Our Verdict
Maybe the excessive bass response works for your musical tastes, but the weak battery life, and sacrificing audio in favour of low latency gaming, makes me want to swerve the Gravastar buds.
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Aesthetically, the Sirius Pro buds are the most ‘gamer’ of all the wireless headphones I’ve tested recently. The case isn’t so much a case as a cage. Attached to a battery pack of a bottle opener. Really. Yeah, there is maybe a feeling that Gravastar is maybe trying a little too hard to hit a particular niche of a user.
But hey, it’s a crowded market, so why not do something to make yourself stand out? The thing is, you need to be able to also deliver on the fundamentals so that the thing which makes you stand out isn’t the only thing you have going for you.
And that’s arguably where theSirius Probuds fall down. When you’re talking about a wireless set, what is it you want? You want battery life, good audio quality, and a reliable connection. I’d also say, having tested out some of the rest, you want decent noise cancelling, too, whether that’s passive or active.
Battery life is one place where the Gravaster buds struggle. The 4 hour battery in the buds themselves is so weak you’d only want to use them on your shortest journeys. For most commutes I guess it’s fine, but if you’re going transatlantic it’s a definite no. The fact the pseudo-futuristic charging cage can deliver another 12 hours of charge doesn’t really help when the charging time is, at a minimum, 90 minutes.
Drivers:7.2mmFrequency response:20Hz – 20,000HzWeight:0.21oz | 6gConnection:Bluetooth 5.2Battery life:4 hours | 12 from charging casePrice:$90|£110
But it’s the audio quality where I really struggle with them, especially at this price. The Sirius Pro earbuds seem to have been too heavily tuned towards the bass. While that doesn’t necessarily muddy the rest of the audio, as I initially thought it might when I first stuck Rage Against the Machine on, it just becomes too overpowering after a short time.
It’s almost lucky there’s such a low battery life here, because I don’t think I could deal with this overwrought bass response for long.
That’s only in music mode, however, as when you switch to the low latency gaming mode the bass bias disappears. That seems to be in order to cut the lag, which it does to great effect when I’ve been hitting men in Hitman 3 on theSteam Deck, but it does add a certain artificial quality to the aural experience.
There is some strange, almost electronic distortion going on, and the drop in audio quality is rather plain to hear. Still, you do get used to it; the human brain is very adroit at normalising poor audio over time. And the audio latency is low enough that the trade-off is almost acceptable.
Or would be if other buds didn’t deal with it far better. TheCreative Outlier Pro’s Bluetooth connection is speedy enough, when the specific low latency mode remains enabled, and theJBL Quantum TWShas a Type-C dongle that makes it indistinguishable from a wired connection. The Gravastar seems to just lower the audio quality to tighten up the latency issue.
When there are better sounding, longer lasting, and more affordable options on offer, even if I loved the more ‘gamer’ aesthetic of the Gravastar Sirius Pro, I would still recommend you spend your money elsewhere.
Maybe the excessive bass response works for your musical tastes, but the weak battery life, and sacrificing audio in favour of low latency gaming, makes me want to swerve the Gravastar buds.
Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he’s back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.
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