In the world of true wireless earbuds, LG isn’t a name that immediately comes to mind. The company is trying to change that with its line of Tone Free(branding that makes me think tone deaf) audio products. The latest in the family is the new Tone Free T90, which LG is dubbing the worlds first Dolby Atmos Wireless Earbuds.
The T90 retails for $399.00 here in Australia which is right on par with Apple’s much lauded 2nd generation AirPods Pro and Bose QuietComfort II’s. However, at the time this review goes live, you can get the T90 for $299.00 on sale at LG. On top of Dolby Atmos, you get Active noise cancelling, Dolby Head Tracking, Multi-point Bluetooth and UVnano self-cleaning tech.
But specs don’t tell the whole story and while the LG Tone Free T90 can certainly do a lot, the sum of parts does not quite exceed the whole.
LG Tone Free T90 Review
Design wise, the T90’s are nothing special to look at; they stick with a safe, standard ear buds with a short stem. They come in either Charcoal black or Snow white and have medical grade silicon ear tips of varying sizes bundled in the box. The charging case is a squat cylinder that matches the buds color. The buds weigh just 5.3g each which feels like nothing when inserted into your ear. Fitment is great and I never had any issue with the buds sliding out of my ears.
Despite the minimal size, LG still managed to squeeze 11mm Graphene drivers, 3 noise cancelling microphones, a voice microphone, the IMU sensor for head tracking and a battery capable of 9 hours of listening with 20 hours more in the charging case. That’s more than enough to get you through an intercontinental flight or two long work days.
The T90 have touch controls which are responsive and not unnecessarily sensitive to accidental touches. You can customise the functionality of these controls in the LG Tone App for iOS and Android. The buds come with a three sizes of silicon ear tips, much less than what comes with the Beyerdynamic FreeByrds.
Besides charging the earbuds, the T90’s case includes UVnano tech which cleans 99.9% of bacteria on the earbuds. This is useful if you are one of those people who shares earbuds with others — especially like with significant other or teenage daughter. By default, this only works when the case itself is plugged into a power source but you can also change that setting in the Tone Free app.
The case charges via USB Type-C which is great since your smartphone or laptop is probably using the same cable. It also charges wirelessly and it works with most Qi wireless chargers including Apple’s MagSafe charger for iPhone.
The T90 support Bluetooth 5.3 with both Multi-point and Multi-pair support. This allows the T90 to connect to up to 5 devices and automatically switch between them. This works well and I love that I could use the buds with my phone, laptop and desktop. The buds will automatically prioritize phones calls from your smartphone.
Pairing is super easy thanks to the T90’s support for both Windows Swift Pair and Google Fast Pair. Simply open the case near a compatible device and you’ll get a notification to connect. But there’s also another way to use the T90 with non-Bluetooth devices.
By plugging the case into your device using a USB cable or the bundled USB-C-to-3.5mm AUX cable, it transforms the case into a Bluetooth dongle. This allows you to use the T90 wireless with the Xbox or PlayStation consoles or TV’s that don’t use Bluetooth. It’s rather brilliant and I sorely wish all earbuds could do this.
Sound and spatial audio
Thanks to new Dynamic 11mm Graphene drivers, the T90’s sounds wonderful with an expansive soundstage that is rich in detail, stereo separation and clean, thumping bass. It’s impressive how wide and spacious they sound, something that lends well to 3D spatial audio. I listened to a variety of music, podcasts and YouTube videos and everything sounded rich and clear.
For games, the T90 do a great job with stereo separation so you can easily distinguish which direction sounds are coming from. They also have a low latency mode that you can activate in the Tone app which makes them good for fast paced games. You will experience some dropouts when using low-latency mode which isn’t ideal for FPS games but for everything else, they sound great.
Listening to music has been a joy thanks to the clean highs, warm mids and pumping bass. I mostly listen to film and game scores which nowadays blend both orchestral and electronic music which covers the full spectrum of audio. In all instances, music sounds airy when it needs to and grungy when it needs to. I did also notice that audio is somewhat amplified when ANC is on versus off and is definitely the preferred listening mode.
You’re experience will differ from mine because of the differences in our ear shapes which is where the LG Tone App comes in handy with a great feature that tests your fitment and advises you to change the silicon tips. The app also gives you a number of great EQ presets and I generally defaulted to the 3D immersive preset which sounded the best middle ground between spatial and stereo. You can customise two of your own presets as well.
Speaking of airy, LG calls the T90 the worlds first Dolby Atmos earbuds. The buds use Meridian Headphone Space Processing (HSP) technology which mimics the natural acoustics in high-end speaker systems but re-engineered to fit in your ear. I’ve not had any experience with Meridian speakers so I can’t comment on that but the T90 certainly do sound wide and spacious.
That said, the laws of physics can’t be broken so tiny earbuds will never sound the same as multiple, expertly positioned speakers surrounding you. Because of this, Dolby Atmos on the T90 fails to deliver that immersive, surround experience. Instead, you get a somewhat larger soundstage but not really a clear sense of audio objects in space around you.
I listened to several official Dolby Atmos demo’s as well as watching Dolby Atmos movies on Disney+ on my iPhone. After a lot of critical listening, I can honestly say that as a selling point, Dolby Atmos shouldn’t be a deciding factor to buy these earbuds. Quite frankly, even something like LG’s own SC9 Sound Bar can’t produce believable Atmos experience; let alone an expansive soundstage.
In saying that, the T90 do make up for that with one very cool feature — Dolby head tracking. This creates a virtual audio space with you at the center and adjusts the audio to the movement of your head in that space. Basically, when you are looking straight ahead, both ears are getting the same audio levels. But if you turn away to the left, the audio is louder in your right ear and vice versa — mimicking real life.
It works as advertised but the T90’s logic assumes that the device you are listening to is always right in front of you, even if it happens to be in your pocket or another room. This is fine if you are watching content from your phone or laptop in front of you but if you are jogging or working out, it will be far more irritating than immersive. So cool, but gimmickry
Noise cancelling and call quality
The T90 have real-time active noise cancellation(ANC) and spoiler alert, it’s not great. As with most earbuds I’ve tested, don’t expect a blanket of silence when you put on the T90’s. In fact, like the Pamu Slide 2 buds, the ANC on the T90 is so weak that I had a hard time discerning when it was actually on.
And, at the time of this review, I didn’t have the opportunity for air travel so I can’t speak to the T90’s ability to drown out air plane noise but I don’t expect much. The T90 also has a transparency mode or Listening mode which allows some background sound in so you can hear traffic or announcements in public places.
On top of Listening mode is a Conversation mode which supposedly enhances voices so you can hear better without taking off the buds. Like Listening mode, it slightly increases clarity of voices but some background frequencies are picked up as well. It’s quite pointless since the ANC or even the passive seal doesn’t block out much sound to begin with.
Call quality on the T90 is acceptable with okay voice reproduction and a 4-mic array to suppress ambient noise and enhance vocals. The buds have some constant background hiss and my voice distorts as they try to cancel out background noise. It’s far from the greatest sounding thing but your callers will hear you loud and clear.
A Whisper mode allows you to take out the right earbud and speak softly into it for those occasions when you don’t want to be overheard.
Verdict
As you can see, the LG Tone Free T90 Dolby Atmos are a wonderful sounding and comfortable set of buds with a mixed bag of goodies that doesn’t quite elevate them to S-tier status. As a pair of earbuds, they are easy to recommend thanks to their comfortable fit, great battery life, connectivity options, excellent audio and the UVnano tech is cool too. The problem comes when you start considering the T90 for everything else it advertises.
Let’s be honest, Dolby Atmos surround simply can’t be rendered well with earbuds. I’ve used full-on soundbars that don’t produce good Dolby Atmos. The experience of head tracking is novel but has the opposite effect of breaking my immersion than increasing it. Additionally, when it comes to Active noise cancelling, there are plenty of other earbuds like Apples AirPods Pro, Bose QuietComfort 2, TCL s600 that perform way better than the T90 for the same price.
I like the T90 but I don’t think it the extra features work well enough and yet they exact a heavy toll on the price. For the price, the competition does things better but if LG can vastly improve the ANC and Dolby Atmos implementation, then this could be a winner.
LG Australia kindly provided the Tone Free T90 to PowerUp! for the purpose of this review!
