Review: Anker Soundcore Space A40

You’ve probably heard of the golden age of TV, a renaissance brought on by the streaming era that is now, sadly, on the decline. It might not bring us another Better Call Saul, but there’s a different golden age that’s still very much shimmering in A/V: the wireless earbud market.

From hearables breaking free of their prescription chains to 3D spatial audio and customized listening, earbuds are innovating at an incredible rate. And new options like Anker’s Soundcore Space A40 prove you can reap the benefits of this brave new world on nearly any budget.

A few years ago you couldn’t find a pair of earbuds with effective noise canceling for under $200. The Space A40 deliver it for half that price, alongside good sound, massive battery life, and a ton of extras to help you customize your experience. That’s all packed into a comfy and compact design that looks fancier than the price suggests.

The A40 do skip a few conveniences, like auto-pause when you pull an earbud out, and the controls can be a little inconsistent. But with great performance in a surprisingly affordable package, the Space A40 are one of the best bargains in this golden age of portable listening.

Photograph: Anker

Even as earbuds everywhere shrink around them, the A40 stand out not only for their minuscule size but also their good looks. The pill-shaped, Qi-ready charging case is stylish and feels good in your hands. Its matte exterior, accented by a metallic Anker logo on top and a trio of LEDs where the clamshell lid meets the base, lends a premium air.

Inside, the glossy plastic terminals hold matching gloss earbuds, with a more matte finish at the exterior for the touchpad controls. The buds are ergonomically shaped, and, most important, their weight of just under 5 grams per side (for reference, Apple’s AirPods Pro weigh 5.4 grams) meets the unofficial baseline for buds that seem to disappear in your ears after a few minutes.

The Space A40 do just that, and the fit is relatively stable. Five sizes of ear tips goes beyond most competitors, and I was able to do all my usual earbud-enhanced activities, from yard work to hikes at my local park, with only a minor readjustment here or there. I did feel them jostle a bit on a jog, and their IPX4 water resistance is solid but not dunkable, so those looking for better stability and weatherproofing may want to consider jumping up to Jabra’s Elite 4 Active.

One place the buds muck up the grade curve is their massive battery. You get up to 10 hours of playback, with four full recharges in the case for 50 hours total. I clocked more like 7 to 8 hours with noise canceling, but that’s still around 40 hours, besting pricier flagships from Samsung, Google, and Apple.

The Space A40 let you customize just about everything. That starts with the fit and extends to touchpads that are reassignable via the Soundcore app. They offer near-comprehensive control, from volume to voice assistants, so you rarely need to reach for your phone.

You’ll need to assign volume in the app (it’s off by default), and I find the double-tap for pause or song skip can sometimes be triggered when you’re trying to do a few rapid single taps to ramp up the jams. I’m also not in love with the hold command, which seems to take hours to cycle through noise canceling and transparency mode (it's really just a couple of seconds).

If you’re impatient like me, you can select noise canceling or transparency modes in the app. The app also unlocks an almost embarrassing amount of other options, from a Gaming Mode to reduce input lag to multipoint pairing so you can connect the buds to two devices at once. The bounty can be intimidating if you’re new to the segment, and you’ll find a simpler layout in something like the AirPods menu.

One place I recommend experimenting is with the sound signature, which is a tad brash and snappy by default up high. Like a growing number of brands, Soundcore offers a personalized sound that will tailor the frequency curve to your ears. This starts with a hearing test, where you get to find out all the damage done in your time on planet Earth. Hopefully, there will be only a few sounds you can’t hear, but it does feel like an audiology exam. It’s also not reassuring that, though there are multiple age categories, everyone over 40 is in the same one.

I didn’t notice a huge sonic difference after my test and actually found the default sounded more open overall, if more sizzly in the upper register. I ended up carving out my own sound curve from Soundcore’s extensive multiband EQ under the Custom setting.

Whichever signature you choose, performance is impressive for the money, offering solid overall balance without over-reliance on thumpy bass. The stereo imaging is particularly nice, with instruments well placed in the mix so you can take your time exploring the different colors. Once my ears adjusted to the Space A40’s cooler sound signature, I found myself regularly impressed with their penchant for digging up instrumental textures, from the dappled vocal lines in Nickel Creek’s Reason’s Why to the laser-sharp synths in Go by the Chemical brothers.

Instruments aren’t as defined as in higher-quality buds like Sony’s lovely WF-1000XM4, but that’s to be expected at around a third of the price, and there’s a surprising amount of tact and detail here for the money. Like Sony, the Space A40 support LDAC for high-resolution Bluetooth streaming.

Calling is relatively impressive. I had no major complaints with the calls I made, and you can assign a Wind Buffer feature. Honestly, aside from their lack of auto-pause and fancy extras like 3D spatial audio, it’s hard to find a major feature these earbuds don’t offer. They also have a transparency mode, though I didn’t like it. It’s rather bright, revealing only a very localized selection of ambient frequencies, and it doesn’t provide fancy options like adaptive sound to limit incoming decibel levels.

Photograph: Anker

Maybe the biggest feather in the Space A40’s cap is just how solid the noise canceling is, especially in the lower frequencies. I was pleasantly surprised at how well the earbuds cut the din of the city on my daily dog walks, offering a lovely blanket of silence that assures you this is much more than just arm-candy noise canceling. Drone sounds slip away, cars driving by are reduced to smooth wooshes, and a bit of music puts you in a tranquil state.

The reduction is adjustable, and you can also set it to automatically ramp up or down according to your environment, though I mostly just kept it on the strongest setting. When put up against competitors in my studio tests, the Space A40 actually bested Jabra’s aging flagship, the Elite 85t, in the lower register, while they easily outranked ultra-budget options like the Soundpeats T3.

The A40 are less effective for higher frequencies, introducing more white noise than the Elite 85t up top, and revealing everyday sounds like voice chatter or keystrokes more readily. They won’t come close to next-gen noise cancelers like the Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2 or Apple’s AirPods Pro (gen 2) there, not that I’d expect them to at this price. Still, starting from already impressive passive noise isolation without ANC, adding noise canceling and a touch of music pretty much wipes away the majority of ambient annoyances.

Anker’s Soundcore Space A40 offer performance, features, and design that makes them feel more like flagships than budget buds. For me, the ultimate question for any earbuds is whether I’d feel content using them as a go-to option for all my wireless earbud activities. With the Space A40, the answer is an unflinching yes. If you need a solid pair of noise-canceling earbuds for under $100, start here.