Audio brand Anker is going to help people get a good night’s sleep with its upcoming pair of wireless earbuds: the Soundcore Sleep A20. These buds have been specially made to block out as much outside noise as possible while being comfortable to wear in bed.
The first thing to notice looking through the Sleep A20’s product page is there is no active noise canceling feature present – presumably because ANC tech quickly drains earbud batteries. Instead, Anker is implementing what it calls a “4-Point Noise Masking System”. It starts with a design that composes two layers of silicon rather than just one. This configuration, the company claims, gives the A20s “three times stronger passive noise blocking” than your garden variety earbuds.
According to the Anker, the devices are preloaded with white noise and other sounds on “an included sound library.” Smart Volume Control will automatically tweak the strength of the audio to ensure outside noise (like someone snoring) doesn’t leak in. The same library even offers personal alarms that only you can hear so as to not disturb your sleeping spouse or anyone else in a nearby room.
Sealed tight
When it comes to the outer design, the company developed the Sleep A20 earbuds to fit comfortably, saying they blend in with the shape of your ear. Speaking from personal experience, sleeping while wearing earbuds often results in a dull, throbbing pain. Especially if you’re a side-sleeper, it can hurt quite a bit.
It seems Anker is well aware of this issue as their model has a flat cover shielding the ear canal. The ends of the A20 morph into an “Air Wing” to evenly spread out the pressure caused by their weight. This wing plus the “ultra-soft material” used for its construction should allow for extra comfort, according to Anker.
You can, of course, listen to music or podcasts from your favorite streaming device via Bluetooth. The Sleep A20s aren't designed primarily for music, though, and Anker’s product page doesn’t list a specs sheet so we don’t know what kind of drivers it’ll have.
Maximum battery life is set for a whopping 80 hours with the charging case. In between charges, the earbuds deliver “14 hours of continuous playback in Sleep mode.” That number drops down even further to 10 hours with Bluetooth enabled. Other notable features include support for automatic sleeping monitoring and sleeping position tracking; both of which can be accessed through the official Soundcore app.
Availability
The launch of Anker’s Soundcore Sleep A20 will be a little complicated.
On April 16 at 8AM EST, the company will launch a Kickstarter campaign where you can pre-purchase the earbuds with a 40 percent discount in the US, UK, and possibly Azerbaijan because the country code "AZ" was listed. We do believe this a typo and they meant to put in Australia instead.
Once the Kickstarter is over, the Sleep A20 will be widely available for purchase on Amazon as well as their online storefront for $150/£120/€150. You can sign up to be notified when the campaign starts by entering your email in the product page.
We reached out to Anker asking for clarification on certain aspects like its future availability and final price tag, among other things. We'll update with any news.
Anker’s latest model may just be the earbuds to fill in the gap left by rival Bose when it discontinued its SleepBuds series. Despite how good they were, it seems there wasn’t enough interest in the SleepBuds II, so the plug was pulled. That's a shame because we really liked them, and Bose hasn't announced any future sleep earbud developments.
If you want recommendations, checkout TechRadar's list of the best sleep earbuds for 2024.
