With brands ditching the 3.5mm headphone jack, we can say that the wireless audio is the new normal. While there are plenty of options available in the market, true wireless earphones in Nepal are mostly either expensive or substandard to recommend.
Accurate, the brand though relatively new to the market, has done a commendable job in providing quality gadgets at affordable prices and we’ve covered some of their products in the past as well. The HX-03 TWS earbuds from Accurate was one such product. Now the company has come up with its successor — the AT-01 but is it a worthy upgrade? Let’s find out.
Design and Build
Build and design wise, not much has changed over the HX-03 as the earbuds themselves are almost similar. It’s the case that’s gotten a revamp with no physical buttons and a newer battery and charging indicator LED that looks amazing. The case gets a stronger magnet this time around which makes placing the buds back inside the case oddly satisfying.
The earbuds are powered by Bluetooth 5.0 onboard and it offers single and dual pairing that lets you switch between mono (old school) and stereo audio. The buds are very lightweight. And most of the time you can’t even feel them in your ears which makes it, needless to say, really comfortable and don’t fall off until you go full headbanging.
They are also touch-enabled so you can use them to perform a series of actions apart from just picking up and ending calls. You can use a single tap to play/pause, double-tap on the right earphone for next, double-tap on the left earphone for previous, hold to summon voice assistant.
Battery
Powering up the buds is a 40mAh cell on each and the case itself packs in a 400mAh battery, capable of fully charging them up to 5 times. The AT-01 TWS earbuds will give you approximately 5 hours of music playback with the volume maxed out. The case charges via Type-C port located to the back of the case rated to support 5 watts charging and takes a mere 45 minutes to fully juice up which is really great.
Audio
With all that out of the way, let’s get into the meat of the matter — i.e. the Audio. To answer it right away they sound really nice. The lows and the mids are well balanced but the highs can be overpowering, i.e. these are little inclined towards the treble. If you enjoy crisper vocals, the AT-01 will serve you well. Let’s just say that the 13mm audio driver inside the earbuds does its job.
Overall, the audio output via these earbuds is well balanced and there’s no static or creaking noise to ruin your audio-listening experience. Talking of noise, these earbuds feature noise reduction which cancels out most of the ambient noises for an immersive experience. The audio can distort a little bit at the maximum volume but it’s safe to say you won’t listen to music at full blast either — we found the sweet spot to be between 60 to 80%.
As compared to Samsung Galaxy Buds Plus for reference (bear in mind it costs six-times more than this), the AT-01 sounds nearly identical when you put the Galaxy Buds Plus on treble boost which is really praiseworthy, especially when we look at their pricing side by side. However, unlike the earbuds from Samsung, here we have no standalone app for tweaking the equalizer settings so if your audio player lets you fiddle around the equalizer settings, you can finetune the AT-01 to your liking.
Latency and Gaming
All thanks to Bluetooth 5.0, the latency is quite low and while watching YouTube, the video as well as the audio are in proper sync. Gaming can be a different story though, as we found the latency to differ between devices.
Testing the AT-01 TWS on the OnePlus 5T and Samsung Galaxy Note 9, we did run into some lag but while testing it on the iPhone 8 Plus, we experienced no lag and the latency was minimal. It’s kinda hit and miss on the Android side of thing, so if you are heavily into gaming, more so the PUBG, you might want to look onto other earbuds in the market. But again, there are not many options when it comes to affordable TWS earbuds that sound as good as this.
Verdict
With that being said, the AT-01 in entirety is a solid piece of TWS earbuds and a worthy upgrade from its predecessor — HX-03. And at the asking price of NPR 3,499, there’s not much you can complain about. The price alone makes these truly wireless earbuds from Accurate, totally worth it.