The Thrifter's Guide to Geekery

Today I want to take a look at the wireless Luxe Earbuds from live. love. music. (gotta love that lack of capitalization and use of extraneous punctuation). These earbuds just hit the shelves at my local Five Below, and they’ve left an impression on me to say the least.

First, let’s start with the positives. The earbuds themselves have a nice velvety texture, though sadly the manufacturer did not use the same coating on the control unit. As for the audio quality, these actually sound really nice. The bass isn’t muddy, and the treble does a great job avoiding coming across as tinny (unlike other headphones in the same price range). Something tells me the fact that these headphones mimic the design of Apple EarPods/AirPods has something to do with the audio quality.

Now on to the negatives. You know that great audio quality I mentioned in the previous paragraph? Well, it turns out that the earbuds are actually mono instead of stereo, despite the packaging lauding their “dynamic stereo sound”. Sure, mono earbuds can be of use to people with hearing damage, but there are far better ways to achieve the same effect without using poorly manufactured electronics. Most phones and computers allow you to adjust the balance of your audio to a single ear, and there are even accessibility modes that allow you to output mono over stereo. Of course, if you have your heart set on a hardware solution, there’s always a stereo to mono adapter.

Another issue I have with these earbuds is the overall build quality. Yes, the texture on the buds proper feels nice, but the metallic bits look really cheap. Not only is the “gold” vacuum plated plastic more akin to tarnished brass on the black earbuds, but the rose gold (or copper?) highlights on some of the white models looks more like its neon pink. Also, the vacuum plating on all of the different models will definitely chip off in the long term.

Finally, the design of the control unit is terrible. While the manufacturer was considerate and added a dust cover to the USB port (something that was missing from some $5 Bluetooth headphones), that feature is rendered pointless with how the buttons were designed. The buttons are just cut portions of the control unit’s body, and that leaves three nice open cavities for every type of contaminant imaginable to reach the main circuit board of these headphones. If you wear these bad boys outside they’ll get gunked up and possibly even fried relatively quickly. In the wrong environment these headphones might not even survive to the end of their 2.5 hour battery life.

All in all, I’d say save your $5 for something else. There have been far better Bluetooth headphones available at Five Below before, and there are sure to be better headphones on offer in the future. In fact, if you’re lucky you may still be able to find a few leftovers from their last batch of Bluetooth headphones. The LED cable earbuds were actually pretty nice.

Here’s a brief review of the “Vintage Retro Speaker” that I found at my local Five Below. I’m a sucker for the 1950’s design aesthetic (one of the many reasons I love Fallout), so I just had to have it. Give the video a watch if you want a look at the speaker in action as well as a more in-depth review, or continue on reading for a brief(ish) rundown.

As for my take on the speaker, I can’t really recommend it. The build quality isn’t that great, and the one that I bought would garble any treble heavy audio until I accidentally fixed it. When I say “accidentally fixed”, I mean just that. I initially wanted to open up the speaker, but it was assembled without any screws visible on the back and I couldn’t find any clips. From what I can tell, there may be some screws on the front under the fragile face plate, but at that point it’s too risky for me to mess with. When all was said and done I was left with stress marks around the outside, and I decided to use my heat gun to remove them. It seems using my heat gun melted and reset the hot glue that was holding the speaker driver in place, because now the speaker itself sounds just fine. That being said, it was still not a great first impression.

My other main issue with the speaker would have to be the LED that was used in it. Apparently the manufacturer thought it would be a good idea to use a color changing LED, and while I may have given that a pass if it looked nice, they decided to go with the cheapest LED possible. Instead of gradually changing color at a constant pace, they used what can only be described as the light from a cheap Halloween decoration. It changes colors at varying speeds until it finally just flashes. Personally, I would have gone with a warm white LED that would be reminiscent of the bulbs used in vintage radios.

All in all, I feel like you should just save your money and pass on this speaker. There are plenty of better listening devices available in that price range, many of which are in the same store.

I recently picked up a few lights at my local Five Below, and to be perfectly honest I was surprised by each and every one of them. Check out the video for my full opinions and some demonstrations.