Technologies

Bose Sound Comes to Baseus Inspire XP1 Earbuds and I’m Impressed

These new noise-canceling earbuds from value brand Baseus include Sound by Bose. They deliver surprisingly good performance for a little more than $100.

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Written by David Carnoy

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David Carnoy Executive Editor / Reviews

Executive Editor David Carnoy has been a leading member of CNET’s Reviews team since 2000. He covers the gamut of gadgets and is a notable reviewer of mobile accessories and portable audio products, including headphones and speakers. He’s also an e-reader and e-publishing expert as well as the author of the novels Knife Music, The Big Exit and Lucidity. All the titles are available as Kindle, iBooks, Kobo e-books and audiobooks.

Expertise Headphones, Bluetooth speakers, mobile accessories, Apple, Sony, Bose, e-readers, Amazon, glasses, ski gear, iPhone cases, gaming accessories, sports tech, portable audio, interviews, audiophile gear, PC speakers Credentials

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8.2/ 10
SCORE

Baseus Inspire XP1

$110 at Amazon

Pros

Well-designed earbuds with comfortable, secure fit
Good sound quality for the price with Sound by Bose
Good noise cancellation
Decent voice-calling performance

Cons

Dolby spatial audio falls well short of Apple’s spatial audio with head-tracking
No wireless charging

In the last year or so Bose has collaborated with a handful of affordable audio brands as it gradually expands its “Sound by Bose” initiative. Like the Bose-infused Skullcandy Method 360 ANC earbuds, the Baseus Inspire XP1 ($110) reviewed here have very good sound and overall performance. These comfortable earbuds share some similarities with Bose’s $300 QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen) for less than half the price, making them one of the best earbuds values around and a CNET Editors’ Choice winner.

Read more: Best wireless earbuds of 2025

Bose-like fit

It appears that Bose has not only helped engineer the Inspire XP1’s sound but their design, as they have similar eartips to the QuietComfort Ultras. Baesus leaves off the stability bands that help lock the buds into your ears, however: That’s an extra found on the Bose buds as well as the Skullcandy Method 360 ANC. Even without the bands, the Baseus buds fit my ears very well and I had no problem running with them (they’re IPX4 splash-proof). The eartips’ tight seal created good passive noise isolation and allowed for optimal sound quality and noise-canceling performance.

The Inspire XP1 have a couple of advantages over the Skullcandy Method 360 ANC, which I also liked and sell for around the same price. The Inspire XP1 have a smaller case and the stems of the Baseus buds are narrower than the Skullcandy’s. They XP1’s have six microphones (three in each earbud) compared to the Method 360 ANC’s four microphones (two in each earbud).

Impressive sound for the price

Out of the box, the Inspire XP1 have a fairly balanced, though marginally V-shaped, sound profile with accentuated bass and treble and slightly recessed, albeit still warm and natural, midrange. Like Bose’s own headphones and earbuds, they’re designed to sound smooth with a variety of music genres and feature strong, punchy bass and relatively detailed sound along with a fairly wide sound stage. While the sound of the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen) is a step-up and has a little more depth and richness to it, the Inspire XP1’s sound isn’t far off the Bose’s pace for sound quality.

You can tweak the buds’ sound a bit in the Baseus companion app with either the preset equalizer settings or create a custom EQ setting, but I mainly stuck with the default Sound by Bose setting. Not surprisingly the Baesus sound pretty similar to the Skullcandy Method 360 ANC as well.

I compared the Baesus to the slightly less-expensive Earfun Air Pro 4 Plus ($80), which I also awarded a CNET Editors’ Choice and which also has a dual-driver design. The Earfun have a slight edge over the Baseus buds to my ear, with a little bit better treble clarity that makes them sound a tad richer, with greater overall depth. The Inspire XP1 are warmer-sounding and more forgiving. They don’t accentuate the flaws in poorly recorded tracks as much, so some folks might end up preferring their sound.

It’s also worth noting that the XP1’s are equipped Dolby spatial audio. Testing it with my iPhone 16 Pro using Apple Music and Spotify, I only noticed a small difference in sound quality when I turned it on in the app (you could argue it’s slightly better but I wasn’t sure about that). I also tested the buds with a Google Pixel 9 phone and felt the same way about the Dolby audio mode. Perhaps we’ll see some changes with a firmware upgrade. Typically, spatial audio modes open up the soundstage a bit.

How do the Inspire XP1’s features stack up?

The Inspire XP1 have a solid feature set. They’re equipped with Bluetooth 6.1, ear-detection sensors that pause your music when you take a bud out of your ear (and resume playback when you put it back in), a low-latency gaming mode that should also be turned on for video watching (to make sure the audio syncs well) and multipoint Bluetooth pairing that enables you to pair two devices simultaneously to the buds.

There’s no mention of Auracast broadcast audio, which the Earfun Air Pro 4 Plus support. This feature allows you to share your audio with other Auracast-enabled speakers and headphones and tap into public Auracast broadcasts. To be fair Auracast has yet to really take off, so I don’t consider its lack a major knock on the Baesus. They’re also missing wireless charging, which may be slightly more important to you, and which the EarFuns also support.

The Inspire XP1 handle the SBC and AAC audio codecs but not the so-called higher-resolution aptX Lossless or LDAC audio codes that the Earfun Air Pro 4 Plus support (many Android phones support the LDAC codec for Bluetooth streaming but fewer support aptX). I personally don’t think the lack of support for aptX or LDAC is a big deal as most people won’t be able to tell the difference between using AAC and those codecs, especially with this caliber of earbuds. But some people do care about audio codecs so I mention them.

There’s a basic Find My Earbuds option that lets you know where the earbuds were last disconnected from your phone.

Good noise canceling, decent battery life

While their adaptive noise canceling isn’t up to the level of the Bose QuietComfort Ultra (2nd Gen)’s superb ANC, it’s quite respectable (rated for with a -50 dB, it’s similar to the Earfun Air Pro 4 Plus’ ANC), especially for a set of earbuds in this price range. They also have a transparency mode that lets external sound into the earbuds if you want. It’s just fine, though it doesn’t sound as natural as the AirPods Pro 3’s transparency mode, which is the gold standard,

The Inspire XP1 are rated for up to 6 hours of battery life at moderate volume levels with noise canceling on, with an additional 29 hours in the charging case. Some earbuds offer an hour or two more of battery life on a single charge (the AirPods Pro 3 are rated for up to 7 hours of playback with noise canceling on, for the record). I used the the Inspire XP1 for 3 days without having to recharge them in the case and felt their battery life was perfectly fine.

B+ voice-calling performance

I was a little disappointed with the voice-calling performance of the Skullcandy Method 360 ANC earbuds, so I was eager to see if the Inspire XP1 did better in my tests on the noisy streets of New York. The answer is yes, though it’s more like a “B+” grade than a not top-tier “A.” Callers said the buds did a good job reducing background noise to a minimum, especially when I wasn’t talking. However, while they could hear me reasonably well, my voice warbled from time to time (as it became noisier around me), which made it harder to understand me if I was talking quickly and not enunciating my words. I could hear callers quite well on my end.

Other Baseus headphones and earbuds with Sound by Bose

The Inspire XP1 aren’t the only earbuds in Baseus new-for-2025 lineup with Sound by Bose. There’s also the Inspire XC1 open earbuds and the XH1 over-ear headphones, all of which cost around $110 when you factor in instant discount coupons on their product pages. I briefly tested both. While I think the XC1 are a good value compared to Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds and sound good for open earbuds, I prefer the Inspire XP1 and its traditional closed design. The over-ear XH1 also sound good and are a solid value overall, with decent noise canceling, but the headphones felt slightly too big for my head, so I was a little less enamored with them.

Motorola has also released some earbuds with Sound by Bose, including the Moto Buds Plus, which seem like dead ringers for the OnePlus Buds 3. I haven’t tried those, but Bose doesn’t seemed to have influenced their exterior design because they don’t have the Bose-like ear tips of the Baseus and Skullcandy buds.

Baseus Inspire XP1 final thoughts

The Inspire XP1 are well-designed and sound good for the price, with solid all-around performance, including good noise cancellation and decent voice-calling sound. The Earfun Air Pro 4 Plus feature slightly better sound for less, but I do like the design and fit of the Inspire XP1 buds a bit better; they look and feel a bit more premium (as does their case). As it stands, the Earfun Air Pro 4 Plus are probably the better value because you can get them for $30 less (or $40 less if you apply the code AP4PCNET at checkout on Amazon). But the Inspire XP1 are also near the top of my list of best budget earbuds and earn a CNET Editors’ Choice award.

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