Cheaper luxury

Review: Oneplus Buds 4 - Headset with fantastic noise cancellation

Oneplus Buds take several features from Oneplus Buds Pro 3 to a cheaper price level. The noise reduction is particularly impressive.

Published 10 September 2025 - 10:17

My favourite headset from last year is the Oneplus Buds Pro 3. They are comfortable, have excellent sound, and fantastic noise cancellation. The Oneplus Buds 4 lack the Pro in the name and are therefore not a successor. Rather, it's about taking the best features from the Oneplus Buds Pro 3 to a slightly cheaper price level.

For 1500 kronor, the Oneplus Buds 4 are not exactly cheap either, but they feel cheaper straight out of the box compared to the Buds Pro 3 for a thousand kronor more. Both the case and earbuds feel more plasticky. The Oneplus Buds Pro 3 are of course also plastic, but the simpler design and texture make both the case and earbuds slipperier and thus harder to handle. I also think the rubber tips are not quite as comfortable, and they chafe a bit over time, but at least they seal well and don't slip out on their own over time.

The headset is controlled by pressing the stem instead of pinching, which increases the risk of accidental presses. Therefore, single press is disabled by default, and to pause the music, you rely on auto-pause when you take the headset out of your ear. However, I enable single press for play/pause in the Oneplus app Heymelody and put up with playback sometimes starting again before I've managed to put the earbuds in the case. A plus with the controls is that you can swipe your finger up or down the stem to raise and lower the volume.

The music sound should be better

Looking inside the plastic, we find dual speaker elements for treble and bass that, according to the specifications, appear to be the same as in the Oneplus Buds Pro 3. But they have been tuned completely differently. Where I appreciated the more expensive headset for its clear treble and natural bass, here we get a heavily exaggerated lower bass that partially encroaches on the midrange. If you like extra bass, it sounds good, especially for electronic music, but it's a cheap way to achieve an impactful sound that does a disservice to the advanced speaker elements. The headset simply doesn't sound better than a cheaper headset would have.

There is support for high-resolution audio, but it's with the LDHC standard, not the more established LDAC standard. For example, Xiaomi, Nothing, and of course Oneplus support LDHC in their mobiles, but not Samsung. Apple, as usual, does not support alternative audio transmission standards, so AAC is the standard there.

What is really impressive, however, is the active noise cancellation. The Oneplus Pro 3 had perhaps the best noise cancellation in a true wireless headset I've experienced. According to the specifications, the Oneplus Buds 4 actually have slightly better noise cancellation. I can't say I hear the difference, but it's definitely the best noise cancellation I've experienced in a headset for 1500 kronor, and a candidate for the best noise cancellation ever. Both bus engine noise and passing cars almost completely disappear.

If I press and hold the earbud, the opposite is activated, namely the transparency mode. Then the microphones pick up the surrounding sounds so you can hear what's happening. That mode is also impressive, and I can have conversations where I barely think about having the earbuds in my ears.

Calls not the strongest suit

The microphones are not quite as good for phone calls. The headset is indeed really good at removing ambient noise, whether it's clattering with things or car traffic, and my voice sounds about as good regardless, but in this case, as good means slightly tinny and clearly worse than when speaking directly on the phone.

The battery life of the headset is good but not so good that it stands out in the competition. The case lacks wireless charging.

To summarise: If you want a headset for 1500 kronor with really good noise cancellation, the Oneplus Buds are the headphones for you. Nothing else in the headset is really bad, so you won't be disappointed.