If you have your eyes on the Monoprice Monolith M-TWE earphones, you may well want to plan on using SoundID. That is the saving grace to what is otherwise a mediocre audio solution at MSRP. At $95, things get more forgiving with far less competition around a similar feature set. So this is effectively a tale of two products, with the best case scenario being purchasing these at $95 and then customizing it with SoundID to where you actually have a potentially superior device compared to even some costing twice as much.

Take the Audio-Technica ATH-ANC300TW we saw before, which comes in at $199. There is a first-party app for it, but it barely works and has no EQ options and is really only useful for assigning what the button does in terms of hybrid noise cancellation. To its credit, Audio-Technica did use a smaller 5.8 mm dynamic driver that does not need a lot of power and does active noise cancellation very well. The Monolith M-TWE costs less than half currently and generally sounds better out of the box, but then SoundID comes in and gives native support to your preferred listening profile. The established frequency response in SoundID is also quite similar to my own measurement, which had optimizations work beautifully in producing a flat response that is then applied to my preferred V-shaped sound signature as detected by the app. The 10-point EQ customization is also critical since the 10 mm dynamic driver is starving for power and just has low volume output to begin with.

In order to hit that price point, Monoprice took shortcuts where it should not have. The ultra-low-power, ultra-efficient Qualcomm Bluetooth SOC just does not enough of an amplifier with a lacking sub-bass and upper-mids response on either side of a narrow, elevated mid-bass to check off the "We got bass" feature. This continues with a weird tuning some will like and others won't that ultimately gives in to Bluetooth hissing at higher frequencies. Battery capacities are also woeful to begin with, and I have no idea how Monoprice even came up with the 10-hour battery-life rating. Perhaps if you had it at 1% volume, which you might as well not do since you won't hear anything substantial until around 80% on an average phone anyway. Ambient mode at least works really well, which makes me suspect ANC is again power-limited for the longer duration, leading to a situation where I don't see it as useful at all. For a first attempt, things aren't too bad. I just wish Monoprice would have foregone its attempt to look premium with the unboxing experience and case/ear bud design as it could have instead been money spent where it matters the most.