Shure already had a great pair of headphones with the Aonic 50 but they kept innovating. Tech expert and audio fan Dave Taylor checks out the new Shure Aonic 50 Gen 2 ANC Headphones and finds quite a lot to like. From the excellent build quality to the wicked cool battery life to, of course, the great sound and flexible EQ tuning through the ShurePlay app, these are definitely a pair of headphones to check out. They are, however, a bit pricey...
Check them out at: https://amzn.to/42ahUVi
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This is the second generation of a great pair of headphones
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Let's check these out. Dave Taylor here, and I'm checking out these
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These are the Sure Ionic 50 Gen 2 ANC headphones. The second generation of headphones that I have already really liked and been very impressed with
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What they've significantly added is even better sound. I'll get to that in a second
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Much longer battery. life and just their build quality and everything, they're just really nice headphones
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Now, they're powered by 50mm dynamic drivers giving you 20 to 22,000 hertz frequency response
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That's probably better than I can hear. I'm guessing it's possibly better than you can hear
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And 97.5 decibels of sensitivity, they have a big, rich, lush sound
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They also have a built-in DAC and amplifier, and one of the things that gives you is it gives
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the ability to enable something called spatialized audio. And that's really interesting because what they've tried to do is simulate the experience
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the sort of positioning in three-dimensional audio experience of having really good speakers in
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your room. So, you know, instead of having the headphones have a different type of sound, you can enable
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this spatialized audio and get something that sounds a little bit more like you're listening
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to speakers. Very cool. They're also high-res. So they give you lots of different listening options
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If you use the included USB cord, you can actually get to high-res audio
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which gives you a PCM of up to 32 bits or 384 kilohertz
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So that's a huge amount of data that it's pushing if you have a source that can supply that much audio
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So what that gives you is just more crispness, more details, more sort of spatial experience and everything
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Very cool. Now, I generally use these sort of headphones wirelessly, and these are powered by Bluetooth 5.0
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Not exactly the very latest standard. That's 5.3, but still, it's going to give you better connectivity, longer range, less breakups, less issues with static or anything with the Bluetooth connection
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All of that should basically never happen to you with Bluetooth 5. and in terms of codex, it has APTX Adaptive, APTXHD, and AAC among its many codex
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So it's going to give you the best possible sound from whatever Bluetooth source device you're using
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Obviously, super cool. Also has Adaptive ANC, and they have something that they call Max Aware, which blocks noise but lets voices come through
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Not a huge fan, but it's something that. might be useful for you in some environments
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You could have a conversation on the subway, for example. Now, in terms of comfort, you saw I just put these on
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and they're pretty darn comfortable. Some people have said that the ear pieces
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and I will point out that these are closed back over the ear Some people have said the ear pieces are a little small but honestly I have pretty big ears and these are pretty comfortable They are on my ear They not the design where it goes over your ear
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That's a whole different kind of headphone. But they are a little bit tight for me
3:29
and that's just because they're shiny and new. And I'm sure the more I wear them, the more they will just give just a tiny bit
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so that you can listen at longer and longer periods. And that's pretty common with headphones. I find a lot of
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headphones, they come out of the box and you can see they want to do this and then you're pushing them into this and so they sort of have this tendency to want to go back to be closed, but over time that sort of gives a little bit on this part of the headphone. This is exactly how they're supposed to work. So from an audio perspective, it gives you six microphones and it has a touch sensor. So I just touched it and it started playing the music on my paired eye
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phone. Now, sure doesn't just do Bluetooth pairing. There's an app for that. So Sure has an app called, what is it called? It's called SurePlay. So I'm going to show you just a tiny bit of how that works because it's pretty cool. I have it on my app and this is the SurePlay app and you can see the headphones are paired and it gives me the ability to adjust ANC level. Here's that max aware option. I like to have my ANC pretty high
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because I like to be able to tune out environmental noise, your mileage may vary
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You can choose your environmental mode level. There's lots of options here with spatializer
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I can turn on music specializer, and that's different to EQ, remember
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And in fact, if I want to go to EQ on the bottom, I just choose Equalizer
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and you can see here are all these built-in different versions or different sort of balances
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Or I can go to manual. In fact, let's turn EQ on
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And now I can go and actually tweak it myself for my favorite preference for hearing
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Or I can just do something like, you know, I like loudness
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It's just a simple way to get even more bass out of these. And then I can go and it can give you music control
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So I can go here and we will, let's see, turn to stone by Electric Light Orchestra
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and they get pretty darn loud too, so I'm going to turn that volume down a little bit
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In fact, let me pause that because you don't want to watch me listening to music
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And then you can get to some settings for the app too. And most importantly, this is where you can check to make sure you have the latest version of the firmware
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Let's go there. and it just makes it really a breeze. But honestly, if you don't want to deal with the app at all
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you can also just pair these with your musical source device and then just enjoy them
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And they really sound nice. Now, let me give you a quick tour
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All the controls are on the right-hand ear cup, and at the bottom is USBC for charging
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and for USB audio connectivity And then there the power and Bluetooth pairing button volume up and down the multi button in the middle I come back to that in just a moment And then that ANC slider at the top And then on the left side there actually a 2 millimeter jack because they also include a cable that is 2 millimeter to 3 millimeter
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It is a hard case. It's not as horribly chunky as most hard cases, which is nice
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and if I open it, I will, oops, I think it was open
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If I open it, then we can see it includes two cables
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So this is the charging cable that's USBC to USBA. The USBC is the part it cares about
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If you don't have USBA on your device, just use a USBC to USBC cable, easy enough
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And then this is the audio cable that is 2.5 millimeter to the much more standard 3.5 millimeter
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So this you can plug into a wide variety of devices, probably including your television
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So it's another possibility. Not super long. This is only 61 inches
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So if you did want to listen to your TV, you might need an extender. But your TV also quite possibly has Bluetooth
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Mine does. And then they also include this great Quick Start guide and sure has just done just for years
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Such a fantastic job with their documentation. And let me just show you
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I talked about that multi-function button. Here's a quick cheat sheet on the kind of things you can do with your single and double and triple pushes and holding that button down and such
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It might be a lot to remember. You can always control things on your source device if it's something like your phone
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So where that gets us to is it gets us to the sound
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But let me give you one more data point is that the battery life on this
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the Generation 2 they gave it a ton more battery life. it's 45 hours of playback with ANC
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Usually when you get this battery life, it's like, oh, but if you turn on ANC, then it's like 30% less
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This is 45 hours with ANC on the whole time. If you're flying that long, then you have literally circled the globe and ended up where you started
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So probably better ways to spend 48 hours than that, but 45 hours of playback, if it's completely dead
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then 15 minutes of charge will give you an additional five hours of
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playback. So if you are three quarters of the way around the world and your phone say, oh, I'm out of
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battery, then you can plug them in for 15 minutes and get the rest of that leg there. So very nice
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So let's talk about sound. And I have to say, I really like the sound of the Sure Ionic 50
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It's a very warm sound and there's a significant sound stage, especially if you turn on some of
9:20
those spatialized audio features and stuff. It's pretty crazy. It's very, very
9:24
interesting but mostly it just has a really nice sound they're very listenable and you can go and mess
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with the app and get whatever EQ settings you want so you can just make it all rock but it just works
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really well and it's definitely really some of the nicest sounding headphones have heard in a while
9:45
and that max ANC that is really nice in a noisy environment and I often in noisy environments And I always have this disconcerting experience where I be in a noisy environment I have headphones with
9:56
really good ANC. So it's essentially like I'm in a quiet room with my own music. And then I take
10:03
them off and suddenly it just seems so loud. All that background noise that has been cut out for me
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by these headphones or similar devices all just comes rushing back in. And for those first two or three
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seconds, I'm like, wow, it's loud. What the heck? And then I realize, ah, well, this is just my brain
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compensating for all this environmental noise. But it also sort of reminds us, if you have the
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similar experience, how noisy our world is. We have hums and buzzes and vibrations and vehicle
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sounds and airplane sounds. There's just so much in the world around us. There are times I just
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turn on ANC and put on headphones with no audio at all just to have a little peace and quiet
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And these do a great job with that too. And you could do that for 45 hours. So I'm not sure
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they'd be comfortable to sleep in, but otherwise they are very comfortable. They have a great
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build quality. And one of the things I find interesting is that you can turn the headphones to
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store it. But that actual hinge there is actually pretty tight. It's not intended to be
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like a comfort hinge so you know do that and push these in and it'll fit right into
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this hard case and you'll be ready to go so lots to like here really great
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headphones a really great upgrade for sure from the original first-gen aonic 50
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but we need to talk about the price because they are fairly spendy before we
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get there I'm going to invite you to subscribe to my channel click on
11:40
subscribe click on that bell icon to get notice notifications, we're connected. Great. Now, give me some feedback. Thumbs up if you found this to be a valuable video or review and comments. If there's something else you wish I would have demoed or talked about, then go ahead and tell me in the comments. I respond to all comments. That's a job. But that's my job. So, these are the sure Ionic 50 Gen 2 ANC headphones and they are $349 at Amazon.com
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It is pretty spendy for a pair of headphones, but I promise if you get these, you're going to really like them, and you're not going to be shopping for new headphones in six months
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So, great build quality, great sound, great ANC, lots to like here
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That's all I got. I think I'm going to go back to my own music, so I'm going to get these back into listenable position
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And by the way, there's a big R and a big L, so you know which way and how to orient the headphones, which is handy
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and that means I'll have to catch you in my next video
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