Tronsmart Battle Bluetooth Gaming Earbuds Review

The Tronsmart Battle Bluetooth Gaming Earbuds are wireless earbuds in a partially-transparent, RGB-lit carrying case. Do these earbuds live up to their “Gaming” marketing? Are they good outside of gaming? Let’s dive into it!

The Hardware and Pairing

First, let’s talk about the hardware. The carrying case for the Tronsmart Battle Bluetooth Gaming Earbuds is a plastic shell that, when opened, lights a ring of RGB lighting on the bottom of the case. It pulses through a variety of colors before coming to a halt after about 10 seconds. It’s a lot harder to spot in daylight than indoors, though.

Once you’ve removed the earbuds from the carrying case, they have the somewhat AirPods-esque design one would expect from wireless earbuds in this day and age. However, I will say they were quite comfortable for extended use sessions and, better than other earbuds I’ve used. “Extended use” also ties into the gaming aspect.

Before I dive too deep into the gaming experience, however, I want to take a moment to talk about Bluetooth pairing with the Tronsmart Battle Earbuds. Basically, as soon as you open the carrying case, the earbuds will enter pairing mode. This causes the RGB lighting effect to go off at the bottom, and the indicator lights on the earbuds themselves to blink rapidly and turn off once they’re actually connected.

Closing the charging case with the earbuds inside is how you stop the pairing process once it starts, and this is where we run into a slight issue: I found myself placing the earbuds into the case improperly on quite a few occasions.

Whether on opposite sides or simply rotated in the wrong direction, the design of the earbuds and the case don’t really do very much to prevent you from placing them in the case improperly. And if you do this, they won’t charge properly when you close the case or pair properly when you open it. With time, I’ve overcome this occasional issue, but it has led me to verify that the charging light indicators on both earbuds are present whenever I put them back into the case.

Past this, the most major issue I dealt with when using the Tronsmart Battle Earbuds was single-earbud mode. It worked fine, but actually getting the earbuds to start registering in both ears again required several resets of both earbuds, since they each began acting as separate audio devices whenever I attempted to pair them. Additionally, there’s no indicator as to which earbud is which when both are seeking to pair in single-earbud mode, though if you leave the one you aren’t using in the case and close it, you can get around that part.

Seeing as these are intended to be used for gaming, a single-earbud mode doesn’t seem like a practical use case scenario, since you lose a lot of spatial awareness as a result. Compounded with the pairing issues it causes, I recommend against using single-earbud mode with these wireless earbuds.

The Gaming Experience

Since these earbuds are marketed mainly around gaming, I feel I should discuss my experience actually playing games with them. I decided to go with one of my current favorite FPS games, Ultrakill. Ultrakill is a very fast-paced FPS inspired primarily by early 3D FPS (like Quake) and Stylish Action (like Devil May Cry). This results in a game with lots of distinct sound queues from visually and functionally distinct enemies, many of whom can kill you in seconds if you let your guard down.

When you play fast-paced FPS games, you learn to pinpoint sound queues based on direction and distance fairly quickly. Earbuds are surprisingly effective in these regards, which makes them popular among pro-FPS players for carrying game audio. So the Tronsmart Battle Gaming Earbuds actually perform as expected: they’re fairly good at transmitting accurate in-game audio. Their fit also gives them a slight noise-canceling effect, which is great when you want to focus on in-game sound and are trying to minimize background noise getting into your experience.

The earbuds also includes a mic. Unfortunately, this mic does not seem to have any noise-canceling qualities and doesn’t seem to be very high quality to be boot. For this reason, I recommend only using a separate mic for in-game communications if you’re playing on PC or console, but I understand this won’t be an option for everyone.

Tapping three times on either earbud will also activate the low latency “Gaming Mode.” Even without Gaming Mode enabled, I felt like the headset didn’t have noticeable latency issues compared to my wired audio when I was in-game. Unless you experience issues, I recommend keeping Gaming Mode enabled to maximize performance as intended.

The Listening Experience and Verdict

Last but absolutely not least, let’s talk about how the Tronsmart Battle Bluetooth Gaming Earbuds sound. Besides using them at home on my PC (where the limitations compared to Hi-Fi headphones would be more apparent), I also used the Tronsmart Battle Gaming Earbuds to listen to music at local gaming events. I found that they effectively canceled out the sounds of surrounding players and still played my music loudly and clearly. While they stuck out in this gaming scenario, I also found them comfortable to use in general.

In less noisy and frantic scenarios, however, I found that the listening experience fell short when compared to other earbuds I’ve used. While audio is generally loud and clear, listening to music with quieter undertones and more complexity doesn’t work quite as well. For gaming-only purposes, this is fine, but if you wanted to game and listen to music, there are certainly better options out there.

If I had to wrap up my thoughts on the Tronsmart Battle Bluetooth Gaming Earbuds, I’d say that they’re a solid pair of budget Bluetooth earbuds with a pretty cool carrying case. They function well for blocking out outside noise and getting a decently immersive soundscape in game.

The Tronsmart Battle Bluetooth Gaming Earbuds do all of this at a decently low price and throw in some RGB frills to top it off. I’d say they’re good, especially at the MSRP of $49.99, which has now been knocked down to an amazing $24. But the budget nature of their audio quality makes me think that the RGB should have been cut in favor of better audio quality or improvements to the build.