I now have opinions on Sleeping Ear Buds
In the last year I’ve needed to mask or block out various noises, either snoring from my beautiful wife or music from my less than beautiful neighbors that have no concept of sound ordnances. Using regular ear plugs means completely sealing my ear, giving me complete silence. Sounds like it should be the goal right? The issue is that i have tinnitus in both ears and that nearly complete silence just ramps it up to 11 and then that’s all I can focus on instead of going to sleep. Rest is not easily gained with this state of being. I had some great tiny ear buds that I figured would work for sleeping and they turned out to be very effective at what I was aiming for. The issue here was that the ear buds were slim, the white noise app I was using sounded awesome on them, but they only lasted about 6 hours, then made a pretty loud beeping noise as they died a noble death. This was not all that great for sleeping, so off to Amazon I went to find long last ear buds!
Soundcore A20i for $20
These were the first that I tried, they have long life, they sound great, and they’re just $20! The problem is that they are not as flat as I need them to be for sleeping and it hurts to try to sleep in them. I was in for a penny though, so now I was determined to figure out how to do this the right way and went all in on the next pair.
These are the Soundcore Sleep A20 and they are an eye watering $150, which is an absolutely obscene amount of money to pay for ear buds. Yes I know premium brands like Apple, Bose, or Beats have them for more than twice this price, but that’s never made scence to me at all. I bit the bullet though and boy howdy was I happy I did, because these things are damn near perfect for my use case. They’re slim, they have a great ear feel, the sound is amazing, and to top it all off they have an app that’s dedicated to sleep stuff, so if you want more than just white noise, there’s dozens of options, including gentle alarms! Even more, you can set them to dummy mode where they don’t use bluetooth at all, just the sounds you selected prior to disconnect! I have no complaints about them at all, which is just shocking.
Well…no complaints about the ear buds at least. That case is very confusing to try to figure out when I first wake up. It’s a perfect circle, so you have to feel around for the side that slides back, which again it’s a circle so it’s not clear. Also, the ear buds fit oddly in that circle, so sometimes I’ll just not put them away at all until after I’ve woken up and done all my morning routine and I’m more alert. The case is so annoying that if I see they change the type of case I might just spend another $150 to get a back up pair.
