An excellent choice for the eco-conscious, casual listener.
Are you sick of your earbuds constantly running out of juice?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could charge your headphones without a power source in sight?
Yep, they come with solar charging, and they’re here to change the game.
You’ll find:
So, fairly standard contents aside from the lanyard, which is very handy indeed.
Let’s walk around both.
We reviewed the Desert Rose color variant of the Phoenix earbuds.
There is a hinged lid at the top which opens to reveal the earbuds.
The earbuds themselves take a familiar form factor, too.
The bottom of this stem features microphones for calls and gold charging contacts.
On the inside face of each earbud is a sensor to activate the in-ear detection.
The design, therefore, is fairly simple and unfussy.
Each earbud contains a 10mm dynamic driver (which Urbanista refers to as a “moving coil”).
We also have an advertised frequency response of 20 Hz to 20 kHz, which is standard.
In terms of audio codec support, we have two; SBC and AAC.
Both are what we would refer to as “lossy” codecs, i.e.
sound quality will diminish as the headphones process the sound.
The earbuds, being wireless, obviously use Bluetooth to connect to the source.
In this case, I used my smartphone as the source equipment.
The Phoenix ‘buds run Bluetooth 5.2, supporting the A2DP, AVRCP, HFP, and HSP Bluetooth profiles.
As for additional features, the headphones carry both passive and active noise cancellation.
They also have a transparency mode; a feature you might be familiar with already.
The earbuds have multi-point connection functionality, so you’re free to connect to multiple sources simultaneously.
The battery provides a respectable eight hours from the earbuds themselves.
With the case fully charged, you get an additional 34 hours.
It is still good practice to wipe your earbuds dry if you sweat profusely all over them, though.
Urbanista Pheonix Performance
The Urbanista Phoenix perform well as an everyday earbud.
They’re not audiophile quality, but they’ll do the job for most casual listeners.
Comfort and Isolation
First, I must offer a caveat here.
As you’ll know from myFiiO FW5 review, I generally struggle with in-ear headphones.
My preference is over ear, as I have narrow ear canals (according to an audiologist friend).
Therefore, wearing some in-ear headphones makes me uncomfortable pretty quickly.
Isolation is good, though.
It is all very simple and works a charm, as you would expect.
Bluetooth range is around 10m in an unobstructed straight line.
In range, the connection remained steady with no artifacts interrupting the sound.
One issue I did notice was pairing with the Urbanista Audio app.
Otherwise, it would keep prompting me to scan for the headphones and fail in the scan.
You simply double or triple tap the stem to action various operations.
Double-tapping either earbud will pause/play the track.
Triple tap the right bud to skip songs forward and the left bud to skip back.
Long press the left for your voice assistant, and right for the transparency mode.
For calls, you use the same gestures.
So double tapping either bud will answer/hang up a call.
Long pressing either will reject an incoming call.
You also have a certain amount of control with the Urbanista Audio app.
you’re free to switch between ANC and Transparency modes, as well as switching between EQ presets.
Charging the Urbanista Phoenix Earbuds
The solar charging well outdoors and even better in direct sunlight.
Indoors under unnatural light is less impressive.
However, from a sustainability point of view, the solar charging is great.
This gives the sound a v-shape, although the mid-treble sits back a bit in the mix.
In general, they have a good sound stage with fair imaging and placement of instruments.
For everyday listening, they work fine.
At low to mid-volume, the bass sounds moderately punchy with decent depth.
Mids sound warm enough, too, although they take a back seat because of the v-shaped tuning.
This makes the Phoenix an excellent pairing for pop music and some electronic music.
In general, the Urbanista Phoenix buds offer well-rounded sound which will more than satisfy the casual listener.
They perform fine as an everyday earbud, but are likely to leave the more serious musical afficionado wanting.
Would I Recommend the Urbanista Phoenix Earbuds?
As with all headphones, a recommendation depends on what you are looking for.
I commend Urbanista on this outside-the-box approach to charging.
But, for the casual user, you’ll find plenty to be happy about with these lil ‘buds.
