These LG Earbuds Rival Even the Best Over-Ear Headphones
June 7, 2023I was an over-ear headphones guy for years. If you’re looking for top-of-the-line sound quality, airplane-proof noise-canceling, and Cloud Sofa-level comfort, you can’t beat a big old pair of, say, Bose QC-45s or Sony WH-1000XM4s. But at a certain point, I just got tired of lugging huge headphones around with me everywhere I went. They were great on the subway, but they became an albatross around my (literal) neck as soon as I got to my destination—which, more often than not, was a bar. And I refuse to do this at a bar:
So about a year ago, I made the switch to noise-canceling wireless earbuds. I’ve been hunting for the perfect pair ever since. I could never seem to hit the sweet spot between long-lasting comfort; serious fidelity; a sleek, non-dorky profile; and a charging case that doesn’t take up too much room in my pocket. After my last pair of earbuds shit the bed, I was considering giving up on small boys altogether and buying another set of big boys—until, at long last, I found my white whale: the LG Tone Free T90Qs.
I’ve been wearing these things every day for about two months now—around the house, around the neighborhood, on the subway, on phone calls, in meetings—and I’m obsessed with them.
I’ll get into exactly why they rip so hard in a minute. But for now, I need to mention what is, to me, their greatest strength: LG has somehow managed to solve The Plane Dilemma. Wireless earbuds are great, but because they don’t have an aux cable, you can’t use them to watch in-flight movies. With these bad boys, you can. The charging case doubles as a Bluetooth transmitter; you just plug it into the headphone jack on a plane and beam the audio from whatever you're watching straight into the T90Qs. Whoever came up with that shit is a genius.
Enough preambling, though. Let’s talk about why these things fuck.
First impressions
For me, a major selling point of wireless earbuds is that you can just chuck them in your pocket when you’re not using them and basically forget they’re in there. The T90Qs excel on that front. The charging and carrying case is a slim, inconspicuous cylinder, with a height of about an inch and a radius of about two inches. With the earbuds inside it, it weighs less than two ounces. When you’re not listening to these headphones, you’re not thinking about them—and that’s a good thing.
Pop open the charging case, and you find two sleek, low-profile earbuds with short stems, akin in design to AirPods. At just shy of .2 ounces each, they’re shockingly light without sacrificing solidity. (I’ve dropped them on the ground, like, 80 times, and they’re totally fine.) They fit comfortably in my ears, and even if I bang my head around like I’m at a metal show, they don’t fall out. (It’s safe to say they won’t fall out of your ears, either; they come with three different sizes of medical-grade silicone ear gels, which are considerably more comfortable than other earbud tips I’ve encountered.) The pairing process was intuitive and low-lift; it took me about 15 seconds to connect the T90Qs to my phone, and a little “bing-bong” sound let me know that I was all set. Once the aforementioned bing-bong bing-bonged, I fired up Spotify to see what these things could do.
Sound quality
I christened my T90Qs, somewhat psychotically for 9:30 a.m. on a Tuesday, with “Kiss Me More” by Doja Cat. I was blown away. The bass was fucking huge—a deep, feel-it-in-your-gut boom that remains clear and unmuddled even when you crank the volume up to 10. The T90Qs aced every other basic metric of sound quality, too: solid mids, crisp trebles, and overall fidelity, which is to say that “Kiss Me More” sounded the same on these headphones as it did on my fancy, $200 Electrohome Bluetooth speakers. Next I threw on “Devil’s Daughter” by Kacy & Clayton and Marlon Williams, a slow, golden folk song—think Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris as opposed to Mumford and Sons—composed solely of acoustic guitar, the 2-4 close of a hi-hat, and human harmony. That’s when I noticed something I’ve never gotten from wireless earbuds before: Every element of “Devil’s Daughter” occupied its own place in space. Maybe you’re an audiophile familiar with the concept of a “soundstage,” but if not, here’s a definition of the term from someone smarter than me at Audioengine:
“In the world of audiophiles, soundstage (or speaker image) is an imaginary three-dimensional space created by the high-fidelity reproduction of sound in a stereo speaker system; in other words, the soundstage allows the listener to hear the location of instruments when listening to a given piece of music.”
When I closed my eyes, I could see Clayton Linthicum playing guitar on the left side of the recording studio; I could see Mike Silverman at the drumset in the back of the room; I could see Kacy Anderson and Marlon Williams singing front and center. The cynics among you might be wondering if I was hallucinating. But it turns out that, according to LG, the T90Qs are “the first wearable with an integrated audio virtualizer by Dolby,” which adds “dimensionality and clarity” to what you’re hearing, and provides “sound placed in space.”
In short: Yes, the bass is deep; yes, the sound is crisp; yes, it remains so at both low and high volumes and across wildly disparate genres. But in achieving that soundstage effect, the T90Qs do much more than just sound good. They replicate the experience of listening to live music—something I’ve rarely gotten from over-ear headphones, and never gotten from earbuds.
Noise-canceling capabilities
As I write these words, there’s a construction crew using a power saw to cut a seemingly unending number of two-by-fours into a billion little pieces in my backyard, for reasons I am powerless to explain. (These people are the bane of my existence.) I’m sitting on my fire escape; they’re like 50 feet away from me, driving me insane. However, when I play “Saat Alfarah” by The Scorpions at about 60 percent volume in my earbuds, I can’t hear them anymore, and I no longer crave death.
Another use case: A few weeks ago, I was sitting in McCarren Park, half-drunk, polishing off the last few slurps of a frozen piña colada, becoming increasingly enraged by the constant hum of a thousand different conversations conducted by a thousand different parkgoers. (It was the first real day of summer in New York, and the park was slammoed.) I popped in my T90Qs and threw on “Misdemeanor” by Foster Sylvers—a fucking ripper of a soul song from 1973—and drowned out the riffraff all around me. Even at about 50 percent volume, I couldn’t hear a thing.
At the end of the day, the T90Qs are still just earbuds; they won’t completely block out the dull roar of an airplane, the screech of a subway car grinding on the tracks, or other Majorly Loud Sounds™. But they do a great job of canceling out most everyday noises, even when you’re not listening to music at full blast.
Nerdy tech shit
The T90Qs are equipped with a dizzying array of hi-tech features, including:
- Dolby Atmos, the top-of-the-line sound technology used by super fancy movie theaters, which makes watching shit like Top Gun: Maverick a fully immersive experience;
- Additional audio technology from Meridian, a primo audio and home theater equipment manufacturer;
- Graphene speakers, which I frankly don’t know anything about, but are apparently “made of a strong, lightweight material” and are responsible for “better overall audio clarity and reduced vibration”;
- A four-microphone system that, those I’ve spoken with using the T90Qs tell me, allows my voice to come through remarkably clearly while filtering out ambient noise (like that coming from the guys sawing two-by-fours in half, constantly, in my backyard);
- A UVnano+ charging case, which uses UV-C light to kill 99.9 percent of the bacteria on your earbuds when you pop them in the charger;
- A freakishly long-lasting battery, which gives you up to 29 hours of play time on a single full charge;
- Snapdragon Sound, which provides Bluetooth sound quality close to that of a wired connection;
- And a whole host of other stuff.
TL;DR
These things fuck. If you’re looking for great sound, solid noise canceling, long-lasting comfort, deep bass, audiophile-approved soundstaging, an unimposing case, and wireless earbuds you can use on the motherfucking plane (!!!), pick these guys up. Here’s the literal and figurative kicker: Right now, they’re marked down from $229.99 to $179.99 on LG’s website.
Buy the Tone Free T90Q earbuds at LG, Best Buy, and Amazon.
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