If you’ve ever struggled with the discomfort or poor fit of traditional wireless earbuds, open-ear designs like the Baseus Inspire XC1 offer a compelling alternative. Unlike conventional earbuds that fit snugly inside the ear canal, open-ear earbuds rest outside the ear, allowing for greater comfort and heightened awareness of your surroundings. This design suits those who prioritize comfort or need to stay alert to ambient sounds, such as while commuting or exercising outdoors.
Open-ear earbuds come mainly in two forms: the classic ear-hook style and a newer clip shape that wraps around the ear, resembling an earring. The Baseus Inspire XC1 belong to this latter category, offering a sleek and unobtrusive fit that many users may find preferable, especially if they wear glasses or dislike anything pressing into their ear canal.
Baseus is a relatively new name in personal audio but has quickly gained attention for delivering impressive products at prices well below many competitors. The Inspire XC1, developed in collaboration with Bose, exemplify this trend. The partnership with Bose, a company renowned for its audio engineering, helps ensure the XC1 delivers sound quality and features that punch above their price point.
The earbuds come in two subtle colors—Cosmic Black and Starlight Off-White—that echo Bose’s aesthetic. The charging case has a smooth plastic finish, which looks sleek but can make opening the lid a bit tricky. Inside, strong magnets keep the earbuds firmly in place while charging. Though wireless charging isn’t supported, this is common among open-ear models, particularly clip-style earbuds.
Comfort is one of the XC1’s strongest points. Like most open-ear designs, they are extremely comfortable even after hours of continuous wear. Because they don’t sit inside the ear canal, you often forget you’re wearing them. The clip design holds securely in place, even during workouts, and the earbuds boast an IP66 rating, providing solid protection against dust and water—safe for showering but not swimming.
An interesting feature of the Inspire XC1 is their reversibility. Thanks to onboard sensors, the earbuds automatically detect which side they’re on, making it easier to put them on correctly. Control-wise, each earbud has a single physical button placed on the battery pod, which can be pressed easily with either thumb or index finger. Unlike touch controls found on many earbuds, these buttons work well even when wearing gloves, adding practical usability in colder weather.
The Baseus app enhances the user experience by allowing customization of button functions through single, double, triple, and long presses. These controls can be mapped to playback, volume adjustment, phone calls, or voice assistants, offering flexibility that suits a variety of preferences. The earbuds also feature wear sensors that pause playback when removed and resume it when replaced, a handy convenience.
Bluetooth Multipoint is another highlight. This feature enables the earbuds to maintain simultaneous connections with multiple devices, such as a phone and laptop. The app simplifies managing these connections, allowing you to switch between paired devices effortlessly—a feature often missing in earbuds at this price range.
One of the defining characteristics of open-ear earbuds is their transparency to environmental noise. Unlike closed earbuds that isolate you from your surroundings, the XC1 let in ambient sounds, enabling natural conversations without removing the earbuds. This makes calls more comfortable, as you can hear your own voice without the muffling effect common to in-ear designs. In fact, this natural awareness often surpasses the best “transparency mode” on traditional earbuds.
However, this openness also means your music has to compete with background noise. In loud environments—busy streets, bustling cafes, or noisy gyms—external sounds can overwhelm the audio, making it harder to focus on music or podcasts. While no open-ear design can fully mitigate this challenge, the Baseus Inspire XC1 handle it better than many competitors, managing to deliver clear sound even amid distractions.
On the audio front, Baseus leveraged its partnership with Bose to fine-tune the XC1’s sound performance. The earbuds feature a dual-driver setup, combining a dynamic driver for rich bass with a Knowles balanced armature driver that enhances clarity in the highs—a somewhat rare configuration in open-ear earbuds. This results in a sound profile that balances depth and detail well.
In quieter settings, the Inspire XC1 impress with strong bass response and clear mids and highs. Testing with tracks ranging from Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” to Stevie Ray Vaughn’s “Tin Pan Alley” revealed that the XC1 deliver deeper bass than Bose’s