Soundcore Space One Pro Headphones Reviewed

I tested Soundcore’s Space One headphones back in January. I loved them for their clean design, pastel colour and reliable on-ear detection. Enter Space One Pro, with the tenacity to take every one of these things away and yet still somehow come out on top.

Soundcore kindly provided me with some white Space One Pro for this review, but they’re also available in black. I miss the Sky Blue of the Space One, but white is an acceptable compromise. While I think I would personally buy black, I tend to avoid making the obvious choice when I pick something to test. Might as well challenge myself when I’m not footing the bill, right?

The gamble paid off, since the white Space One Pro look great. They are, however, visually a complete departure from the design that attracted me to Space One. In fact, despite also being headphones, and being pretty good headphones at that, the only thing they really have in common is the name. Is this such a bad thing? Not necessarily, but I’d have preferred a Pro version in more than name only. Maybe I’m a little too partial to the Space One design… let’s give Space One Pro a chance!

The differences from their namesake run deep and there are certainly more upsides than down. For starters Soundcore have completely redesigned the folding mechanism – now dubbed “FlexiCurve” – to allow Space One Pro’s ear cups to be folded around and stacked on top of each other for compact storage. To accomplish this the hinges have almost 270 degrees of rotation and will fold flat into the center of the headband with the ear-cups facing each other and squishing down into a little bundle. It takes a couple of tries to get the hang of it – and indeed the Soundcore app even gives you a little tutorial when you first set up the headphones – but once you get used to it there’s no going back. If the stacked earcups are too thick for your bag you can still fold them up the old-fashioned way and tuck one earcup up with the other dangling in a sort of figure-eight configuration.

Either way the folding mechanism of the Space One Pro is a country mile from the chaos of the Space One, and while it’s much for muchness the mechanisms that fold with both ear cups facing each other the normal way around, it doesn’t necessitate quite as big and bold a hinge mechanism to accomplish.

As I alluded to above, Space One Pro also drop the wearing detection. The Space One had a single (infra red, presumably) sensor in the left ear cup which I praised as perhaps the least frustrating wear detection I had come across in a pair of headphones. In most cases my right ear tends to upset wear detection and I have to turn it off. Removing it altogether is a bold choice, especially when its inclusion is almost a forgone conclusion in all modern headphones. But is it a bad choice? For me, absolutely not. In fact one of my typical uses for the Space One (and now the Space One Pro) was lying down in bed, with the left ear up on, and the right ear cup slid backwards off my head so I could lie comfortably with my head turned to the side. I fell asleep listening to YouTube like this with the Space One Pro and woke up hours later to HBomberGuy’s Deus Ex video. It’s always that video for some reason!?

If you rely on wear detection, however, these are absolutely not the headphones for you.

Despite significant visual differences the controls and ports on the Space One Pro have managed to stay in roughly the same place as their non-Pro counterpart. The dedicated Noise Cancelling button – labelled NC – is positioned at the top on the left earbud, below this is the power button which also doubles as the Bluetooth pairing button. An indicator LED comes next, followed shortly by a 3.5mm socket and USB Type-C for charging. On the right ear cup is a large rocker button for volume control and, below it, a play/pause button.

Charging the headphones will disable Bluetooth functionality, and they don’t support audio over USB Type-C which is a shame. This would have been a nice Pro differentiator and a feature I might actually use.

Spot the difference

So what *does* differentiate the Pro? Other than the enhanced folding mechanism they boast a slightly longer claimed battery life with ANC off – 60 hours – and potentially better ANC. USB fast charging also joins the fray, with Soundcore claiming a whopping eight hours of runtime from just a five minute charge. That alone is a heck of a useful feature and makes these headphones feel like they should be a successor, rather than a complement, to the Space One. They seem to deliver on battery life, since I’ve run them on and off for the best part of a week without charging with 20% remaining- this includes multiple nights of falling asleep wearing them and listening to whatever nonsense I had on at the time. Though I did have ANC mostly off.

From the plastic edge of the cup to the outside of the headphone they’re also about 1cm thinner. At 288 grams (measured on my kitchen scales) they’re also a touch heavier, though you’d be hard pressed to notice this.

The foam padding on the cups is softer, too, making these a particularly comfortable pair of headphones. There’s no better test than falling asleep in them a few times!

Conspicuously missing from the Space One Pro are spoken status messages. Rather than the “Noise Cancelling” and “Transparency” that Space One speaks in a suspiciously computer-generated sounding voice, Space One Pro opt for some generic sound effects to differentiate the various modes. A good mnemonic for these – aside from being able to clearly hear the difference between noise cancelling, off and transparency – is that “Transparent” is a “ding dong” like a door opening and you inviting outside sound in… Okay that was a bit of a stretch. The sound for “Noise Cancelling” mode is a kind of reverberating harp strum. The power on sound has also changed from Soundcore’s signature “Doop doop doop dum” (which was also present in the Nebula Capsule 3 projector) to something that sounds more like a Zelda sound effect. It’s an odd choice, since I found the old sounds almost synonymous with Soundcore – a sort of audio branding – but I don’t dislike the new ones. In fact after some use the happy little ditties are growing on me, but are also making me want to play Tears of the Kingdom again.

Sound

All the trimmings are for naught if the headphones don’t sound good. So do the Space One Pro stack up? Well, if the Soundcore logo weren’t a dead giveaway already, yes, yes they do. You can expect the default settings to be pretty decent, if a little bassy. The “Soundcore Signature” EQ profile makes an appearance once again, but there are (many!) other presets to choose from and the ability to customise to your own liking with an eight band EQ.

You can also use HearID to test your hearing and personalise a profile automatically. This involves dragging around a slider until you can hear audio at various frequencies, followed by a preference test. The preference test is odd, it seems to be playing what I assumed was an AI generated song entitled “Make It Come True” which includes nonsense unintelligible lyrics that completely derail my brain from the A/B test.

Okay, stop the press a minute, someone from the BritSplits Discord found the song and it’s Make It Come True, written by a Chinese songwriter, sung by a Chinese singer. This certainly explains why the lyrics are completely bonkers. Here, you can enjoy it for yourself- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI5HTq1-8dM. It seems to go a lot harder in the full version than the short thirty second snippet used in the Soundcore app and I challenge you not to listen to it twice. The song seems to be the “2022 Global Campus Recruitment Song”, and I have no idea what that means but I need to find out.

Once I broke free of my ADHD descent into the origins of the music and slogged through the A/B test the resulting profile was notably different from my Soundcore Space One profile. It resulted in a sort of rolloff from low toward high frequencies with a distinct dip in the midrange. This is actually at least somewhat consistent with my hearing, but not necessarily with my preference – which is to reduce the bass frequencies somewhat.

It’s worth noting that calibrating the HearID through a haze of tinnitus and hissing in my ear is perhaps not optimal- if you’re prone to either of these things then avoid playing music for a good while before trying calibration, and wait for the tinnitus to subside (or your brain to filter it out).

Noise Cancellation

Due to their bulk the Soundcore Space One Pro have pretty decent passive noise cancellation. Combined with the adaptive active noise cancelling they perform extremely well, cutting out the sounds of the microwave and cooker hood fan in our kitchen almost completely. They also performed well against the air conditioner with its miscellany of noises.

While it was a slightly gimmicky feature in hindsight and one I never really used, Space One Pro have also lost the touch-for-pass-through from their predecessor. If you want to hear external audio you’ve got to fumble for the switch, take a headphone off your ear or give the “Easy Chat” feature a try.

Presumably “Easy Chat” is why the touch-for-pass-through feature is dropped. It’s actually an extremely good feature through which it’s possible to have a conversation. Speaking – albeit assertively (something I’m not great at) – will immediately reduce music volume and activate pass-through. This works effortlessly for conversations you initiate, with the timeout time being configurable between 5, 10 and 15 seconds, but is a little clunkier when someone talks to you. In my experience – and as a half deaf person I’m used to this anyway – just saying “huh” or “pardon” is enough to both activate pass through and, of course, immediately get a repeat of the question you couldn’t hear over Don’t Be So Serious blasting into your ears for the 50th time. Quieter non speech noises, like eating, didn’t seem to trigger Easy Chat, but coughing did.

Overall

Though some might lament the loss of ear/wear detection that doesn’t change the fact that the Space One Pro are a reasonably affordable – £150 – entry into the top end of Soundcore’s already strong lineup. Perhaps the excellent “Easy Chat” feature alludes to a pair of headphones you’re simply not supposed to take off. In this case it would be nice to be able to bind a long button press to toggling Easy Chat on and off, since it’s a nuisance if you’ve got a cough or are, uh, singing along…. Don’t be so seeeeriiiouuss, don’t be so seeeriiiiouuuuuuuuuuusss.

They sound just as fantastic as the Space One, and noise cancelling performance is still great, letting me drown out a low roar while I listen to Low Roar.

If I were to level one more complaint it would be that they’ve lost a lot of the design magic that drew me to the Space One, they are pretty bland and generic by contrast but also quite a bit more compact. I guess the phrase is: utilitarian. They don’t look bad, by any stretch, but they’re missing that visual spark. Others might prefer this lack of flamboyance and see the pared-back design as a plus- that’s okay, you’re forgiven.

You can pick up the Space One Pro from Soundcore directly, or grab a pair from your friendly local unstoppable unyielding megacorporation.

Thursday, September 5th, 2024, Personal Audio.