Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro: Premium features at double the price, but not twice as good

Xiaomi announced the Buds 5 Pro in February 2025 alongside its flagship 15 series phones, and the timing felt deliberate: these earbuds are built to bundle, not to stand alone. At £159.99 (roughly $210), they cost more than double the standard Buds 5, which sold for £69.99. That price premium buys you real improvements—better active noise cancellation, silicon ear tips that actually stay put, and a more polished overall experience—but not enough to justify the leap when you're shopping without a phone deal attached.

The engineering inside is genuinely ambitious. Each earbud packs an 11mm dynamic driver, a planar driver, and a ceramic tweeter, a triple-stack setup you don't see often in this category. The battery life is solid: eight hours on a single charge with ANC off, probably closer to six and a half or seven with it on, and the case adds another 32 hours. Charging is fast—Xiaomi claims 4.5 hours of listening from just ten minutes of USB-C charging—and you can also top up wirelessly via Qi. The buds themselves weigh only 5.6 grams each, light enough that you forget you're wearing them.

Where the promise breaks down is in the sound. The midrange is meaty and the treble is crisp, but the bass is conspicuously absent. Not just light—absent. Depending on the track, it ranges from "a little thin" to "where did the low end go?" The equalizer offers a bass reducer and a treble enhancer, but no bass booster to compensate, which feels like a missed opportunity. If you listen to genres that don't rely on bottom-end weight—classical, jazz, spoken word—you'll be fine. If you're into grime, drum and bass, or anything with intentional low-frequency punch, these will disappoint. The max volume is impressively loud, almost painfully so, but that doesn't fix the fundamental imbalance.

The design improvements over the standard Buds 5 are tangible. The silicon tips solve the fit problem that plagued the earlier model; these stay in your ear without fussing. The case is a slim silver clamshell, lightweight and easy to open, with the stems positioned so you can grab the buds quickly. The touch controls require a firm squeeze of the stem, which works but lacks the satisfying click of older designs. The IP54 rating gives you some protection against dust and water spray, a nice reassurance for gym use.

The feature set is where Xiaomi tries to justify the price. You get multiple ANC modes—standard on and off, transparency with options to enhance ambient sound or voices, and an adaptive mode that supposedly adjusts between light and deep levels depending on noise around you. (I couldn't hear a meaningful difference between the adaptive settings, but the concept is sound.) The Xiaomi Earbuds app lets you customize touch controls, adjust an eight-band equalizer, enable spatial audio, and record voice memos. There's also a Wi-Fi variant, the Buds 5 Pro Wi-Fi, which costs about £20 more and supports lossless audio at 2.1Mbps—but only if you own one of Xiaomi's top-end phones. That's the real catch: the best features are locked behind a Xiaomi ecosystem wall.

The value proposition is the sticking point. These buds are competent, even likable, but they're priced above rivals that offer more for less. The original Buds 5 are cheaper and acceptable if you can live with the fit issues. Nothing's Ear undercuts the Pro model while delivering distinctive design and strong sound. Creative's Aurvana Ace 2 costs less and sounds better. Unless you're getting the Buds 5 Pro as part of a phone bundle or catching them on sale, there's no compelling reason to choose them. And that's the honest assessment: they're a good secondary purchase for Xiaomi loyalists, not a standalone recommendation for anyone else.