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Ready to upgrade to good sound, good ANC, and lots of battery life? You'll want to learn more about the Monolith from Monoprice M-TWE Hybrid ANC Earbuds. Tech expert and audiophile Dave Taylor explores the new M-TWE earbuds, talking about the best features and some of the design oddities you'll want to know about before you buy a pair. Also includes an audio recording demo and SoundID app usage.
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Cool earbuds, good ANC, but some quirks
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Let's check it out. Let's check it out. Let's check it out. Let's check it out. Let's check it out
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Let's check it out. Let's check it out. Let's check it out. Let's check it out. Let's check it out
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Dave Taylor here, and I'm checking out these. These are the Monolith by Monoprice
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M-T-W-E-A-N-C earbuds. I suppose I should take one out so you can see what they look like
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They have what's called a button design, so it sits in your ear
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and then the end of it is actually a tiny little touch panel that gives you access
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to various tap and swipe controls. We'll come back to that. Let me tell you about them
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So, they're powered by 10 millimeter neodymium drivers, which give you a solid 20 to 20,000 hertz
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They're running Bluetooth 5.0, which is good stuff. Look for that Bluetooth 5.0
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because it gets rid of all of those annoying left doesn't know about the right or any of that stuff
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It gives you more reliable connectivity to the source device and better range
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All good. They support aptX and AAC, so you're gonna get the best possible sound
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out of Android, Windows, Mac, iPhones, iPads. Whatever you're gonna pair this with
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you're gonna get really good sound. Hybrid ANC, also really good. Active noise canceling is a great thing
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but it's also great to be able to temporarily turn it off
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if you're, for example, on an airplane and the flight attendant has just walked up
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and asked what beverage you'd like. To do that, you tap and hold for just a couple of seconds
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on the touch surface, and then it tells you ANC off, and you can hear all that background noise
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suddenly comes back. You talk, you have your conversation, you tap and hold it again
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all the background noise goes and diminishes again, ANC for the win, and you're back on your listening
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10 hours of playtime on the earbuds, two more charges on the case
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It's a little bit big as cases go, but not horribly so
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It gives you 30 hours of listening, and if you put it in for five minutes
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you're gonna get another hour of charge. On the back is USB-C, and that is how you charge it
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no wireless charging, and it does have indicator lights on the earbuds to give you their battery level
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and then on the case, there's one tiny LED that has different flashing sequences
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to show you how charged it is. That's one of my least favorite features
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particularly when you're charging it and you have it like this, there's no indication on the outside
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that it's charging or that it's fully charged. I would much prefer to see a bunch of LEDs on the front
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that give me a quick and immediate visual feedback on what's going on with that charge level
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Now, with these as earbuds, if you wanna use them for a phone call or something
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that's totally fine. They have built-in microphones, and they're using the Qualcomm CVC 8.0 circuitry
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which gives you echo cancellation, and it will drop the ambient noise down
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so your voice stands out a little more. I'm gonna give you a demo of that in just a second
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Works pretty well. The reality is is this style of earbud has a long way to go to get your voice
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because your voice isn't projecting like that, your voice is projecting forward
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So I found I had to talk fairly loud for it to work. Most interestingly, they use an app called Sound ID
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and I would show you and demo you that on my phone, but it's interesting
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because if I have Sound ID running, and I have my phone, this is an iPhone 13 Pro
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if it's recording the screen, then the sound turns off. Never experienced that before
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Soon as I turn off that recording, the sound comes back, and everything works perfectly well
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So there's something quirky going on there. I can, however, show you some screenshots
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So here is Sound ID on its home screen, and you can see you start out by doing a sound test
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to sort of have it fine tune what you like to hear, and that's pretty interesting
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It's much like being at the optometrist where you have A and B
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Which one sounds better, A or B? And you can switch back and forth, pick the one you like, go to the next pair
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and then when you're done, it's built a personalized sound profile for you, and that works pretty well
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You can go and do a personal EQ. I found that to be pretty clumsy
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and it literally only gives you bass and treble, so there's not like six or 10
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or however many different areas you can sort of fine tune what you wanna hear
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because the app's really designed to sort of do that for you. Now, you can also go in
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and look at the characteristics of your earbuds, and because Monolith signed up with the app company
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then it knows about these particular units, and it can also give you some tutorial information
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That's pretty slick. So, let me actually put them in. And it says power on
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You turn them just gently to get them to fit properly in your ear
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That's the left one, and the right one says power on, and they're both good to go
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And now, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to, first off
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confirm that it's working, because you never know. I'm gonna just play some music super quick
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Soundtrack from Stranger Things. Pretty sweet sound there. I'll come back to the sound in just a second
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but what I wanna do is I wanna demo how it picks up my voice. So, I'm gonna switch audio
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and now you're hearing my voice as recorded through these on my phone
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and you can hear it sounds pretty darn different, and I'm talking a little louder than I was
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just to make sure it picks me up. So, with that in mind, let me switch back to the regular microphone
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And I find the sound to be okay, but like I said, I actually feel like
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I have to talk a little louder for the person on the other end to hear me. That was my experience on some phone calls and such
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which is really sort of characteristic of this design style. One of the advantages that designs
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like the Apple AirPods Pro or AirPods have is by having that stem coming down
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they put the mic near the end, and it's better at picking up your voice
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So, that's just something to know. But I find most people that have these sort of units
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end up listening 99% of the time, and they're on like a quick phone call
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and if it's something they need to be on for a while, they'll either find an environment
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where they can talk louder, or they'll just switch to talking on their phone directly
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And all of that's super easy to work with. Now, they're also IPX4 water-resistant
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so don't swim with these. That'd be a bad idea anyway. But if you're out for a run and you end up having it rain
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or you're a little sweaty or something, that's okay. They stay in pretty well, not fantastically
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but I found that they definitely were fine in terms of me walking around
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and doing various chores around the house and such. I never had an issue with getting loose or falling out
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So, let's talk about what's in the box, and then I'm gonna come back and talk
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just a little bit about that touch interface, because that's something we should explore
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So, the box, it's a very nice design, very easy to work with
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And on the top here, it tells you that you have a charging cable and soft pouch
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So, let's see what's in here. Like I said, it's a USB-C charging
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so we expect a USB-C charging cable, and it feels like it's inside the pouch
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So, this is sort of a soft fabric pouch, not a mock leather or anything
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I'm not sure who needs a pouch when they have something like this, because I feel like the case is gonna be
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what you're gonna travel with by itself. Here's that USB-A, the rectangle
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to USB-C charging cable. Obviously, very important, though honestly, you probably already have a bunch of them
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And then here's a set of ear tips. It comes with five different sizes of ear tips
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So, let's see what those look like. So, there's already one on the earbuds
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and unusually so, the default ones actually worked just fine for me
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I usually find I have to go to larger sizes, but this one works fine
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And then in here, you have extra small, small, large, and extra large
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So, these, the default ones, are the mediums, which makes sense. So, you have all those different choices
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Take the time to find the right ones for your ears, because that will make a significant difference
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with the A and C in particular, but it will also bring out a lot more bass
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There's a very nice looking manual that also shows you how to use the app
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So, that's everything in the box. Let's sort of pack things back up a little bit
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You can tell why I don't work in their factory, packing up boxes, but that's okay
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So, that's what we got, and these are the earbuds. So, two things I wanna talk about now
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is number one, I wanna talk about the touch interface, because it works pretty well
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And here's a little cheat sheet, so you can see some of the things you can do when you're listening to music
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But what's missing? Do you notice? There's no next and previous track
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I don't know what that's about. I don't know why they didn't design it that way. So, since you have that swipe up and swipe down
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to adjust the volume, I'm not sure why they didn't do swipe forward and swipe back to change tracks
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It might be that there just isn't that level of granularity on the sensors
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but something that would let you change tracks would be reasonably nice
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Now, to be entirely fair, when I have these sort of earbuds in my ears
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I almost never actually touch the earbuds. I just use the source device
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because that's generally just a foot or two away. But if you want all those controls
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you should know that it doesn't have next and previous track. Awkward
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Now, the other thing to talk about is the sound quality, and I found they sounded really good
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They have a big, rich sound, and you get, you know, certainly with my sound signature
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designed from Sound ID, I got a lot of bass. You know, when I was just listening
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to the Stranger Things soundtrack, man, it is a big, rich sound
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But there's a little bit of detail I found was missing. It's a little hard to sort of quantify this
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but there's a precision and clarity that you get on really high-end earbuds and really high-end headphones
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that these just felt a little bit were lacking in that area
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Now, for most people, I'm sorry, for the vast majority of people
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is totally not anything you'll ever notice. You'll put these in, you'll crank up your tunes
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you'll say, man, these sound great. Then you'll turn on the ANC and they'll sound even better
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and that's great. So, good soundstage, good experience of listening, there's a nice spatial sense to them
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they're comfortable, they're, you know, certainly comfortable for listening for hours, and that 10 hours of charge per earbud is pretty sweet
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So, there's lots I like about these. There's a couple of those quirks, like I said
11:02
I don't understand the previous Nextrack lacking, and I don't understand how they designed
11:08
the little LED feedback light for your charge level, but really, those are the biggest things
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Other than that, these are a solid option, which means we need to talk about the price
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But, before we get to the price, I'm gonna ask if you could subscribe to my channel
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Really appreciate that. Click or a tap on that subscribe button, and we're connected, great
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These are the Monolith by Monoprice MTWE ANC earbuds, and they're $99, no, actually right now when I checked
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they're down to $83.99 at Amazon.com. These are a solid option in the sub $100 price range
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the ANC works really well. If you're gonna spend a lot of time on phone calls
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you might wanna look at some other possibilities, but otherwise, if you're just looking for a really good audio experience with solid ANC
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these are a definite contender. That's all I got, I think I'm gonna go back
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to Stranger Things, which means I'll have to catch you in my next video
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