Overall and Final Verdict
The idea of sleeping with earbuds is simple and you would think it would be easy to make work. But once you break down what they need to do differently it does get more complicated. They have to be extremely compact so that they can be comfortable when sleeping on your sides, they have to have the battery life to last the entire night which gets complicated once you also figure in the compact size, and because you have them inside of your ears and you potentially are sleeping on your side covering it all up you have to be able to get a signal through to them or at least have a solution for when you lose connection. Then on top of that, you have all of the standard concerns that all earbuds have as well. On paper, soundcore has all of that covered though with a very small margin when it comes to battery life especially if you want to listen to some music when going to sleep. But do they accomplish that? Well in most ways yes but the Sleep A10s are far from perfect.
They did a great job on comfort with the compact design combined with including a nice variety of eartip and earbud silicon covers. In fact, the compact design makes me want my everyday earbuds to reach the same compact size, but once you start going to better battery life, active noise cancellation, and/or more power for even better audio the size goes out the window. I did personally run into issues with my ears getting hot and sweaty when running the A10s which as someone who gets an ear infection every few years started to cause concerns. Locking all of that sweat in and doing it every night for the entire night can cause issues. So if you overheat easily, like me, this might not be the best setup to get through the entire night.
The wireless issues did end up being an issue, namely when I tried to connect to anything at any distance when laying on my side. Keeping my phone under my pillow helped a lot though. Soundcore did set the Sleep A10s up to account for this though, at least once you are asleep. The sleep white noise is uploaded to the earbuds so keeping connected doesn’t stop that from playing at night. It was the battery life though that was my biggest issue with the Sleep A10s. The listed life gets you up to 10 hours using only sleep mode, 6 hours with music, and 8 hours in mixed-use with that mixed-use being a half hour of music and 7 and a half hours of sleep. Even in perfect battery life, that is pushing it for anyone who wants to listen to a little music before sleeping and then get 8 hours of sleep. In my opinion, I think future models should air for 10 hours of mixed-use to give a little headroom. This becomes a bigger issue if you rely on the alarm and the battery dies. Even if you aren’t planning on using it, now you have to have an alarm that is loud enough to overpower the double-sealed earbuds and if they are still running the white noise as well. In the end, my experience had the batter life down from the advertised numbers which meant they were often dead if I wore them all night.
Now I do still have to point out that when things were working well they did improve my sleep and some of the issues, namely my ears getting so hot are going to be an issue with any sleeping earbud. There is room for soundcore to improve on things for sure but they aren’t far from hitting the mark as well. For me, it does let me know that white noise could potentially help me sleep better at night, but maybe the music and white noise would be better coming from an external speaker in my situation. Maybe soundcore should consider integrating it with their older Wakey alarm.
As far as pricing goes the Sleep A10s launched with an MSRP of $179.99 which that price when compared to the competition, the Bose SleepBuds II which are $249 isn’t too bad. But once you take the Bose out of the picture the price is expensive especially when the sleep design takes away a lot of the functionality of day to day earbuds like a microphone, active noise canceling, and longer battery life. They did update the price with a coupon on their website and it is just lower on Amazon for $129 which is better but is still expensive. Once we compare the Sleep A10s with the Bose I can also see why they went with the charging case design that I felt was too large for no reason. Overall if you need sleeping earbuds, these are worth a look. But go in knowing that there are downsides. That said more than anything I hope Anker/soundcore continues to improve on the design because they are close.
Live Pricing: HERE
