August EP720 Active Noise-Cancelling earphones

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Very good ANC earphones

August sent me these EP720 earphones for review and I think they are very good. They are well made, they have effective Active Noise-Cancelling and the sound quality is very good.

The earphones are well packaged and come with a good User Manual, extra silicone tips to fit smaller or larger ears and a standard micro-USB charging lead.  There's no carry-case, which is a shame but not a big problem.

Functionally they work well.  There is a neat in-line panel (with a shirt-clip, a nice little feature) which has a microphone, a simple control button for music and calls and an on/off switch for the Active Noise Cancelling.  The ANC is remarkably effective: general background noise is very significantly reduced and almost vanishes much of the time. I can still hear when someone speaks to me and they don't keep out sudden, loud noises, but they perform as well as any noise-cancelling I have ever tried – including my Bose QC2 over-ear headphones which I have relied on for many years and a couple of more recent in-ear sets, too. They also work fine as passive, unpowered earphones with the ANC turned off.

The sound is very good, especially for this price range, with a good, deep bass and clear, bright tops and middles. The articulation crisp and the overall sound is very pleasing. I have a Test Playlist which I use for audio products beginning with 15th Century choral music, ending up with The Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen and London Grammar and going through most things in between; these perform well throughout.

I have tried quite a lot of earphones and as ANC earphones I think these EP720 are very good and represent very good value.  They're not quite as stylish as, for example, the Chafon H100 which have been recently released, but the sound is better, the ANC is at least as good and they're around half the price. In short, these are very good quality earphones which give very good sound and have very effective noise-cancelling. I can recommend them warmly.