Beats Studio Buds Debuting Today With Active Noise Cancellation, Stemless Design, and More for $150

I've been using a pair of Studio Buds in "Beats Red" for the past week and a half, and I've come away impressed with their performance, especially given their price point. I'm a heavy AirPods Pro user on a day-to-day basis, and the Studio Buds stack up well against them in most respects.

If you've used AirPods Pro before, Studio Buds will be immediately familiar, with the same one-touch pairing and simple button presses to cycle between standard mode, ANC mode where the noise around you is actively canceled out to provide a more isolated listening environment, and Transparency mode where the sounds around are actively piped through the earphones and mixed in with your audio so you can hear what's going on around you even with the earphones sitting firmly in your ears.

While AirPods Pro use a force sensor in the stem of each earbud for controls, Studio Buds each feature a button on the exterior of the earbud. You'll see the typical set of functions, with a single press allowing you to play/pause audio or answer/hang up a phone call, a double press skipping ahead to the next track, and a triple press skipping back to the beginning of the current track or to the previous track.

That same button also handles the noise control modes via a long press, which cycles through the three modes. By default, both earbuds have the same set of controls, but you can use the Settings app on your device to configure the press and hold function separately for each ear, such as noise control on one side and activating Siri on the other side. ‌Siri‌ activation via button press isn't a necessity, however, as hands-free "Hey ‌Siri‌" activation is supported.