The EarFun Clip is the latest pair of earbuds from the Chinese manufacturer, which has won many awards over the years for its audio products. The Clip uses an open-ear design, which should be appealing for those looking to avoid typical in-ear models.

The EarFun Clip feature 10.8mm dynamic drivers with Bluetooth 6.0 connectivity and LDAC. They have a dual microphone design with AI background noise reduction and up to 10 hours of claimed battery life. All of it is in an interesting design that clips onto the back of your ears.

Design

True to their name, the earbuds have a clip-shaped design that is designed to lightly pinch your ears to hold them in place. The spherical portion with the driver sits in your ear, while the part with the electronics wraps around the back of your ears.

This novel design approach should ensure compatibility with almost all ear shapes and sizes. This is not always a given with earbuds, as they rely far too much on the shape and size of the concha to ensure a proper fit. This can result in the earbuds either not fitting inside the ear at all or falling out. The EarFun Clip bypasses this problem by not relying on the concha itself but rather the folds of your outer ear for support.

The inner and outer ear portions are connected by short, taut straps. These hook-shaped appendages also help while pulling the earbuds out of the case, making these by far the easiest earbuds to put in and out of the case that I’ve come across.

Each earbud has a physical button that sits on the part with all the electronics. This button conveniently points upwards once you wear the earbuds and is very easy to use compared to all the taps and gestures that other earbuds have.

The two earbuds are almost completely symmetrical, which can make them harder to tell apart at times. Thankfully, the right earbud has a red ring around the strap, which makes it easy to identify as long as you’re not in the dark.

Compared to the earbuds, the charging case has a much simpler design. The earbuds sit right up top, and even though they may seem identical, you can’t put them in the wrong slot. The exterior of the case has a somewhat boring gray color, and there is no other color available at the time of writing.

The overall build quality and finish of the earbuds and the case are good. The earbuds are also IP55 rated for dust and water resistance.

Comfort

The comfort of the EarFun Clip is excellent. Initially, you might feel a little pinch from the earbuds grabbing onto your ears like a pair of baby sloths. However, over time, this feeling fades away, and so does your memory of ever putting these earbuds on. The earbuds just become weightless after a while, and you don’t even notice that you’re wearing them anymore.

However, it must be said that putting these earbuds on can be quite fiddly. Unlike regular earbuds, which fit more or less in one specific way, the EarFun Clip offer a fair bit of latitude in how you can wear them. However, the earbuds don’t sound good in every position, so you have to keep messing around until you get the best fit and also the best sound, and this can take some time. You then have to repeat this process every time you put them on.

You also have to remember that something is sitting behind your ears. There were times I ran my fingers behind my ears and ended up hitting the module that sits there because I’m not used to anything being there. Having said that, I did not face any issues with wearing glasses with the earbuds on, so that isn’t something you would need to worry about with these earbuds.

The earbuds sit reasonably securely in your ears, and there were never any concerns of them falling out. In fact, these are generally more secure than traditional earbuds that sit in your concha without any support.

Software and features

The EarFun Clip are compatible with the company’s EarFun Audio app, available on Android and iOS. This is where you access and adjust all the features, as well as update the firmware.

The app has a variety of features on offer. Starting with the audio customization, you get an equalizer with a generous 10-band adjustment, as well as 22 presets. Not only can you create and edit your own presets, you can also enable one of the pre-made presets and have the exact tuning for that preset available on the custom EQ for you to fine-tune further. You can also generate a custom sound profile for your hearing based on a quick audio test.

EarFun Audio app

Finally, there is one additional EQ preset available, called the Fernanda Signature, which has been tuned by Indonesian audio reviewer Fernanda Gunsan. More on this later.

The app also offers a Theater Mode, which enables a virtual surround sound effect. This, however, locks the user out of the equalizer, for some reason. There is also a Privacy Mode feature, which just quickly drops the volume down so others around you don’t hear what you’re listening to. This feature can be assigned to the physical buttons on the earbuds for quick actuation, and I used it sort of as a transparency mode to quickly hear something around me. But even this mode locks you out of the EQ, and it’s not clear why EarFun thinks this is necessary.

Audio settings

The physical buttons can be customized with a variety of controls or can be disabled individually or simultaneously. One of the functions assigned by default to a single press is volume. This ended up being one of those frustrating but somewhat amusing things, as you could only press the buttons once to volume up or down and then wait. If you pressed it too quickly again, then it would trigger the double or triple press gesture. You also can’t press and hold because that would trigger some other gesture. And if you assign volume to press and hold, then it will still only make one increment and stop.

Other features include dual device connectivity, the ability to change the language and volume of the voice prompts, being able to reduce the max volume and change balance, adjusting automatic shutdown duration, and the find headphones function.

Other settings

Overall, the EarFun app is well-made and easy to use, and is one of the best of its kind, as it presents no pointless setup or login screens before being able to use it.

Performance

Audio quality

The EarFun Clip have 10.8mm dynamic drivers. Due to the open ear nature of these earbuds, the drivers have to work a lot harder, as there is effectively an infinite volume of air between them and the eardrum. The earbuds support SBC, AAC, and LDAC codecs over a Bluetooth 6.0 connection. They also use Bluetooth LE to maintain a connection with the app.

Being an open-ear design with no fixed sitting position, consistency can be an issue. As mentioned before, you need to fiddle around a bit when you put the earbuds on to ensure you are getting the best sound. This means you can get a different sound, not just between two different sessions but also between your two ears. This is an unfortunate downside of this design, and something you need to come to terms with.

Assuming you get the positioning right, the sound is challenging at best. Starting with the frequency response, the default tuning is very mid and upper bass forward, but tapers off on both ends of the frequency spectrum. This results in a very crown-shaped frequency response curve of sorts.

Starting with the bass, the lower bass notes are completely absent, as one would expect. The drivers are too small to move air sufficiently at those frequencies at the required amplitude for there to be audible sub-bass. This has always been an issue with earbuds and open-air designs, and the EarFun Clip weren’t going to be the first to rewrite the rules of physics here.

To make up for this, EarFun does what manufacturers always do in this situation, which is to bump up the mid-bass. Unfortunately, the company goes too far here, and the resultant boost in mid and upper bass frequencies makes the sound very honky and nasal, especially since it also spills over into the lower mids. This does terrible, unspeakable things to the timbre, which is all over the place.

The sound regains some of its composure in the upper mids and lower treble, but then tapers off towards the top. The top end is very dry and lacks the sparkle and air that would have taken the bottom-heavy sound into a clearer, cleaner direction.

The default tuning sounds a lot like listening to a small, inexpensive Bluetooth speakers, which typically have a similar crown-shaped frequency response that prioritizes mid-bass and lower-mids over everything else.

But then things get worse when you start playing with the volume slider. The EarFun Clip can only maintain its default tuning roughly up to 50% volume. This is likely where the small drivers start reaching the end of their excursion, as the bass just stops increasing with the rest of the frequencies when you increase the volume beyond this point. At higher volumes, you just have the mids and highs screeching in your ears while the amplitude of the bass frequencies is still at what it was roughly five volume levels ago.

This whole experience is not too dissimilar to phone speakers that also sound more full-bodied at lower volumes, but then dial back the low frequencies to not bottom out the drivers at higher volume levels.

The result is a very low usable volume level. The sound is simply unpleasant at volumes above 50% as it’s completely out of balance, as whatever little bottom end was there has also fallen off now. The notion of turning up the volume when you’re enjoying a track simply doesn’t exist with these earbuds, as you would physically cringe every time you do that because of what it does to the sound. Also, you’d better pray whatever you are listening to is loud enough by default; if the source volume is quiet, then you will have to face a tough choice of listening to a really low volume while preserving sound integrity, or increasing it till it’s audible and completely destroying it.

This wouldn’t be an issue if these were in-ear, but since they are open ear, the sound coming from the drivers is already competing with everything else happening around you, so being limited to a low volume makes things really frustrating.

But there is a reason I referred to the sound as challenging, and not bad. Being an open-ear design, especially one used by the EarFun Clip, has its advantages. The drivers can engage your outer ear to bounce sound around before it goes in your inner ear, much like sounds in the real world or from loudspeakers can do. This results in very impressive imaging and soundstaging, which is up there with full-sized headphones. Couple this with the earbuds’ innate ability to disappear in your ears, and it can almost feel like the sound is coming from around you rather than from inside your head, that too without any gimmicky spatial audio processing.

The EarFun Clip have a niche that they can play very well. Play something from the 70s, 80s, or the early 90s, and the tuning isn’t as much of an issue, and the inherent loudness of this loudness-war era music means you also don’t require higher volumes. And then just watch as the funky stereo effects from the music of this age come to life in their glory with the wide soundstage and image.

I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy myself using the EarFun Clip in this manner. However, this isn’t the most popular way to listen to earbuds anymore, and the moment I played something modern, the sound just fell flat and felt out of place.

Speaking of tuning, the EQ and presets can be used to great effect if you are willing to put some work into them. The Natural preset seemed like an easy fix, but I would recommend turning down the lower mid frequencies and turning up the high frequencies. As for the aforementioned Fernanda Signature preset, I can’t say I have anything positive to say about it, as it boosts the lower and mid frequencies and turns the high frequencies down, which is the exact opposite thing these earbuds need.

Microphone

The EarFun Clip have good microphone performance. Voices are a bit quiet but natural-sounding. There is a slight background hiss when you speak, but it’s not very noticeable or distracting.

The background noise cancellation is also good, and even with loud background noise, the earbuds manage to produce usable audio.

Thanks to the open-ear design, the earbuds feel quite natural when used for calls as you can hear yourself clearly. This, coupled with the good microphone performance, make them ideal for those who make a lot of phone calls.

Noise cancellation

The EarFun Clip do not have active or passive noise cancellation. Rather, they do the exact opposite and let in as much noise as possible. In that, they are also better than typical earbuds as they sit a fair distance away from the opening of the inner ear. There is only a slight attenuation of mid-frequencies with this design, but most of the sound comes through without being blocked.

I have to mention this, almost as a PSA, when covering such open-ear designs and their usefulness outdoors. While it is true that they let in ambient sound considerably more than in-ear designs, that sound can still get suppressed by whatever you may be listening to due to auditory masking. You could physically be able to hear that car honking at you, but your brain would be too distracted by what’s playing to notice. As such, don’t just assume you can wear them in public and turn your brain off, as you are still required to pay attention.

As for the sound leaking outside, I did not find it to be much of a concern with these earbuds. Sure, there is some audible sound next to you, especially in really quiet environments, but it’s not enough to be an annoyance. This is helped by the fact that you’d likely not be listening at a particularly high volume on these earbuds anyway due to the aforementioned issue.

Latency

The EarFun Clip have decent latency performance. By default, you may notice some delay in a latency-sensitive application. However, the game mode solves this completely, and it becomes really difficult to notice the delay with this feature enabled.

Connectivity

The EarFun Clip had excellent connectivity performance. The earbuds managed to stay connected without issues, whether used in single or dual device mode.

The earbuds offer the choice of using SBC/AAC or LDAC through the app. I wouldn’t bother using LDAC with these, as you aren’t going to notice any difference other than in the battery life.

Battery Life

Speaking of battery life, EarFun claims 10 hours with LDAC disabled and 5.5 hours with LDAC enabled.

In my testing, I got 9 hours and 6 minutes with AAC and 5 hours and 6 minutes with LDAC set to 660kbps ‘Balanced’ preset. Not quite the same as the claimed numbers, but close enough.

When tested after a 10-minute charge, I got 2 hours and 9 minutes with AAC and 1 hour and 27 minutes with LDAC. EarFun doesn’t advertise these numbers, so there’s nothing to compare against.

As mentioned before, it doesn’t really make sense to use LDAC with these earbuds, so I’d take the greatly enhanced battery life with it disabled.

Conclusion

The EarFun Clip are priced at $70, and there is a 25% discount coupon available at the time of writing on the EarFun website, which brings the price down to $52.50.

The Clip are reasonably priced, as is the case with all EarFun products, and especially compared to woefully overpriced rivals such as the $250 Sony LinkBuds Open. They also have a much more universally compatible design, unlike the Open, which did not fit in my ears at all.

The Clip also have a well-built design, nice clicky buttons, excellent app, good microphone performance, good latency performance, and decent battery life.

Unfortunately, the audio quality leaves a lot to be desired, even factoring in the limitations of this form factor. The default tuning isn’t great, and even if you were to fix that, you cannot get past the very limited usable volume range on these earbuds, beyond which the sound gets irreparably bad.

The EarFun Clip would be ideal for those who greatly dislike typical in-ear designs and want to prioritize spatial awareness over things like audio quality. If you just want something to play a podcast or carry a simple tune while you stay in touch with your surroundings, then these should do just fine.