It’s tough finding a pair of wireless Earbuds that have premium features, good build quality and decent audio. Enter Urbanista with their budget option in Urbanista Stockholm Plus wireless earbuds. Yes, people can and do go to the shadier corners of eBay for knock off Air Pods for under £50 for cosmetic gratification, but the end result is a half working product with poor performance. Here are some specs for Stockholm Plus:
Looking the Part
Stockholm Plus come in a satin finish (At least the midnight black buds did) which screams premium and work straight out of the box. I was up and running in seconds. The syncing process is incredibly user friendly. Simply insert then take the buds back out of their charging pod to enable sync. The right buds blue LED will flash indicating they are now discoverable via Bluetooth.
The one thing missing from the day to day operation of the buds is a companion app to give charge info and maybe some extra sound settings. The charging pod holds around five full charges, indicated by five LEDs on the front of the casing. The buds are held magnetically in the case when charging, adding to it’s premium feel.
I Wanna Hold You But I Better Not Touch…
Stockholm Plus supports gestures such as volume up and down, answering calls, using a devices assistant such as Google and more. The issue is with its implementation. For example, adjusting the volume up is one tap of the right bud, with volume down being a tap of the left. This can easily be mixed up with pausing/skipping a track if done quickly. A slide gesture would have been much more convenient in this scenario.
Remembering that certain gestures are mapped to a different bud can sometimes be a little confusing to remember in practice. For around £100 cheaper than a premium set of earbuds, however, this is a small price to pay.
Quality Matches The Price
The microphone serves as good as any in calls or speaking to a voice assistant. There were no noticeable dropout or distortions during testing. Stockholm Plus earbuds are a nice fit when sitting inside the ear, with the elongated charging stems anchoring the bud at the right angle.
The sound quality of the buds 12mm drivers isn’t going to blow anyone’s mind, featuring spots of hiss when listening to higher frequencies. Mid and high tones are represented with zero distortion on higher volumes, but fans of anything other than pop and standard jazz will be missing those juicy bass scoops found in higher grade buds.
