By now, most of us have become familiar with ANC TWS earbuds. And almost all of the popular manufacturers have come out with their own flagship ANC wireless earbuds in the market. While they each have their own features, one thing is common among these earbuds — they’re expensive. And even the cheapest Xiaomi Mi Air2 Pro featuring ANC will set you back around 699 RMB ($105). But what if you don’t want to pay a hefty premium for ANC earbuds? Then you can take a look at some niche brands like COUMI which has launched cheap wireless earbuds called ANC-860.

As usual, let’s start with the design. At first glance, there’s no doubt that the COUMI ANC-860 box is big. But its not just regular big, it’s kind of huge for its product segment. Its bigger than the case of the Xiaomi Air2 pro we’ve tested before and if you remember, we called that case bulky. Plus unlike other earbuds, the COUMI ANC-860 doesn’t have a magnetic case. So you have to manually pull up the case lid, making it nearly hard to open it with one hand.

The oval shape of the COUMI earbuds makes it look like Sony’s WF-1000XM3, but it’s actually very different from WF-1000XM3’s design. First of all, in this model, when you wear the earbuds, the oval exterior of the earbuds stays vertical, unlike in Sony’s model where it’s horizontal. Secondly, it wears fixed in a different way. The ANC-860 hangs against the ear canal. The same way as the half-in-ear earbuds is fixed. Yeah, it can take off its in-earbuds cover, and you can see that the earbuds are actually half in-ear design. And people who don’t like in-ear earbuds can remove the cover and use them as half in-ear earbuds without any problem. Except maybe a little lower volume.

Because of the oval design of the earbuds, so the noise-canceling function is just average performance. Also, the large oval design tends to be heavy and sometimes falls off when worn outside. So the best use case scenario for this pair of earbuds is not outdoors, but indoors.

It has no app controls, and all your earbuds control needs to be done on the earbuds. You can double click on the left ear to switch modes between Noise canceling on, Transparency mode, and Noise-canceling off. Single left or right earbud tap increases or decreases the volume or answers/hangs up calls. Double click on the right earbud to play or pause music. Long press left or right earbud for two seconds to play the previous song or the next one, or you can reject calls with this gesture. Left or right ear long press for one second to wake up the Smart voice assistant.

Wait, doesn’t this feel like an overload of instructions? When it comes to functionality it meets all your requirements, but the learning curve is long. So don’t bother memorizing all the controls. Just remember the important controls, that should be enough.

In the noise-canceling mode, the earbuds last for about 5.5 hours, which is good for mainstream noise-canceling earbuds. Incidentally, it doesn’t have the ability to automatically pause when you take off the earbuds.

The COUMI earbuds support AAC codec.The sound quality is good in this protocol. And the low and mid frequencies are relatively strong. But the latency of this protocol is quite high. Maybe around 0.8s delay while gaming, so these earbuds are not recommended for gaming on AAC. If you switch back to SBC, it will reduce the latency a lot, and then you can play games with minimal lag.

So we cannot recommend the COUMI ANC-860 as noise canceling ANC earbuds. But as normal earbuds, it’s not bad. You can use it as in-ear earbuds or as half-in-ear earbuds with a noise-canceling mode bundled with it. It sells for around $60 on Amazon. There is a 10% coupon along with 40% OFF code LYRAT7J3 to grab it with 50% off on Amazon.  So if you’re using the earbuds at home or in an office where you don’t need to exercise, and the noise isn’t very loud, it’s still capable of meeting your requirements.