The sight of corded earphones is becoming ever rarer in the era of true wireless earbuds and phones without headphone jacks.
Thus, Beyerdynamic's Soul Byrd in-ears are a welcome respite for anyone seeking quality wired audio.
At $89, the price is right, and if you're looking for an accurate sound signature with some added bass depth and crispness, you won't be disappointed.
Design
The earphones, available in black, have a fairly nondescript design, with a thin matte rubber cable (about 47 inches long) and glossy black eartips featuring the new Beyerdynamic logo.
The overall look is simple and sleek, but it definitely doesn't stand out.
The inline remote control, located at roughly chin level on the right ear's cable, has three buttons.
A central multifunction button handles play/pause, call management, and track navigation (with multiple clicks), and the plus/minus buttons adjust volume.
The central button can also summon voice assistants when held down for a little more than a second.
The remote compartment also houses a mic, which offers excellent intelligibility.
Using the Voice Memos app on an iPhone 8, we could understand every word we recorded crisply and clearly.
The mic doesn't offer much low frequency response, but that's hardly necessary for vocal clarity—this is a crisp, distortion-free experience.
Beyerdynamic includes five pairs of silicone eartips in various sizes, as well as a removable shirt clip and a zip-up protective case.
The in-ear fit, once you find the right eartip size, is lightweight and secure, but these earphones are not ideal for exercise: They have no IP rating, and they won't likely stay in place as well as an exercise-focused pair will.
For walking around, however, the in-ear security is fine, and the seal allows for solid bass response and a consistent ear-to-ear stereo image.
Performance
Internally, the earpieces house dynamic drivers delivering a frequency range of 10Hz-25kHz, with an impedance of 18 ohms.
On tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife's "Silent Shout," they deliver solid low frequency response.
At top volumes, the bass doesn't distort, and at more reasonable listening levels, the lows feel powerful without sounding overly exaggerated.
Mega bass fiends might be disappointed with the fairly accurate response here—it's certainly not meager, but it veers toward accuracy and away from the often heavily boosted lows we hear in competing models.
Bill Callahan's "Drover," a track with far less deep bass in the mix, gives us a better sense of the Soul Byrd's general sound signature.
The drums on this track can sound unnaturally thunderous on heavily bass boosted in-ears, or thin and brittle on pairs that really dial back the lows.
Here, we get something close to the middle, with a slight lean toward the bass-boosted end of the spectrum.
This results in a lovely drum sound that's rich, round, and full, but not insanely heavy.
Callahan's baritone vocals get some add richness in the low-mids, but nothing over the top, and they also receive plenty of crisp high-mid and high frequency presence to keep things clear and detailed.
The acoustic guitar strums and higher register percussive hits also receive a decent high-mid presence, keeping things fairly balanced.
The overall sound signature doesn't feel wildly sculpted—it's subtly boosted and cut here and there.
On Jay-Z and Kanye West's "No Church in the Wild," the kick drum loop receives enough high-mid presence to keep the attack sounding punchy, though we sometimes hear a tad more high-mid presence from other pairs.
Instead, we seem to get more high frequencies, pushing the vinyl crackle and hiss a bit forward in the mix.
The sub-bass synth hits that punctuate the beat are delivered with solid presence—you hear their power and depth, but it's not taken to intense levels like we often hear on pairs trying to replicate the boosted subwoofer experience.
The vocal performances on this track sound excellent—clear, with no sibilance added to the equation.
Orchestral tracks, like the opening scene from John Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary, get some added bass depth, and the lower register instrumentation takes a slight step forward in the mix as a result.
The spotlight still belongs to the higher register brass, strings, and vocals, however.
This isn't quite a sound signature for purists, but it doesn't boost or sculpt things so wildly that they will run in terror.
Conclusions
If your mobile device has a headphone jack, and a wired in-ear pair is what you're after, quality affordable options are becoming rarer and rarer.
For $90, Beyerdynamic's Soul Byrd earphones deliver an impressive listening experience aimed at those who want a mostly accurate sound signature, but don't mind some slight boosting in the lows.
We're also fans of the V-Moda Forza, the Bowers & Wilkins C5 Series 2, the 1More Triple Driver In-Ear Headphones, and for less, the RHA MA390 Universal.
But at this price, Beyerdynamic delivers a high-quality listening experience and a comfortable design.
The Bottom Line
Beyerdynamic's Soul Byrd earphones deliver quality audio in an increasingly rare wired in-ear design.
