Not long ago, Beats launched a new product in the Solo series of headphones – Beats Solo 4. Beats Solo 4 has been improved and upgraded in terms of appearance, acoustic structure, spatial audio, and range, etc. In this article, I will talk about the feeling and experience of wearing it.
Appearance
If you’re used to seeing flagship wireless headphones, you’ll be attracted to the small size of the Beats Solo 4 at first glance. Compared to its predecessor, the Beats Studio Pro, the Beats Solo 4 is significantly smaller in size and lighter in weight (217 grams) than the Beats Studio Pro (270 grams). Even compared to its predecessor, the Beats Solo 3 Wireless (215 grams), the current generation of Beats Solo 4 has achieved a “slight weight reduction” – the Beats Solo 4 is a “lightweight” compared to its own and other similar products.
But even though it’s lighter, the Beats Solo 4 has been improved and upgraded in a number of ways.
For starters, the Beats Solo 4 is well made. Although the stitching on the earcups is indecently exposed, the Beats Solo 4 still handles the seams tightly; the folding clasp has a crisp and strong rebound, and the locking state is stable; and the buttons are solid, with clear feedback and no wobbling or false position. The Beats Solo 4’s earcups are made of the same UltraPlush soft memory foam as the Beats Studio Pro, which improves wearing comfort; the Beats Solo 4 is a headphone that pinches your ears when you wear it for a long period of time, and without the improved earcups, the wearing time of the earcups would have been drastically shortened.
The new Rock Green color scheme is also a color I like. It’s a highly saturated color in real life, but it doesn’t look greasy, and I don’t get tired of looking at it too often, for too long, or at different angles. Incidentally, I think Apple’s industrial design team has done a pretty good job of choosing colors for their products in the last couple of years, and I don’t find any of the colors of the iPhone 15 or the recently launched iPad Air to be ugly, and there’s also a new Cloudy Pink colorway of the Beats Solo 4 that I like, and I hope to try it out when I get a chance.
Functionality
While the previous generation Beats Solo 3 Wireless was powered by the Apple W1 chip, the Beats Solo 4 switches to the Beats Universal Platform for better compatibility with non-Apple devices. Pairing the Beats Solo 4 is the same as with any other headset, with a long press on the power button, and the pairing window automatically pops up for iOS devices, as well as for Android devices. the Beats headset’s classic disc buttons continue to be used with the Beats Solo 4. The Beats logo on the left side of the headset is a controller. Pressing the center area controls play and pause, switching songs between left and right, and adjusting the volume up and down, which is very intuitive. The only small difference is that other similar headphones tend to have controls in the right ear area, so switching to left-handed controls requires a slight adjustment process.
Wearability and Noise Cancellation
The Beats Solo 4’s biggest feature regret is that it doesn’t have active noise cancellation, but it’s not bad at all, thanks to its tightly-wrapped design idea for the over-ear portion of the headphones.
Based on my testing, the Beats Solo 4’s physical passive noise cancellation is about 60% to 70% as effective as the Bose QuietComfort Ultra’s active noise cancellation. While active noise cancellation is limited by noise-canceling algorithms that can’t accurately cancel out mid-to-high frequencies such as vocals, the Beats Solo 4’s passive noise cancellation is able to physically isolate them without discrimination. My biggest problem when I work at home is my cat’s constant purring, and while I can occasionally hear it when I wear the Bose, I can’t hear it at all when I wear the Beats Solo 4, so there’s a noticeable difference. At the same time, because of the physical isolation, wind noise, which is often a problem with active noise-canceling headphones, is not present in the Beats Solo 4.
However, great noise cancellation comes at a price. The better the passive noise cancellation, the more pressure the earcups put on the ears, and “tired ears” are the most uncomfortable part of wearing the Beats Solo 4. The Beats Solo 4’s earcups snap tightly around the ear in order to achieve the noise-canceling capabilities mentioned above, and the fact that the earcups themselves are not large enough to completely wrap around the outside of the ear, but rather have a portion of them pressed against the ear, further adds to the pressure on the ear. I keep wearing them for an hour or so before I get the “I can’t, I need to take them off and rest” feeling. A simple rub of the ears and adjustment of the wearing position would last another hour at most. Therefore, if you want to use these headphones as a monitoring headphone, you need to be careful, as they probably won’t be able to “stay on your head all day long”.
Sound Quality
To my surprise, the Beats Solo 4 doesn’t feature any sound quality.
I was impressed with the sound quality of the previous Beats Studio Pro, which, under Apple’s tutelage, has moved away from the traditional “big bass, not much else” style, and has a wide range and clear mid-range and high end, while keeping the bass solid and restrained, which is the direction I like to go.
But the Beats Solo 4 doesn’t inherit any of these characteristics, and its sound style is literally “nondescript,” with no low-frequency dynamics, and the mid- and high-frequencies aren’t crisp and clear. I’ve listened to almost every type of sound I’ve ever heard in the time I’ve been using these headphones, trying to find an area where these headphones could shine. But sadly, nothing.
In theory, the Beats Solo 4 is an upgrade over the Solo 3 Wireless in terms of acoustic architecture, transducers and tuning. I haven’t used the Solo 3 Wireless for a long time, so I have no way to compare the sound quality of the two. In terms of the Beats Solo 4’s performance alone, the main reason for my “nothing special” feeling is that it uses Passive Tuning rather than Active Equalisation, and the small size of the ear cups, which doesn’t allow for a larger acoustic cavity, ultimately resulting in a “flat as water” and bizarre style. The offbeat style of the “Flat as Water”.
The good news is that the Beats Solo 4 isn’t all about sound quality, and spatial audio is what it – or Apple’s audio devices – do best. Spatial audio is so immersive that when I first put on the Beats Solo 4, I watched a movie recorded by a vegetarian on Weibo, where the spatiality of the speaker’s distance shots and the emptiness of the non-acoustic recording made me think that I wasn’t wearing my headphones properly and that I was playing back the sound, and it wasn’t until I examined it that I realized that the spatial audio was responsible for the sound.
Not only that, but the spatial audio supported by the Beats Solo 4 is full-featured, personalized spatial audio, with gyroscopes and accelerometers built into the headphones for head-tracking effects. While “good sound” isn’t the Beats Solo 4’s strong suit, it doesn’t fall short on the basics.
Battery Life
The Beats Solo 4’s battery life, however, is awfully long. Its nominal battery life is 50 hours, and I used the headphones for five days straight after receiving them, using them for one to two hours a day, with more than 60 percent of the battery remaining, which means that I was able to use them at a level of intensity that would allow me to recharge them once a week-an unimaginable level of battery life for any other product that includes active noise-cancellation features.
On top of this reliable battery life, the Beats Solo 4 also supports Fast Fuel technology, which allows it to “charge for ten minutes and last for five hours,” making it a product that has nothing to do with battery life anxiety. Of course, as mentioned earlier, “tired ears” is the biggest challenge in using this product, and this hidden indicator limits almost everyone from using it for a long period of time.
Summing Up
The Beats Solo 4 is the cheapest of Apple’s line of headphones. In fact, the Solo line has always been the best-selling lineup under the Beats brand, too. It’s better suited for users who don’t need active noise cancellation and don’t want to wear a bunch of ear cups, chips, and sensors on their heads. The “tired ears” can add to the fatigue of wearing them, and the watery sound quality can be boring to listen to, but the long battery life and lightweight body just allows you to wear them on your head or hang them around your neck and listen to them whenever you want.