Hi I’m Gidon from thetechnologyman.com. LG’s TONE Free FN4 and FN6 earbuds look
very similar to Apple’s AirPods Pros, have an ambient sound mode, automatic ear detection
and wireless charging. Their sound is tuned by Meridian and they can be configured with
an accompanying app. The more expensive FN6 version I’m looking
at, also come with a so-called UVnano wireless charging cradle that supposedly sanitises
your earbuds. A quite apt and well timed feature with the current global pandemic.
After discussing their features, I’ll be comparing them to Apple’s AirPods Pros and
Anker’s Soundcore Liberty 2 Pros. The FN6s cost around the same price as the Soundcores
- currently £150 or £150, and the FN4s costs just under £100 or $100. They all cost a
lot less than Apple’s earbuds which are around £250 or $250. But check all the earbuds’
current pricing below in the description. So let’s take a closer look.
Overview Inside the box you get the earbuds themselves
inside their charging case, a USB-C charging cable, 3 sizes of ear tips including the ones
already fitted, and a user manual. LG’s earbuds come in black or white and
their circular charging case has a diameter of 55mm. The case is 28mm thick and weighs
50g, with the earbuds themselves weighing 10g. This is one of the most compact and light
charging cases I’ve seen. It is thicker than the AirPods Pro case, but feels just
as compact. The case has a matte finish with TONE branding
on its lid, which does unfortunately really need two hands to open. But the build quality
is good and the lid has very little play. Underneath the lid is the LG branding and
more prominently there’s the Meridian logo just below the earbuds.
Around the back of the case is the USB-C charging port and the side of the case has the pairing
button. When you first open the lid, the front status
light flashes blue indicating they are ready for pairing. With an Android device (Android
5.0 or later) they support Google Fast Pair. You’ll get a notification which you just
need to tap to pair your earbuds and link them to your Google account. This is a very
welcome feature. On iOS or if you don’t get the pairing request,
you’ll need to go into Bluetooth settings and tap on LG HBS-FN6.
Even though you can use either earbud separately in mono mode, there isn’t the clumsy prompt
you often get to pair the second earbud. All this happens transparently. The one disadvantage
of this is you can’t use the left and right earbud with two different devices.
You can only connect to one device at a time. To pair to a second device, either disconnect
from your currently connected device or, with the lid open and the earbuds charging, press
and hold the pairing button for a few seconds until the blue status light flashes, indicating
the earbuds are ready for pairing as before. You can factory reset the earbuds and delete
all pairing records with a ten second press of the pairing button with both earbuds in
their case and the lid open. The status light flashes red and then blue when they are again
ready for pairing. You can charge the case either with the included
USB-C cable, or with the FN6 model, wirelessly with any Qi compatible charger. With a wired
connection a full charge of the case’s 390mAh battery takes around 2 hours charging at around
0.4A. Wirelessly charging also takes around 2 hours. The earbuds themselves take around
an hour to charge their 55mAh batteries and conveniently a 5 minute quick charge will
provide one hour of playback. The earbuds have a rather average 6 hours
of playback with a full charge and the case will provide an additional 2 full charges
for a total of 18 hours of usage. This is below average, perhaps due to the electronics
required for the UV cleaning. Although the FN4s also have the same battery life.
The charging case on this FN6 model has a built in UV-C LED which has disinfecting capabilities
which is meant to kill 99.9% of bacteria. This only activates with the earbuds in the
case whilst charging with a wired connection. The status light pulses whilst this cleaning
cycle is active which takes around 10 minutes. This status light also indicates the case’s
remaining battery, and will stay on when cleaning has completed. In use, this battery status
light also indicates the remaining charge of the case when you open and close the lid.
You’ll need your phone to check the charge of the earbuds themselves.
The earbuds are fairly easy to remove from the case but they are also quite easy to put
back in the case the wrong way around if you’re not careful, which you quickly realise when
the lid doesn’t close. The earbuds' resemblance to AirPods Pros is
hard to ignore. I quite like their design with the substantially shorter than average
stem. They have a mainly glossy finish with just the front of the stem having a matte
finish. They aren’t quite as stylish as the AirPods Pros and build quality doesn’t
feel as premium, but then they are much cheaper. They have no branding on them at all and I
can’t help but feel they could so with some sort of design flourish to make them look
a little less plain. Each earbud has two microphones for suppressing
noise during calls but these mics are also used in Ambient Sound Mode to let you hear
your surroundings, a feature I was very happy to see. Unfortunately they don’t have Active
Noise Cancellation, only passive noise isolation. The earbuds come with medium silicone ear
tips fitted with a spare set of small and large tips to swap out for the perfect fit.
Their fit in my ears was excellent - they’re some of the most comfortable and secure earbuds
I’ve tried which is impressive, since they don’t have any included fins like the Soundcore
Liberty 2 Pros. They even stayed put running. The earbuds have touch controls which can
be configured in the accompanying TONE Free app. By default, a single tap of either earbud
will pause and resume playback or answer a phone call, a double tap of the left and right
earbud will turn the volume down or up respectively or end a phone call, and a triple press on
either earbud will skip forward a track. A long press on either earbud will switch Ambient
mode on and off with a rather intrusive voice prompt. A long press will also reject an incoming
phone call. In the app which is available on iOS and Android,
you can configure all these controls apart from the long press. I like to configure the
triple press on the left earbud to activate my voice assistant.
The app also lets you check the battery level of each earbud, switch Ambient Sound on and
off and control how loud these ambient sounds are, lock the touchpad controls and update
the firmware. There are also four equalizer presets and two custom presets, which you
can edit to your tastes. I did find it a little tricky to grab the frequency control handles
- it’s easy to end up just scrolling up and down.
There’s also a handy feature to locate your earbuds, playing a loud chirp sound to each
earbud. Most settings are the same on iOS and Android,
but the Notifications option that reads back messages has a finer level of configuration
on my Android phone. These touch controls work well as far as touch
controls go, but trying to triple tap or even double tap is tricky walking and even more
so running. Still, sitting down in the office or on a train, it’s handy being able to
fully control the earbuds, even adjusting volume, without reaching for your phone.
There’s also Ear Detection which works very well, pausing and resuming playback when you
remove and reinsert either earbud. It’s a convenient feature, but I would still like
the option to disable this in the accompanying app, as well as all the beeps and sound prompts
which you might find a little annoying after a while.
Sound quality and performance They have a slightly unusual name for earbuds
but Tone are LG’s range of headphones, and Free relates to them being TWS or True Wireless
Earbuds therefore free of any cable or band, not free of tone!
Naming aside these earbuds with their 6mm drivers sound very good. The default Immersive
EQ profile is well balanced with a full bodied sound with clear mids and a decent amount
of bass. Meridian has done a good job tuning them to provide audio that does genuinely
feel quite immersive as their profile promises, with a better soundstage than you often get
with wireless earbuds. And although there’s not a huge number of
presets to choose from in the accompanying app, they all offer something different to
suit most people’s tastes. I did try and configure a custom profile,
but I found the presets always sounded better with a wider range than I could achieve dragging
around the frequency graph. They don’t have the lower end of the Soundcore
Liberty 2 Pros or the clarity of AirPods Pros at the higher end but overall they have a
pleasing sound that I imagine most people would be more than happy with for the price.
The earbuds don’t have support for the aptX codec but do support the still higher quality
AAC codec. The LG Tone Free FN6s and FN4s don’t have
active noise cancellation, but their passive noise isolation is very effective. It’s
not far off the AirPods Pro’s ANC in a lot of environments, but Apple’s earbuds do
a much better job with constant background noises, like the hum of fans, or somebody
strimming. Their good seal also makes sound leakage even
at maximum volume minimal. They aren’t the loudest earbuds I’ve tested - similar to
the Soundcores Liberty 2 Pros but not quite as loud as the AirPods Pros.
Although there’s no ANC, they do have Ambient Sound mode which I compared to Apple’s Transparency
mode. This mode does a decent job, basically playing back your surroundings using the built
in mics. It does sound quite artificial though, especially comparing to the AirPods Pros which
do such a realistic job you almost take it for granted what they are actually doing.
You can tweak the Ambient Sound Mode slider but I found the default mode about right in
most cases. If it’s at all windy, you’ll mostly hear wind noise even over your music,
so I usually turned Ambient Sound mode off when I was out walking or running where there
were no roads or people to contend with. But it is still a useful feature to have.
The earbuds have an IPX4 waterproof rating and were certainly sweatproof in my tests.
They make a very good pair of running earbuds with their sweatproof rating, secure fit and
ambient sound feature. And they worked well on the cycling turbo trainer too, where sweat
eventually causes my AirPods Pros to fall out.
The four microphones, two on each earbud did a decent job in a quiet environment. As a
more extreme test, I tried them on the cycling turbo trainer, a noisy and windy environment
with two very powerful fans pointing towards me. I compared them to the AirPods Pros and
the Soundcore Liberty 2 Pros. They did an ok job, but the AirPods Pros are
still the earbuds to beat! Battery life is quoted as 6 hours and I found
I got close to that, mainly playing back at 60% volume and often louder.
The earbuds use Bluetooth 5.0 and although they were very easy to pair, especially on
Android devices, I did get occasional issues with interruptions in the audio on both or
just one earbud. This was even outside in the countryside with no sources of interference.
The connection to the iOS app was a little unreliable too. I’m hoping a firmware update
might fix these issues since my earbuds are a very early sample.
Range was ok though, maintaining a connection even when my phone was in the next room over
10 metres away. One thing I couldn’t really test where the
cleansing claims with the FN6s, but these claims have been apparently independently
verified and do provide a certain reassurance especially in the current climate - and more
so if you tend to share your earbuds with others.
Conclusions The LG Tone Free FN6 earbuds sound good and
have a very impressive range of features. Really the only feature missing on the FN6s
is active noise cancellation and I’ve not seen any earbuds with this cleansing function.
The FN4s at under £100 or $100 are great value if you don’t need the superior case
with wireless charging and UV cleansing. I like the compact case, the extremely comfortable
and secure fit in my ears and their design. The audio quality is good, especially in the
mids and the accompanying LG Tone Free app makes adjusting the sound to your tastes very
easy. Battery life is a little on the low side and
the ambient sound mode whilst welcome, I didn’t find as effective as I’d hoped. I did also
have some issues with audio breaking up occasionally which I really hope will be fixed soon in
a firmware update - I’ll report back in the description.
Overall though LG has done a good job with these earbuds and with their sound quality,
comfort and feature set they should definitely be on your shortlist if you’re looking at
true wireless earbuds around these price points. But I’d love to know what you think? Is
the UV cleansing feature something you’d pay extra for? How do you like the design?
Let me know down below! And as always, if you have any questions,
please ask - I read every comment and will do my best to respond.
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