Sony LinkBuds Fit review: comfort above everything else

“Unrivaled comfort.” That’s how Sony described its new LinkBuds Fit noise-canceling wireless earbuds when they debuted alongside the company’s two other new LinkBuds products, the LinkBuds Open and LinkBuds Speaker.

That’s a bold claim. It’s also pretty accurate. I don’t know if they’re the most comfortable wireless earbuds you can buy — maybe you have weird ears? — but as far as my ears are concerned, they’re easily in the top three.

Now that we have that out of the way, what about the LinkBuds Fit’s many other characteristics and features?

Let’s check ‘em out.

Editor’s note: This review has been updated with more details on the LinkBuds Fit support for Auracast.

First a note on where the Fit sit in Sony’s earbuds lineup. It’s tempting to think of these buds as successors to the 2022 LinkBuds S. But since Sony plans to sell the two products side by side for the foreseeable future, they’re more like siblings. The Fit offer a few more bells and whistles — some of which come directly from Sony’s $300 flagship, the WF-1000XM5 — yet with the same $200 price as the S.

Design-wise, the Fit may not win over S fans. Sony has used a lot of silicone on the LinkBuds Fit, mostly in the form of the new, hook-shaped “Air Fitting Supporters” (which is a terrible name). It’s a very different look. It’s also a different shape.

The S employs a dual-chamber design, with a small spherical module sitting close to the ear canal and a larger coin shape placed in the outer concha. For those with smaller ears, like my daughter, it lets the silicone ear tips penetrate deeper into the ear, providing a snug and secure fit.

By contrast, the LinkBuds Fit have a larger, more traditional shape. It proved to be too big of a difference for my daughter — the Fit just don’t fit.

The new charging case adopts a clamshell design, offering excellent access to the earbuds. Sadly, there is still no wireless charging and I’m not convinced it’s any easier to pocket than the S. The hinge works well, but the magnetic closure isn’t as strong, which may lead to inadvertent openings in a purse or backpack.

I’m on the fence when it comes to Sony’s optional silicone case covers. I’m not a big fan of customizing the look of my accessories (I’m probably not part of the target market), but I do like the extra protection they afford. My black review unit’s glossy case lid became marred with fingerprints as soon as I removed it from the box.

The specs

Tap anywhere controls

Because Sony has wrapped the entire outer portion of the Fit in silicone, the controls use accelerometers to detect tap gestures. This has several benefits. First, it enables Sony’s Wide Area Tap, a cool feature that heightens the accelerometers’ sensitivity to movements created when you tap on your cheek, near your ear. It also means that the controls are glove-friendly — no capacitive touch needed. Finally, it all but eliminates inadvertent pausing or other unwanted commands when you adjust or remove an earbud.

I enjoyed this system on Sony’s first-gen LinkBuds (not the S model), and it works just as effectively on the Fit.

The downside is that Sony has also kept its frustrating control scheme from the LinkBuds: You can customize two gestures per earbud, but you can only pick from preassigned gesture groups. These include ANC control, playback, song selection, voice assist, and several others. If you pick ANC control on the left earbud and playback on the right, you don’t get access to song selection.

Thankfully, Sony has added a persistent volume control gesture (repeated taps on the left or right earbud to raise/lower volume), so that’s one less reason to reach for your phone.

Sony’s new Voice Assist feature, should you choose to use it, makes up for the limitations of the gesture groups. Saying “Hey Headphones …” followed by a command such as “turn noise canceling on” does exactly what you’d expect. There are voice options for nearly every function, including a handy battery check command. It works well and I love that you don’t need to tap an earbud first, but it’s not very smart. If you want to pause your tunes, “Hey Headphones … pause” doesn’t work. You need to complete the phrase “pause music,” or “pause song.” The wear sensors are the other way to do this, as they auto-pause your tunes when you remove an earbud.

Also new to the Fit are call management head gestures. When a call comes in, you can nod to accept or shake to decline it. I found the nodding gesture worked consistently, while the shaking motion seemed to require a more exaggerated movement.

For years, Sony was a laggard in the Bluetooth Multipoint department. But those days are now behind us. The newly redesigned Sony Sound Connect app (previously known as the Headphones Connect app) does a great job of showing you the LinkBuds Fit’s currently connected devices. You can also bump the earbuds back into pairing mode from the app so you can add another device to the list. I guess good things come to those who wait.

Consistently quiet

The LinkBuds Fit apparently possess Sony’s best ambient sound (transparency), in part because of their Integrated Processor V2 chip, which first debuted in the WF-1000XM5. I hesitate to co-sign that claim. I agree that there’s a difference in the Fit’s ambient performance when compared to both the LinkBuds S and even the WF-1000XM5, but an improvement? I’m not so sure.

As with most of Sony’s ambient products, you can hear the outside world with impressive clarity when it’s engaged. I think I’m on board with the notion that the Fit does this part marginally better than those other earbuds. However, part of the transparency formula is how well you can hear your own voice. The Fit are certainly no slouch in this department, but I prefer the LinkBuds S version — they’re more natural-sounding to my ears.

On the other hand, when it comes to noise cancellation, their performance is nearly identical to the LinkBuds S, which is to say, perfectly adequate, but not as capable as the kind of quiet you’ll get from the XM5 or even Bose’s new $180 QuietComfort Earbuds.

One thing’s for sure: Sony’s Adaptive Sound Control, which attempts to guess whether you need noise cancellation or transparency based on a variety of factors, is as annoying as ever. For some reason, it can’t handle the idea that you might want the benefits of ANC while walking and always turns on transparency mode. Your mileage may vary, but I tend to turn it off and leave it off.

Conversely, speak-to-chat is an available option (there are so many available options in the Sound Connect app!) and it does an excellent job of sensing your speech without reacting to other sounds like sneezes, coughs, or the clearing of throats. It quickly moves you from ANC to transparency and halts your tunes within a second or two of detecting speech, while letting you decide how long it waits after it senses you’re done talking (5, 15, 30 seconds, or never) before returning you to ANC and music.

Detailed sound

Sound quality is yet another area where Sony believes the LinkBuds Fit excel. It claims that the V2 chip and the Fit’s “Dynamic Driver X” architecture were both inherited from the company’s 1000X series. If that’s true, I guess it’s proof that there’s more to the XM5’s sound than these two ingredients.

I have absolutely no complaints about the Fit’s sound. It’s exactly what I’ve come to expect from Sony’s midrange offering, with the kind of clarity and bass resonance that keeps earning Sony praise year after year. But make no mistake, they don’t deliver the class-leading performance of the XM5.

Swapping back and forth with the LinkBuds S, I was hard-pressed to tell the difference between these models, except in one area: Sony’s LDAC Bluetooth codec.

With the LinkBuds S, I didn’t detect much difference between LDAC and AAC, but the Fit are a different story.

For this listening session, I paired the LinkBuds Fit to an iPhone 14 (AAC) and a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra (LDAC) and hit the same three hi-res FLAC tracks using Tidal. It was Lusaint’s haunting cover of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game that best demonstrated LDAC’s extra detail. A deep echo effect is applied to Lusaint’s voice at the end of each of the six opening lines of the song. On the iPhone, the decay of that echo felt like a shadow of the vocals that produced them. On the S23, the decay had an audible texture and shape, giving the echo an eerie personality — you could hear it fighting against the inevitable oblivion.

The Sound Connect app gives you access to Sony’s standard equalizer function with its collection of presets, manual settings, and bass boost adjustments. You can use it to perform extensive tweaks if you want, but I was content with the balance right out of the box.

Speaking of EQ, Sony has added something called “background music effect” to the Sound Connect app. It gives you a choice of three simulated environments: My Room, Living Room, and Cafe. Each one modifies your music to give you more or less “space” to the sound. With My Room, the sound is placed very close to your ears — you may not even notice a huge difference versus no effect. But once you get to Cafe mode, there’s a very distinct sense of being in a large space, with sound that is coming from further away. Sony says it helps with relaxation and focus. Thankfully, there are no simulated Cafe patrons.

Sony’s approach to spatial audio mirrors that of Google’s Pixel Buds Pro 2, but that’s not a compliment. Sony doesn’t offer spatialized stereo (stereo made to sound more immersive via software) and it only supports head tracking via a limited set of Android-only apps like Netflix and YouTube.

Like the S and XM5, you can improve the spatial effect by uploading photos of your ears to the app. Once analyzed, the app uses that data to optimize streaming apps on your phone that supports Sony’s 360 Reality Audio (360RA) format . That might not be a bad thing if it were easy to access 360RA content, but it isn’t. Currently, the only major service that supports it is Amazon Music. Your other choices are nugs.net, PeerTracks, Artist Connection, and 360 Reality Live. And at the moment, Amazon Music can’t be optimized.

Making calls using the LinkBuds Fit is generally excellent. The high quality of the transparency mode minimizes the fatigue associated with not hearing your voice clearly. Your callers will hear you clearly too — and with better resolution than many other earbuds. The performance is slightly better than with the LinkBuds S. With the Fit, noisy backgrounds are silenced more effectively while keeping your voice stable. In quiet locations, there’s not much difference between them.

Sony pegs the battery life on the LinkBuds Fit at 5.5 hours per charge with ANC on, and 21 total hours when you include the case. If you need more, you can turn off ANC and those numbers rise to 8 and 30, respectively, which is very competitive with other earbuds.

Sony’s optional features can take a big bite out of the available stamina. Enabling LDAC, speak-to-chat, voice commands, and Sony’s DSEEE upscaling (on top of ANC) could drop battery life to as little as 3 hours per charge — possibly less if you like to listen loud.

Cleverly, Sony has added a new option called Auto Battery Save. When it’s turned on, it will automatically shut down all of these extras except LDAC when your remaining battery life hits 20%.

Awkward Auracast

When Sony briefed me on the LinkBuds Fit and the new LinkBuds Open, it didn’t mention support for Auracast. Sony’s product pages for these earbuds don’t mention it either, and it’s not listed in the detailed specifications. And yet, Sony claims both sets of earbuds work with new Bluetooth broadcast audio standard.

That may be true, but I have no way to test it. Instead of including Auracast functionality in the Sony Sound Connect app (as JBL has done with its app for the Tour Pro 3 earbuds), Sony says it requires your smartphone’s operating system to provide the critical “Auracast Assistant” function — the ability to pull up a list of available Auracast broadcasts and send that info to the LinkBuds.

Herein lies the problem. Apple’s iOS doesn’t offer this ability (and Apple has said nothing about supporting it in future releases), and while Google’s Android 15 is slated to support Auracast, it doesn’t yet. Currently, as far as I can tell, only a select number of Sony Xperia smartphones let you use the LinkBuds Fit and Open with Auracast.

LinkBuds Speaker

I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer some thoughts on how the LinkBuds Fit work with Sony’s new $180 LinkBuds Speaker. Though the speaker can very much be thought of as a standalone product, it’s clear that Sony sees it as a companion to its LinkBuds and 1000X series earbuds.

Using the Sound Connect app, you can enable Auto Switch if you own both the Speaker and any compatible Sony earbuds/headphones (currently the LinkBuds S, Fit, Open, and WF/WH-1000XM5). With that option engaged, music can be transferred seamlessly between the earbuds and the speaker.

Getting Auto Switch set up proved trickier than I had expected. For some reason, the Sound Connect app kicks you into a browser window where you’re expected to read the instructions on Sony’s website, instead of simply walking you through the process.

Still, once I figured it out, it worked well. If you’ve got music playing on the LinkBuds Speaker, it instantly transfers the moment you put the Fit in your ears. If you return the buds to their case, the Speaker takes over, but not instantly — there’s about a 3 second to 4 second delay as the Speaker reconnects to your phone.

Keep in mind that this is all performed via Bluetooth — unlike a smart speaker, the LinkBuds Speaker doesn’t have its own Wi-Fi connection.

This leads me to my biggest critique of the Speaker. Despite having a built-in mic, which lets you use it as a speakerphone for calls, the Speaker doesn’t support Sony’s voice commands, and there’s no way to trigger your phone’s native voice assistant.

To summarize this very lengthy look at the Sony LinkBuds Fit: These earbuds offer a much more comfortable wearing experience thanks to their shape and silicone Air Fitting Supporters — unless you have small ears. Overall, they deliver very similar performance to the LinkBuds S in terms of sound, ANC, transparency, and calling. However, for the same price as the S, you get some fun extras like voice commands, head gestures, and Auto Battery Save. Plus, the movement-sensitive controls are a great choice for those who routinely wear gloves.

They’ve been designed with color customization in mind, but these silicone accessories add to the cost and I’m not convinced they’re a strong reason to choose the Fit over other models. Plus, you can bet that Amazon will soon have plenty of third-party options at much lower prices.

The continued absence of wireless charging at this price is a disappointment. And given that Sony sees its LinkBuds lineup as “all-day” devices, I’m surprised that Sony hasn’t integrated Auracast functionality directly into its Sound Connect app — relying on Apple, Google, or any other smartphone OS developer to make this happen feels very un-Sony. If you’re looking for an alternative to the LinkBuds Fit, the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds are a little less expensive and offer better ANC.