There’s a hundred billion different types of wireless earbuds out on the market, but not all of them are focused on providing a focus for gamers. Luckily for us, Roccat stepped up to deliver their take on Apple’s Airpods. Are Roccat’s Syn Buds Air worth your hard earned bucks?
Roccat Syn Buds Air
Manufacturer: Roccat
Price: $99.00
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what the thought process behind these earbuds are. From a performance standpoint, they’re pretty typical earbuds that sound great when you’re wearing them and have pretty basic touch controls on the side of the earbud or the stems. They’re decently low profile but there’s not much that differentiates them from other products on the market visually except for Roccat’s jungle cat logo on the earbud.
This would be fine, except for that for some unknown reason, Roccat’s parent company Turtle Beach also released their own version of these same earbuds – the Scout Air earbuds. The only difference between these two seems to be the logo on the outside of the earbud. I don’t really know why two companies would compete with themselves, but hey, the Scout Air is on sale for $69.99 if you wanna save a few bucks.
I’ve actually been using these earbuds for a quite a few months now and I have to admit that they sound really damn good. My biggest problem with Syn Buds Air is that no matter what I do, I cannot keep these things in my ears. It’s a shame as they’re very comfortable but they always rotate out and there’s no provided options to help me keep them in my ears. When they stay in place, they sound great and mobile games sound fantastic on them. I also enjoy using them for music and movies, but they are often fairly testy and require a bit of finagling to get working properly.
I often had an issue where only one of the earbuds would power on, while the other one wouldn’t seem to want to connect up. Fortunately, there’s a Roccat Syn Buds Air app you can install on your phone that will upgrade the firmware on the buds, making them considerably more reliable. Unfortunately, there’s not much guidance to remind you that this app is actually more of a necessity than a companion as I was unable to find a way to update the firmware on these without the use of the app and not everyone is going to want these buds for their phones as they’ve probably got a pair they like better.
Personally, I’ve been using them with my Steam Deck and they’re awesome with it, but again, I wouldn’t have been able to fix some of the issues I had out of the box without the use of the smartphone app, which seems like a pretty big design flaw.
Roccat’s Syn Buds Air are available for purchase from the Roccat website as well as other retailers. Roccat provided Niche Gamer with the unit for the purposes of this review.
