Review - The Ultimate Ears Fits Earbuds prioritize your comfort - Android

Ultimate Ears wants to make sure you never itch wearing these earbuds.

It's probably safe to say every company that makes and sells the best wireless earbuds wants to give you as comfortable a fit as possible. It also goes without saying that the further earbuds push toward the inner ear, the harder it is to ensure they'll feel comfortable for every size or shape of ear.

Ultimate Ears, or UE, as the Logitech-owned brand is better known, takes a dynamic approach to solve that problem: a molding process that reshapes its UE Fits earbuds as you're first wearing them. While this idea turned out to be a viable concept here, you may not get every other feature you're looking for.

At a glance

Ultimate Ears Fits Earbuds

Bottom line: The UE Fits are as close as you can get right now to wearing a pair of earbuds with the ultimate comfort in mind, considering how personalized they are in that regard. It's just that to get that kind of tailoring, you lose out on other features that have become staples for wireless earbuds in the same price range.

The Good

• Outstanding comfort
• Good sound quality
• Lightweight design
• Good call quality
• Solid app support

The Bad

• Finicky touch controls
• No ANC or Ambient mode
• No wireless charging
• Pricey

$250 at Amazon

Jump to:

• What I like
• What needs work
• Competition
• Should you buy them?

Ultimate Ears Fits Earbuds What I like

Sound quality is naturally a huge factor in how good earbuds can be, except assessing their fidelity has a lot to do with how well they fit. That's why you'll rarely see a consensus on which earbuds sound or fit the best, with different reviewers or customers praising or panning earbuds that may or may not fit your ears in particular. It's a big reason why some manufacturers experiment with different ear tips of varying sizes and shapes to truly find the perfect balance. Even foam tips were made with that in mind.

UE prioritized fit above all else with its appropriately-named earbuds. For starters, the UE Fits use an alternative take on the AirPods-style stem; instead of a shaft falling down from the top, it extends from either side of the bud. It's an odd shape compared to the industry standard or the cheap AirPods clones you usually see, but there's a legitimate reason for the design.

To be comfortable, the Fits need to be stable, and balancing the stem this way distributes the weight more evenly. It's also necessary because the ear tips are actually larger than you typically see in other earbuds, which often come with three or four tip sizes. The Fits instead use a one-size-fits-all design that relies on the UE Fits app to actually make them fit everyone. Using the app, you'll initiate a 60-second molding period whereby the ear tips light up and reshape themselves to match your inner ears.

There are no other ear tips or replacements here. It's one set out of the box, and that's it. UE even puts a disclaimer on the box noting that the tips are light sensitive. I set them up pretty quickly after unboxing them, as I wasn't clear on how much exposure qualifies as "too much."

Either way, the setup process itself is definitely unique for any pair of headphones. The 60-second app session activates the ear tips' LEDs and heats up the buds, making them more malleable for the final fit. In the midst of this, the app told me to relax my jaw and listen for the bass tones playing, in order to customize the sound profile to my ears. Before I started, I couldn't find the right seal in my ears; but after the molding finished, I could immediately feel the difference in comfort and sound.

I also appreciated that the app didn't just finish with the setup and offer little else. Using the custom equalizer, you can switch between six preset settings or easily set and save your own presets based on your preferences. I always like when a dedicated app offers some freedom to do more, and in this case, it compensates for the fact that the earbuds themselves don't have any active tools for blocking out background noise.

Getting the Fits to fit matters for a number of reasons, not least of which is the sound quality itself. Without active noise cancelation (ANC), the UE Fits need to do passive isolation really well to compensate. Thankfully, after the molding session, I found that not much sound leaks in or out, leaving more wiggle room for the actual audio. For comparison, I've found that achieving that same tight seal with most other earbuds takes a lot more trial and error.

I noticed this with all genres of music I listened to, including those that may not be mainstream. A Spanish guitar track like Jesse Cook's Viva sounded resonant with the right EQ settings, and I felt the same way while listening to a hip-hop track like 2Pac's California Love. If you want extra bass, you can ramp that up. If it's a brighter or balanced tonality that suits you better, that's easy to manage. And with phone calls, callers sounded nice and clear, with those on the other end never really complaining about how I sounded.

To accommodate the variable size of these earbuds, the case, which is a moderate size, has a cavernous gorge inside to fit them in neatly. That does affect overall battery life since the case only adds 12 hours to the eight hours the earbuds have for themselves. Normally, this would be a pretty significant drawback compared to what others in the same price range offer, but it's understandable under the circumstances. Between a moderately-sized or extra-large case, I'd rather go with the former.

The good news is that thanks to the tight seal, I didn't have to raise the volume too much from the default level. So I routinely got about seven hours or more per charge. It more or less lives up to UE's estimates.