other standard stuff that the Soundcore app provides, like white noise and an Anker-branded chatbot called Anka, which I interacted with and wish that I hadn’t. No offense to Anka or Anker, but I don’t need an LLM shoehorned into my audio app for no reason. On the voice assistant front, one thing I did enjoy was voice commands, which actually don’t require a wake word.

You can say preset commands like “next track,” “play music,” and “stop music,” and the Liberty 5 Pro Max will pick them up. Soundcore says the Thus chip also comes into play here and vastly reduces latency in the wireless earbuds, actually executing the command, and the Liberty 5 Pro Max definitely feels snappy. There was very little downtime between yelling at my earbuds and them doing something, so if you’re a hands-free kind of person, these might be the pair for you. If you don’t like voice controls, there are also touch controls, which work fine, though I hate tapping on wireless earbuds that are in my ear because it usually feels uncomfortable.

There are so many features in these wireless earbuds that just when I thought I’d explored all of them, I found something else hidden in a menu. It’s a lot, though it’s hard to argue since most of them work well.

Battery life, by the way, is fairly solid. Soundcore says the Liberty 5 Pro Max get 6.5 hours with ANC on, and after an hour of audio playback at 60% volume, the Liberty 5 Pro Max dropped from 100% to 82%, which tracks closely with that estimate. Not the best battery life in the world, but no slouch either. The case has about 22 hours of battery life, and I didn’t notice a huge impact from using the screen, but I assume if you are always using the case screen for stuff, it could drain much quicker than earbud cases without screens.

Should you put money down for Pro Max?

There’s a lot going on in the Liberty 5 Pro Max, which is overwhelming, but a lot of it is good stuff. The ANC is incredible, as is the ENC for calling. The transcription works well, though it is maybe only for business people and students. The translation is solid, though maybe not more compelling than the AirPods Pro 3 or even just regular Google Translate.

The sound, to me, doesn’t excel to the level of greatness, which is a bit of a bummer considering these are still wireless earbuds, but it’s good nonetheless, and if you’re not a pure audiophile, that might not matter as much.

There’s a lot to like in the Liberty 5 Pro Max, and for an ambitious pair of wireless earbuds, I’m surprised by how many marks they hit. If ANC and calling are high on your list of priorities and you feel like you’d use transcription, the Liberty 5 Pro Max feel like an easy choice, even if that type of listener feels more niche than your average.