Beats Flex Wireless Headphones Review

The Beats Flex have a sleek and simple design that looks very similar to the Beats BeatsX Wireless. They have a neckband cable that gives them a slightly more sporty look. However, unlike the Beats Powerbeats 4 Wireless, they don't have ear-hooks. They come in four color variants to better suit your style: 'Black', 'Yuzu Yellow', 'Smoke Grey', and 'Blue'.

The Beats Flex are comfortable, lightweight in-ears. They don't go very deep into your ears, and the cable shouldn't be fatiguing to wear around your neck. However, the ear tips can move out of place if you don't have a good seal.

The control scheme is alright. There's a button rocker on the left side of the neck cable that allows you to adjust the volume. Next to it is a multi-purpose button. Pressing once lets you play or pause your audio. You can also activate these commands by magnetically clipping the earbuds together. Two presses skip the track forward while three presses skip the track backward. You can also scan through your audio forward by pressing once and then holding the button or scan backward by triple tapping. If you want to activate voice assistant, hold the button until you hear a chime. While they have some audio cues, the multi-purpose button isn't the most clicky.

These headphones are outstandingly portable. They can be folded up to fit into most pockets or be worn around your neck when you're on-the-go.

These headphones don't come with a pouch or case.

These headphones have a good build quality. They're mostly made of silicone and plastic, which makes them very flexible. They also feel durable enough to survive a couple of accidental drops. However, the ear tips seem like they could easily rip, and they don't have an IP rating for dust and water resistance.

The Beats Flex are stable headphones. While they don't have ear hooks, they shouldn't move around your ears too much once you achieve a good seal. They come with four differently-sized ear tips to help you get the best fit.

• Beats Flex headphones
• 4x ear tips
• USB-C to USB-C charging cable
• Manuals
• Beats sticker

The Beats Flex have a bass-heavy sound profile, which is well-suited for thumpy genres like EDM and hip-hop. Unfortunately, their treble is underemphasized, resulting in veiled vocals and lead instruments as well as dull sibilants like S and T sounds.

These headphones have an outstanding frequency response consistency. Once you achieve a proper fit and seal, you should get consistent bass and treble delivery each time you use them.

The Beats Flex have good bass accuracy. It's overemphasized across the range, which some users may prefer, especially for more thumpy genres like EDM. While this can sound warm and full, mixes also become muddy and boomy.

The Beats Flex have excellent mid accuracy. There's some overemphasis continuing from the bass-range into the low-mid, which makes mixes sound a bit muddy and cluttered. The mid-mid is pretty well-balanced, though. There's also a bump in the high-mid, so vocals and lead instruments can sound a little honky.

The treble accuracy is acceptable. There's underemphasis across the range, which results in veiled vocals and lead instruments as well as dull and lispy sibilants like cymbals.

The Beats Flex have very good peaks and dips performance. The range is well-balanced up to the mid-mids. There's a peak in the high-mids that makes vocals and lead instruments sound honky and harsh. However, a dip in the low-treble veils the upper harmonics of these sounds.

The Beats Flex have outstanding imaging. The group delay is below the audibility threshold for the entire range, ensuring a tight bass and transparent treble reproduction. The L/R drivers of our unit are also very well-matched in amplitude, frequency, and phase response, which is important for the accurate placement and localization of objects such as instruments or footprints in the stereo image. However, these results are only valid for our unit and yours may perform differently.

The Beats Flex's passive soundstage is bad. The outer ear needs to be activated with sound resonances to create a large and spacious soundstage. However, in-ears like these by-pass the outer ear altogether and don't interact with it. As a result, they produce a soundstage that is perceived as small and as if it's coming from inside your head. Since they also have a closed-back design, they won't feel as spacious as open-back headphones.

These headphones don't have any virtual soundstage features.

The weighted harmonic distortion performance is good. All ranges fall within acceptable limits, which should result in clean and pure audio reproduction.

These are the settings used to test these headphones, and our results are only valid when using them with this configuration.

The Beats Flex have decent noise isolation performance. They only reduce a bit of bass-range noise like bus or train engines, which may not be suitable if you commute every day. They do a much better job with mid-range noise such as ambient chatter and can cut down a significant amount of high-pitched noise like the hum of an AC unit.

The Beats Flex's leakage performance is outstanding. If you're working at the office, people around you shouldn't be able to hear your audio, even if you're listening to it at a high volume.

The Beats Flex have an integrated microphone.

The integrated microphone has a mediocre recording quality. Your voice sounds boxy, thin, and slightly muffled. However, you should still be understandable to whoever's on the other line.

The integrated microphone's noise handling is acceptable. It struggles to separate your voice from ambient sound around you, even in moderately noisy environments.

The Beats Flex's battery performance is passable. They have a continuous battery life of 11 hours and fully charge up in just over an hour. Beats advertises a 'Fast Fuel' feature, which gives you 1.5 hours of playback time on a 10-minute charge. However, we don't currently test this feature. These headphones also don't have any power-saving features and can't be used while charging.

These headphones have a very limited companion app. You can turn on and off the auto-pause that activates when you remove them from your ears. You can also turn on and off auto-call answering, but that's about it.

The Beats Flex have decent Bluetooth compatibility. They don't have multi-device or NFC pairing. However, they do have a W1 chip so you can easily pair them with Apple devices. While they have high audio latency on PC, their latency on iOS and Android is a lot lower, which is better suited for streaming video. That said, some apps and devices compensate for latency differently, so your results may vary.

These headphones don't support non-Bluetooth wireless connectivity.

The Beats Flex can't be used wired. They come with a USB-C to USB-C charging cable.

These headphones aren't compatible with the PS4. Although they can be used on Bluetooth-enabled PCs, they have high audio latency, which makes them less suitable for watching videos or gaming.

These headphones aren't compatible with the Xbox One.

These headphones don't have a base/dock.