Edifier ES850NB Headphones Review

Welcome to my review of the Edifier ES850NB Bluetooth Headphones.

These are available in four colours, you can buy them now in pink, ivory, brown, and black. I was kindly sent a brown pair to review. I must say, I do like the colour.

So how do the headphones perform? Continue reading to find out.

The Hardware

In the box, we have a well packed set of headphones in their protective travel case, along with a quick start guide, and a USB-C to USB-A charging cable.

As always with Edifier, I wasn’t long into testing these headphones, and I noticed that they had great sound quality. This seems to be a trend with Edifier.

They also block out a lot of noise when ANC is enabled.  

Let’s put it this way, I was wearing them whilst out on my drive washing my wife’s car with a pressure washer. Whilst wearing them I genuinely couldn’t hear anything around me with my music playing at around medium volume. I personally don’t like having the volume up too loud on headphones to help protect my ears.

So, it goes to show just how well the ANC works on these headphones.

Specifications

Thanks to Edifier for the below information from their website:

At first glance, the Edifier ES850NB look like your usual wireless headphones. But then you look closer and they have a really nice metal arm on either side of the headband. Of course, that brown colourway actually looks very nice too.

They’re a standard over-the-ear design that are comfortable and I didn’t feel like my ears were getting too hot whilst wearing them out in the sun.

The power button is actually a multi-action button and allows you to answer/end calls, play/pause music, and more.

To do these actions you just need to press the power button once, or twice in quick succession. The mode button allows you to skip through listening modes. For example, active noise cancellation on, off, and ambient mode.

There is also a mode called Transparent; this is a mode that allows Edifier hardware to help you hear more of the outside world. You can have this enabled all the time, or, my favourite feature… Pop your fingers on the right side headphone and after a few seconds it will pause your music and automatically enable the transparent mode regardless of which ANC mode you have enabled. This is bloody brilliant as you can quickly hear what’s going on around you.

You can also plug these in via the provided USB-C to USB-A and use them as a wired headset on your devices i.e. a Windows laptop/PC.

Overall, the design is pretty good, and all of the buttons are easy to feel and press when the headphones are on your head.

The functionality is where it counts with headphones though, of course. I must say that I am overall very impressed with the Edifier ES850NB.

They provide excellent balance on the treble and bass levels. All levels of bass sound great in my opinion. Sometimes, you would hear distortion during the higher level of bass. This is not apparent with these. The levels of treble didn’t appear to cause any distortion or hissing sound on the music either. This was at all levels of volume that my ears could take without being too uncomfortable for my ears. However, pushing the volume louder still provided a very clean listening experience.

My biggest issue is that they do not have any official IP rating. Therefore, they are not guaranteed to be safe in the rain, at the gym etc.

However, as mentioned above I did use them whilst washing the car, and they did get quite a few splashes on them. But that’s not to say they’re waterproof without a rating, that’s just to say that you might be OK with a few splashes here and there. Just bare it in mind.

Connection and Software

As per usual with Edifier hardware, the connection is very simple.

You hold the power button to turn them on and hold the Bluetooth button for until you hear an audio cue that says “pairing”. This enables pairing mode for you to connect to your chosen device be it a phone, handheld games console, laptop, or tablet. You can also connect via a USB cable to your devices, as mentioned above. You can customise your ES850NB Headphones with the Android and iOS app, Edifier Connex or the Windows app, Edifier TempoHub.8

This means you can then customise your EQ settings, easily change ANC mode, and more.

Conclusions

The Edifier ES850NB is, as always from Edifier, a brilliant set of headphones that give a decent quality of sound for the price. At the time of writing, they can be purchased between for £49.99 and £99.99 depending on where you buy them and if they’re in stock.

I score the Edifier ES850NB headphones a 8/10 due to the lack of IP rating.

You can watch the hardware trailer below or head on over to the official product website. You can also check out our previous hardware reviews.

A sample was kindly provided for us to review this product.