QCY HT07 Earbuds review – The Best ANC On Budget

After the Huge success of the QCY T13, QCY has announced recently a new product in the budget category under the name QCY HT07, also known as the QCY ArcBuds. An earbud that is small in form, yet has big features that distinguish it from the rest of the market. This earbud are compact and sit comfortably in your ear, it boasts a Bluetooth 5.2 chip, a 10 mm dynamic driver and a 350 mAh battery that provides 32 hours of total playtime, it has the QCY App support and last but not least, it has a powerful Active Noise Canceling technology. Do these earphone deliver on their promise and are they worth the hype? Let’s find out in this review.

QCY HT07 Features

Design & Build Quality

Charging Case

The QCY HT07 charging case embraces a minimalistic and understated design, striking a balance between a parallelepiped and an ellipsoid shape. It boasts a unicolor finish, with the QCY logo elegantly positioned on the top surface. Located at the back is a USB-C port for convenient charging, while an LED indicator adorns the front, offering insights into the case’s battery level and charging status. Compact in size, measuring 60.3 x 24.9 x 43.2mm, and lightweight, the case is incredibly practical, fitting effortlessly into your pocket and serving as a portable companion for your earphones.

Available in three versatile color options – Black, White, and Blue – the case is constructed from durable ABS plastic. While this material imparts sturdiness to the case, it may have a somewhat economical feel. The design itself is simple and unpretentious, featuring an easy-to-open lid that reveals the earphones nestled inside. The lid’s hinge, although slightly loose, offers secure closure, thanks to a robust magnetic mechanism. This ensures that your earphones remain protected, even if the case takes a tumble.

While the case may not boast premium materials, it is a cost-effective choice that prioritizes sound quality, active noise cancellation (ANC), and other essential features. Keep in mind that it is not certified as water or dustproof. However, it provides convenient access to the charging pins, simplifying maintenance and reducing the risk of charging and connectivity issues.

The Earbuds

The QCY HT07 earbuds epitomize minimalist sophistication in their design. They sport an unassuming, unicolor black finish with a matte texture that not only adds a touch of elegance but also helps prevent unsightly scratches and fingerprints. The primary design feature on these earbuds is the subtle QCY logo, which seamlessly integrates with their minimalistic theme.

Measuring a compact 24.9 x 20.3 x 25.4mm, these earbuds are designed to fit snugly and comfortably in your ears. Their in-ear style, coupled with replaceable silicone eartips, ensures a secure seal that effectively isolates external sounds, enhancing your audio experience. It’s worth noting that the earpieces are not interchangeable, and each one is marked with a letter to indicate which ear it should be placed in.

What’s particularly striking about these earbuds is their lightweight construction, weighing in at a mere 4.9g each. This featherweight design contributes to extended comfort, allowing you to wear them for extended periods without any discomfort. Additionally, the absence of a stem leaves ample space for the touch control area. The QCY logo, situated atop this control area, adds a subtle yet functional touch. Above it, an LED dot provides visual feedback during usage.

The thoughtful engineering of the QCY HT07 earbuds extends to their sound delivery. Their front and back sound holes are thoughtfully designed to strike a balance between inner and outer air pressure, ensuring a harmonious blend of comfort and sound quality. The included rubber eartips create a reliable seal within your ear, providing effective passive noise canceling, further enhancing your listening experience. Moreover, the incorporation of three microphones, along with ENC technology, ensures that your voice comes through with clarity during calls, while also mitigating unwanted background noise. Even without active noise canceling, these earbuds offer impressive passive noise isolation, helping you immerse yourself in your music without disturbance.

Waterproof Rating

The QCY HT07 earbuds come equipped with an IPX5 waterproof rating, which provides a level of protection against water exposure. This rating signifies that the earbuds are shielded from water jets to a certain extent, making them resilient against rain or sweat droplets. However, it’s important to exercise caution and avoid submerging the device underwater or exposing it to saltwater, as this can lead to irreversible damage. While the IPX5 rating ensures a degree of water resistance, it’s crucial to note that these earbuds lack protection against dust, so users should be mindful not to subject them to dusty environments to prevent potential damage to their internal components.

Touch Control on QCY HT07

The touch control system on the QCY HT07 earbuds offers a seamless and user-friendly experience. Positioned on the rounded surface of the earbuds, the touch control area is thoughtfully designed for easy access and operation using just a single finger. What sets this control system apart is its full customizability through the QCY app, allowing users to tailor the controls to their preferences.

Furthermore, the touch control area’s generous size enhances usability, minimizing the likelihood of accidental touches and ensuring precise interactions. This level of precision in touch controls significantly elevates the overall user experience, whether you’re engaged in a brisk run or simply in a rush, preventing frustrating misclicks and ensuring smooth, hassle-free operation. The QCY HT07 earbuds’ touch control system combines convenience, customization, and accuracy, making them a standout choice for users seeking effortless and intuitive control over their audio experience.

Touch controls and their corresponding actions: 

• Double touch: Pause/resume playing, Answer/end call
• Triple touch right earbud Skip track forward
• Keep touching for 1.5s Ignore call
• Triple touch left earbud Voice assistant
• Keep touching left earbud for 1.5s Low-latency mode on/off
• Keep touching right earbud for 1.5s ANC ON/OFF/Transparency

How to Pair QCY HT07

Pairing the QCY HT07 earbuds is a seamless process, thanks to their Bluetooth 5.2 technology and the Wuqi WQ7003AR chipset. These earbuds are compatible with most Bluetooth-enabled devices running on modern operating systems, including Android, Windows, and iOS. The pairing experience is incredibly fluid and hassle-free, as the earbuds connect automatically and instantaneously to your device without any complications.

Despite not featuring the latest Bluetooth version, the Bluetooth 5.2 chip in the QCY HT07 earbuds offers excellent power efficiency, ensuring prolonged battery life for your listening pleasure. These earbuds provide a Bluetooth range of 10 meters, although this range may vary depending on environmental factors and obstacles.

For audio enthusiasts, the QCY HT07 offers two codec options: SBC and AAC. While it doesn’t include the LDAC or aptX codecs, it still provides a quality audio experience. AAC is optimized for iOS and Apple products, delivering superior sound quality with exceptional clarity. On the other hand, SBC is the preferred choice for Android users, as it prioritizes battery life while still delivering decent sound quality.

Below are the simple the step-by-step instructions for pairing the earbuds with a smartphone, note that you only need to perform this process once, from then on, the earbuds and the smartphone will pair automatically once you take the earphones out of the case and turn Bluetooth on on your device:

• Turn Bluetooth On on your device
• Open the lid and take the QCY HT07 earphones out of the case
• On your Bluetooth menu find “ QCY ArcBuds” and click on them
• Allow the pairing

QCY App Support

The QCY app is available on the App Store and the Play Store, and requires Android 8.0 or above and iOS 13.0 or above. This meticulously designed app significantly enhances the user experience by simplifying access to and control of the many features offered by the QCY HT07 earphones. While the earphones work fine even without the app, forgoing its utilization would mean missing out on a host of intriguing features that could elevate your audio experience to new heights.

After installing the app, you are going to have to add the device to the app to start benefiting from the features, and to do that you need to follow these steps:

• Turn the earphones on and click on the plus button at the top right corner of the App’s home screen
• The QCY ArcBuds earphones will appear, click on it and allow the pairing

That’s all, you may now proceed into exploring the app and customizing the earphones to your preference.

QCY App Features

The app offers many features that are useful for the user and improve the user experience, here a list of some of the features:

• Button customization: customize the button layout and the action executed with each prompt to match your preference or possibly a layout that you’re already familiar with
• Timing to power off: you can set your device to turn off after a set period of time, this feature is useful to stop the audio from playing all night long to preserve your ears and preserve the battery for the next day
• Firmware update: this feature is crucial, it allows you to update the software of the earphones and receive updates that can potentially fix bugs or bring forth improvements to the sound quality, latency, or overall user experience.
• Integrated Equalizer: the equalizer allows you to change the sound profile which changes the way music sounds, you can either choose one of the preset profiles or create your own.
• ANC control: this menu is all for activating Noise Canceling, and adjusting its profile depending on the environment
• Battery display: accurate displaying of the battery level of the earphones in real time 
• Turn Gaming mode on: toggle gaming mode on and off to get low latency during gaming.

QCY HT07 – Sound Quality  

The QCY HT07 earbuds offer a commendable sound quality, marked by their stereo effect that provides an immersive listening experience. Their dynamic range allows for clear audio reproduction even at high volumes without introducing distortion or unwanted noise. These earbuds are equipped with 10mm biofilm dynamic speakers, enabling them to deliver sound within the human audible range, spanning from 20Hz to 20KHz. While they do offer a solid audio performance, it’s worth noting that the soundstage isn’t particularly wide, and subtle sonic details may be somewhat lacking. The sound signature leans toward a warm tone with a noticeable emphasis on the bass. However, the treble isn’t as finely tuned, resulting in a sound quality that is quite typical for devices in this price range. These earbuds are sufficiently loud, typically requiring only around 70% volume for comfortable listening. It’s important to exercise caution with high volumes, as prolonged exposure can be detrimental to your hearing. Additionally, keep in mind that these headphones may exhibit some sound leakage.

Active Noise Canceling

The QCY HT07 earbuds come equipped with Active Noise Canceling (ANC) technology, enhancing your listening experience by effectively reducing external environmental noise. With an impressive 40dB of active noise canceling coupled with passive noise canceling features, they create a substantial barrier against ambient sounds, allowing you to immerse yourself in your music or audio content without distractions. These earbuds take it a step further by offering six levels of transparency mode, which enables you to stay aware of your surroundings while still enjoying your audio. It’s important to note that while ANC significantly improves the auditory environment by minimizing external noise, it may slightly impact the sound quality, particularly in terms of subtle nuances and details. Nevertheless, the QCY HT07 stands out as a solid choice for those seeking effective noise-canceling capabilities in an affordable package.

Microphone Quality & Bluetooth Calling

The QCY HT07 earbuds incorporate an advanced three-microphone setup in each earpiece, engineered to enhance voice clarity and mitigate ambient noise effectively. Often, budget earphones compromise on microphone quality, resulting in subpar voice reproduction, particularly in noisy surroundings. However, the QCY HT07 is designed to deliver a notable improvement in this regard.

These three microphones include the primary talk microphone, a feedback microphone, and a feedforward microphone. The primary microphone excels at capturing your voice with impressive clarity, while the feedback and feedforward microphones employ specialized Electronic Noise Cancelling (ENC) algorithms to reduce external noise interference.

In a quiet environment, the QCY HT07 microphones perform exceptionally well, delivering clear and intelligible sound, albeit with a slight touch of muffling and minimal hissing. However, in more complex and noisy settings, the microphones face challenges in isolating your voice, resulting in a considerable loss of clarity. The extent of this degradation depends on the complexity of the surrounding environment.

A handy trick to enhance microphone quality is to hold one earpiece closer to your mouth while using the other for listening. This approach allows the microphones to capture your voice more clearly, notably improving call quality, especially in environments with significant background noise.

QCY HT07 Low Latency and Gaming

The QCY HT07 earbuds offer a commendable latency performance, ensuring an enjoyable content consumption experience by maintaining lip-sync accuracy. Equipped with Bluetooth 5.2 technology, these earbuds deliver a seamless audio-visual synchronization, effectively eliminating delays between the sound and video. This means you can fully immerse yourself in your favorite content on platforms like YouTube, Netflix, or Hulu, enjoying a superior and delay-free audio experience with your earphones.

When it comes to gaming, QCY claims to provide an 80ms Low Latency Gaming Mode. However, real-world tests have shown that the latency is even lower, further enhancing the gaming experience. While these earbuds may not be the best choice for competitive gaming due to the minimal latency, they can certainly serve well for casual gaming sessions with friends. If you’re seeking headphones with a significant gaming advantage, you might want to explore alternatives like the Baseus AeQur G10 or the Lenovo GM2 Pro, which are designed to provide an edge in gaming performance.

QCY HT07 – Battery Life And Charging

The QCY HT07 earbuds shine when it comes to battery life, setting a benchmark in the budget headphones category. With ANC (Active Noise Cancellation) enabled, these earbuds offer an impressive 6 to 7 hours of continuous playback, ensuring an extended listening experience without frequent recharging. Powered by a 350mAh lithium battery, the earbuds efficiently recharge in approximately 1.5 hours using the provided USB-C cable.

Adding to their longevity, the charging case significantly boosts the total playback time to a remarkable 32 hours. This means you can enjoy your music and calls throughout the day without the worry of running out of power. Furthermore, the QCY HT07 earbuds feature a 42mAh battery in their compact frame, providing 6 to 7 hours of continuous playback with ANC on at 70% volume or 4 to 5 hours of call time. The integration of Bluetooth 5.2 technology plays a pivotal role in optimizing battery efficiency, allowing users to maximize their usage time. Additionally, the inclusion of a USB-C charging port is a welcome feature at this price point, promoting environmental sustainability and user convenience.

Final Verdict

The QCY HT07 earbuds stand out as a remarkable choice in the crowded earphone market. Their most impressive features include an exceptionally long battery life, robust active noise-canceling capabilities, and a user-friendly app that enhances the overall experience. What truly sets these earbuds apart is their affordability, with a price tag of just $24 on the AliExpress platform. Considering the substantial value they bring to the table, the QCY HT07 is an easy recommendation for anyone in search of a high-performing pair of earbuds that won’t break the bank.

What’s in the Box?

• QCY HT07 Earphones & charging case
• Replaceable eartips
• Charging Cable
• User Manual

QCY HT07 Specifications

Specifications
Product Name	QCY HT07
style	in-ear
waterproof	IPX5
Driver Size	10mm
Bluetooth Version	Bluetooth 5.2
Transmission Distance	8-10m
Frequency Response	20Hz – 20kHz
Charging Interface	Type-C
Microphone Sensitivity	40dB ± 3dB
Distortion	≤5%
Speaker Impedance	32Ω ± 15%
Battery Capacity (Earbuds)	43mAh
Battery Capacity (Case)	350mAh
Playback Time (Single Charge)	7 to 8 hours
Total Playback Time (with Case)	Up to 32 hours
Charging Time	1.5-2 hours
Noise Reduction	40dB Active noise canceling Technology
Game Mode	Yes (80ms low latency)
Voice Assistant Support	Yes
Compatibility	iOS and Android devices