Test: Xiaodu Du Smart Buds – Cheap Headphone from a Newly Born Brand

Xiaodu is a Chinese headphone brand that hasn’t put much energy into creating an original brand. They have literally taken Xiaomis and replaced every Mi with Du. Instead of Mi Smart Buds from Xiaomi, we have Du Smart Buds from Xiaodu here. Even the merchants seemed unsure of Xiaodu. As far as we can tell, it is a subsidiary of Baidu, which is the largest search engine in China.

The earphone case is small and round in shape that fits nicely in a pocket. Getting the earbuds out of it is a little tricky, but you learn a working technique without access to the touch controls.

The headset is in the classic Airpods format, i.e. with a stick that makes it easy to adjust the fit on the ear and a directional speaker but no rubber plugs that fit snugly in the ear. This means that no form of noise reduction is missing, and the headset allows ambient sounds to be heard. Good if you want to know if someone is trying to talk to you or if vehicles are coming, it’s less good if you want to listen to podcasts on public transportation. The maximum volume is quite low, and podcasts in particular drown out even the relatively quiet environments of public transportation. Music is often recorded at a slightly higher volume level to begin with.

Not because the music sounds good in the headphone. I’m used to most headphones, even the cheapest ones sound good, but here we have an exception. It is above all the dynamics, i.e. the ability to play several frequencies at the same time, which is the worst I can remember when I was involved in it. Every drum beat in the music lowers the volume of the guitars and vocals, which means that nearly all of the music sounds choppy and wobbly. Regardless, the sound reproduction is very good, but it cannot be ignored when it makes all the music unpleasant.

When I’m listening in the headset and someone tries to talk to me, I use the touch controls to pause, but all I can do is fast forward to the next song no matter how I press. When I install the Xiaodu app, I get the explanation. I can select the controls when I press twice on the left and right ear pieces, without pressing once or pressing and holding. By default, both earpieces are set to fast forward to the next song.

In fact, that’s not the only thing that touch controls do, because when I cover my ears to hear the podcast I listen to best, I turn on pairing mode, so I can pair them with another device.

Now that headphones are bad for music and bad for podcasts, things will almost be complicated if you excel positively during phone calls, but you don’t have to worry about that. In a quiet environment, I find my voice audible but muffled, and when I walk out next to a slightly trafficked street, I can no longer hold a conversation.

The application also has a function for recording voice memos. You can get them partially as audio files, but you can also translate them from speech to text, but Swedish is not supported for this function. If I talk too fast I get the error “The operation is too fast, please slow down” and the recording gets stuck. The result is a zero-second audio file, with no speech audio being recorded.

Xiaodu Du Buds do have quite a few flaws, but when there are flaws in every area and every flaw makes the feature difficult to use, it becomes difficult to recommend the headset to anyone.