We’re entering new territory in the walled garden earbud wars: to get the very best audio quality from Samsung’s Galaxy Buds 2 Pro, you need to use them with a Samsung phone. It was always going to come to this. Between Apple’s Airpods, Samsung’s Galaxy Buds, Google’s Pixel Buds, and other earbuds developed by companies with a deep-rooted interest in the smartphone world, we’ve already seen many convenience-minded features — one-touch setup, automatic device switching, head-tracking spatial audio, and others — that incentivize consumers to match their brand of buds with the phone in their pocket.The goal is to lock you in that ecosystem as you gradually upgrade one device and then the other in perpetuity.
But the $229 Buds 2 Pro are the first to play up superior sound quality as the big exclusive. Connect them to any recent Samsung phone, and you can wirelessly stream “24-bit hi-fi audio” from services like Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, Qobuz, and others that offer lossless and high-resolution music catalogs. Samsung claims this results in substantially richer audio and a better listening experience from where things stood before.
