CMF’s clip earbuds hit the balance between cheap and good

Clip earbuds are an exercise in compromise. It’s an inherent aspect of their design — and physics. They can be more comfortable for people that don’t like something jammed in their ear, but sound response suffers. Ambient awareness is great because you can easily hear the sound around you, which means to hear your own music the buds need to be turned up and potentially leak sound out to your neighbors. For what they offer, they can also get pricey, with popular pairs from Bose, Sony, and Shokz reaching $200. The CMF Clip Pro, though, are under $100, and while they still have those compromises, they handle them well.

CMF is Nothing’s budget sub-brand, and because it tends to release earbuds in the $40–$60 range, I was expecting the same when I first heard about the Clip Pro. But instead, the Clip Pro are $99 — the same price as Nothing’s Ear 3A that just came out last month with more features (and also more issues). Only a few days after release and the Clip Pro are already on sale at $79, which puts them at the price I think they should be.

Comfort is the Clip Pro’s big advantage. The flexible band avoids any pinching around the helix, and I didn’t experience any discomfort with how the speaker orb or battery/control capsule sat in and behind my ear. A clip design is the best option for those that have trouble fitting earbuds in their ear canals.

Not having the sealed fit in your ear canals, though, affects the sound consistency, and I wouldn’t suggest doing any critical listening on the Clip Pro — or any clip earbuds, for that matter. Even so, the sound balance didn’t negatively affect my listening of my regular playlists and KCSN radio station app. By default, there’s a bass boost, which is necessary without a sealed fit but doesn’t cause the sound to be overly bassy (which other Nothing earbuds can be).

There’s a three-band EQ in the Nothing X app to adjust to taste, although as with other Nothing earbuds and headphones, the EQ can be tricky to use. Increasing a slider doesn’t always boost that frequency band, but instead lowers the other frequencies (increasing the bass, for example, actually brings down the mids and highs). It takes some getting used to and extra finagling. The Clip Pro support fixed spatial audio, which adds more space to the sound (I didn’t find it objectionable, but preferred the sound without it), as well as high-res audio over LDAC. The differences with high-res on an open-ear design are so minute, it’s not worth it, especially with any ambient noise around.

While listening to my radio app, the DJ’s voice could get difficult to understand during talk breaks with traffic going by. Boosting the volume can solve the problem, but it can also cause the sound to leak out to be heard by those close to you (benchmates on the bus or subway, for example). Turning on anti-leakage mode in the app cuts higher frequencies, but also adversely affects sound quality. The sound only leaks at high volumes, so it’s best to just turn them down.

There are multiple options for adjusting the volume in those situations, including directly from your device, with buttons on the capsules that rest behind each ear, or with a dial on the case (assignable in the app). The dial is also a button that can play and pause, skip forward and back, or call up your phone’s assistant.

There isn’t quite enough resistance to the dial, so at times while the case was in my pocket, volume would go up or down by a click or two. I ended up disabling the dial and either using the buttons on the earbuds, which work well although with a slight delay, or just pulling out my phone instead of the case. And with functionality disabled the dial becomes a great fidget toy.

The Clip Pro are pretty good with calls and don’t exhibit the buggy functionality I experienced with the Nothing Ear 3A, where the compression on my voice would drastically adjust based on the ambient sound when I started talking. The noise gate is still very aggressive to filter out any surrounding sound and can clip the very end of a word, but when I was speaking at normal volumes while walking down the street, my wife was able to understand me easily. Soft-spoken people might run into issues, though. When I spoke quietly, I sounded very muffled and it took her lots of concentration to try and figure out what I said.

That call quality epitomizes the CMF Clip Pro, and it’s the same with their sound. The earbuds are good at what they do under the constraints of the technology. And their comfort, along with their price, make them great when you don’t want something deep in your ear.

Photography by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge