Xiaomi has had a busy day of announcements, alongside launching five new phones, it has confirmed that its recently released wireless earbuds – the Redmi Buds 5 Pro and stripped back Redmi Buds 5 – will be available to buy globally.
What's immediately eye-catching about these AirPods lookalikes is that the black and white models of the Redmi Buds 5 Pro have a marble texture on the stems of the buds themselves. The case also has an updated design compared to last year's Redmi Buds Pro 4, now with a vegan leather texture.
Despite their elevated looks, the buds are selling for a similar price to their predecessors. You can pick up a pair for €69.99 (approx. $76 / £60 / AU$115) according to Notebookcheck, which is a lot less than most of the best earbuds. Given that many of the cheaper models don't offer access to hi-res codecs – not even the mid-priced Sony WF-C700Ns have this – the Redmi Buds Pro 5 sound like incredible value, potentially.
What's special about the Xiaomi Redmi Buds?
First released in November 2023, the Xiaomi Redmi Buds 5 Pro slipped under our radar mainly due to their limited restricted availability to China. But that's not to say that we aren't impressed by their spec sheet.
Unlike the best AirPods, the Redmi Buds 5 Pro have support for lossless audio (although Apple has said that it will make this available to the AirPods Pro 2 when used with the Vision Pro). Xiaomi says that they will support LDAC – which is basically CD quality – with a sampling rate of up to 24bit/96kHz, AAC, SBC Bluetooth, and LHDC 5.0.
Like the Honor Earbuds 3 Pro and One Plus Buds Pro 2, they have a coaxial dual driver setup, which consists of a 10mm piezoelectric ceramic tweeter and 11mm dynamic driver. In our experience, this kind of speaker system can deliver especially rich and fulsome audio quality, so we'll be excited to hear whether this is the same with the Redmi Buds 5 Pro.
On top of these features, the buds have three transparency modes, including Regular, Enhance Voice and Enhance Ambient Sounds. Xiaomi also promises that the active noise cancellation will be three times better than the Redmi Buds 4 Pro. Lastly, with an incredibly strong battery life of 38 hours with the case (the buds last 10 hours on a single charge), the Redmi Buds 5 Pro last a lot longer than a lot of the best wireless earbuds – the AirPods Pro 2 tout 30 hours.
You don't often find earbuds that give you this many features and access to high-quality codecs for under $100 / £100 / AU$150, so needless to say Xiaomi has our attention. If the Redmi Buds 5 Pro sound as good as they look, then we might just have a new contender for our best budget wireless earbuds guide.
