OnePlus Nord Buds 3 Pro review

The OnePlus Nord Buds 3 Pro are the company’s latest true wireless earbuds. In case you are wondering if you missed out on a non-Pro Nord Buds 3, you didn’t. That’s just how OnePlus names things sometimes, where the Buds 3 follow a non-existent Buds 2 and the Nord Buds 3 Pro follow the Nord Buds 2. There will probably be a Buds Pro 3 at some point but we will cross that convoluted bridge when we get there.

The Nord Buds 3 Pro are from the most affordable of the three series of earbuds that the company currently has, signified by the Nord badging. The Pro moniker is supposedly for the quality of the ANC, where the company claims to have included a flagship-level solution that suppresses up to 49dB of noise. Aside from that, these are a fairly basic set of earbuds with no special features or codec support.

The codec bit is important, as the Nord Buds 3 Pro are, for all intents and purposes, rebranded Oppo Enco Air4 Pro with the LHDC support removed. Not having to license the codec is likely how the company can price the Nord buds cheaper as otherwise, the two are identical on paper.

At £79 / €79 / $79.99 / ₹3299, the Nord Buds 3 Pro are affordably priced, but we will have to see if they are worth the money.

Design

Since the Nord Buds 3 Pro are essentially the Oppo Enco Air4 Pro, the design is identical down to the last millimeter. You get the same soap-shaped charging case with a two-tone finish and a new color, Soft Jade. Both feature a speckled finish on the lower half of the case. The bottom of the case has a pairing button and a USB-C connector for charging.

The charging case is well-designed with an attractive look and a good finish. The build quality is decent although, unlike the earbuds, there is no ingress protection on the case.

Speaking of the earbuds, they have a standard shape with stalks that hang outside your ears. The stalks have an interesting tear-drop shape that gets wider as you go further down. The back of the stalks features a touch-sensitive area for touch gestures.

The inner side of the earbuds has a capacitive area that activates when in contact with skin and is used for wear detection. The earbuds have L and R symbols carved into the casing, making them act like vents for the driver within. There seems to be a grille on the inside so stuff like earwax won’t just fall in. And yes, the earbuds are IP55 dust and water-resistant.

The Nord Buds 3 Pro earbuds are very light and compact. The soft silicone ear tips are easy on the ears and you can wear them for hours without discomfort.

Software and features

The Nord Buds 3 Pro pair with Android and iOS devices using the HeyMelody app. Those using OnePlus smartphones or tablets do not need the app as all functionality is built directly into the Bluetooth settings of those devices.

HeyMelody app

The app allows you to adjust all of the features available on the earbuds. You can change your ANC settings, including picking between three levels of intensity and an automatic Smart mode. There is also a personalized noise cancellation feature, which assesses your current ambient noise level and ear shape and creates a custom ANC profile.

You also get an equalizer function with three preset profiles. The so-called Balanced is the default along with Serenade which emphasizes mid-frequencies, and Bass. If that wasn’t enough bass, there is also a BassWave feature, which lets you increase as well as reduce the bass frequencies. Finally, there is a six-band EQ with the option to create multiple custom presets that are saved on the earbuds and available on any device you pair them to.

Connections and EQ

You can also customize the touch gestures with options available for double, triple, touch and hold, and long touch and hold. Not all options are available for all gestures and the single tap gesture can only be assigned to play/pause and is disabled by default. The touch gesture area on these earbuds is fairly small so it’s difficult to hit accidentally but works fine when you intend to use it.

Gesture controls

You can also manage all of your paired devices. The Nord Buds 3 Pro support being paired to two devices at a time and can switch automatically based on the output. Finally, there is also a game mode option if you are in the HeyMelody app, which claims to reduce latency. On OnePlus devices, there is no manual toggle and the mode is automatically enabled when the device detects a game being launched.

Performance

Audio quality

The Nord Buds 3 Pro utilize the same hardware as the Oppo Enco Air4 Pro. You get a single 12.4mm dynamic driver and Bluetooth 5.4 connectivity. However, while the Oppo model features SBC, AAC, and LHDC 5.0, the Nord Buds 3 Pro only have SBC and AAC.

The Nord Buds 3 Pro are mediocre sounding pair of earbuds. The sound is largely dominated by a wide-band bass boost, which sounds muddy and bloated. The mid-range has a decent presence and timbre but is often overwhelmed by the bass. The upper mids and treble regions have very little energy, which makes the sound needlessly dark and veiled.

The overall sound is just dark and bassy, starving your ears of all treble detail. You are almost forced to use the EQ, which does alleviate a lot of the issues with the sound. It’s still not an especially resolving, detailed, or spacious sound, but that is to be expected from a product in this price range, especially one lacking a high-resolution codec.

Unfortunately, I have no experience with the Oppo Enco Air4 Pro, so it’s not possible to say if those sound any different. As for OnePlus’ own products, the previously launched Buds 3 exhibited some good taste in terms of tuning but with the Nord Buds 3 Pro, OnePlus has fallen back to its default bloated, bassy sound.

Microphone

The Nord Buds 3 Pro have decent microphone performance. The background noise cancellation works really well and it’s hard to hear anything going on in the caller’s background unless it’s really loud.

This does seem to come at the slight expense of voice quality. While perfectly audible, the voices have a slight garbling to them, which is often caused by aggressive noise reduction. There were also occasional popping artifacts in my recordings, which seem like something that can be fixed with an update. Still, overall voice quality was fine for calls.

Noise cancellation

The Nord Buds 3 Pro have good noise cancellation performance. The ANC takes a second to kick in and then another couple of seconds before it fully calibrates to your surroundings. There is good suppression of low and mid frequencies, with only the higher frequencies filtering in.

The ANC can waver a bit based on ambient noise, and you may hear it changing its attenuation if the noise pattern changes, even if you have it manually set to the Max mode. As I sit here and type this, I can hear the ANC changing its algorithm to specifically work on reducing the noise of the keyboard, and then change back when the typing stops. Some may not find this fluctuation pleasing as it is noticeable when nothing is playing. However, you won’t notice a thing if you have audio playing through the speakers.

The ANC also performs well in windy environments. The ANC slowly reduces its effectiveness in heavy winds to reduce the buffetting effect but even before doing so there is very little buffetting to begin with.

The transparency mode on these earbuds also sounds quite good. We are not at the point where enabling transparency more or less sounds just like removing the earbuds, with a natural tone to the surrounding noise that sounds real and less like something captured and played back. However, some may prefer the louder transparency modes of other earbuds that artificially enhance certain tones, such as voices, which you won’t find here. The earbuds also do not enable transparency automatically when on a call or using the microphone in general so you can hear yourself better.

Latency

The Nord Buds 3 Pro have decent latency performance when paired with a smartphone. By default, the latency performance isn’t very good as there’s a notable delay in apps that can play audio but aren’t video players (video players tend to automatically sync to hide the delay).

However, enabling Game mode in the HeyMelody app or simply launching a game on a OnePlus device drastically reduces the latency to the point where the delay is much harder to notice. It’s not completely gone but most people either won’t notice it or won’t be bothered by it.

The downside of this is that when pairing with a PC you are relegated to the default latency as there is no app to enable game mode. So latency when used with computers was fairly high. You also don’t get the benefit of audio sync with video players on PCs so even videos sound a bit out of sync.

Connectivity

The Nord Buds 3 Pro had reliable connectivity during testing. There were no instances of dropped connections or audio packets while testing.

Battery Life

The Nord Buds 3 Pro have a claimed battery life of 5.5 hours when using ANC and 12 hours without ANC. The company also claims 11 hours of battery life without ANC after a 10-minute charge.

It was not possible to test battery life with ANC on these earbuds as they require contact with skin for the wear detection to work (as opposed to an optical sensor on some other models) and thus couldn’t be put through the usual battery life test cycle.

When testing with the ANC off, I managed to get 12.5 hours of battery life, which is just over the claimed figure. However, no matter how many times I tested it, I couldn’t get over 4.5 hours when testing after a 10-minute charge. The 11-hour figure does seem a bit far-fetched and perhaps OnePlus needs to run those numbers again to see if they are correct.

Conclusion

The OnePlus Nord Buds 3 Pro are an affordably priced pair of earbuds and for the price, you get a comfortable design, impressive noise cancellation, and good battery life. Unfortunately, you have to compromise on the audio quality, which seems one compromise too many for an audio product.