CMF Buds Pro 2 review: super-cheap earbuds with a literal twist

CMF Buds Pro 2: Two-minute review

British tech brand Nothing has, in just a few short years, become a popular name for tech fans with its smartphones and earbuds proving you don’t need to spend a lot to get decent quality. It’s recent CMF by Nothing sub-brand pushes that idea to its extreme, but it doesn’t always work.

The CMF Buds Pro 2 are a good example of that: if you’re used to getting a lot more than you pay for with Nothing products, you’ll be surprised to find that these CMF earbuds give you exactly what you pay for. Nothing more, nothing less.

These are really budget earbuds too; you won’t find worthwhile products for less, and they’re among the cream of the bargain bin… if not the crop. At $59 / £59 / AU$99, your wallet will thank you.

Your ears might thank you too, because the CMF Buds Pro 2 sound good compared to same-price rivals, likely thanks to the union of a bass driver and a tweeter. Bass is the focus of music for sure but treble isn't lost, and the equaliser gives you some customization over your sound. I've certainly tested worse earbuds, including some that cost more.

The noise cancellation is a feature that doesn’t really impress, sadly. I found that it didn’t really compare to most of the CMF Buds’ rivals, even similarly-priced ones, and the Transparency mode was particularly poor. Still, any level of ANC is nothing to get snobby about, given that many rivals in this super-affordable category lack it.

What could have been the redeeming feature of the Buds Pro 2 is a returning feature from other CMF earbuds: the case has a swivel dial which you can use to control your music, rotating it to alter volume or pressing it for play/pause, and this partly replaces on-bud controls that most headphones have. 

In practice, though, the implementation of this feature is poor. The dial is prone to accidental turns or presses in your pocket, the notification sound to tell you that a function has been triggered is startlingly loud, and there’s a significant delay between using the dial and hearing its result. 

Lots of these issues can be overlooked if you consider the low price, but I’d recommend putting a little extra aside beyond the Buds 2 Pro’s asking price: the in-box ear tips are made from a material that isn’t very grippy, and they didn’t reliably stick in my ears. I’d recommend you look to third-party ear tips if you’re considering the CMFs.

There are some parts of the CMF Buds that I liked. The case-buds combo comes in four colors, including a distinctive orange (pictured) and a suave navy blue, so you have more options than for many other buds you may be considering. Plus a few Nothing-exclusive features like its bass boost mode and ChatGPT integration (as long as you’re using a Nothing phone) return, even if the overall feature set is nothing impressive.

It’s easy to look at any super-cheap earbuds and hand-wave any issues as being a symptom of the price, and that’s true with the CMF Buds Pro 2 as well – they’re basically what you’d expect for buds costing this much. However the budget bud market is competitive and a few rivals get you better value for money – more on them in the 'Also consider' section below.

CMF Buds Pro 2 review: Price and release date

• Unveiled in July 2024
• Costs you $59 / £59 / AU$99

The CMF Buds Pro 2 were but on sale in July 2024, just a short time after two other pairs of earbuds from Nothing: the Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear (a). This won’t be the last time you hear about these rivals in this review.

You can pick up the Buds Pro 2 for $59 / £59 / AU$99, so they’re not just cheap earbuds, but they’re cheap earbuds. That’s a $10 / £10 / AU$10 price increase over the original Buds Pro, and I can’t compare the price to a non-Pro CMF Buds 2 because, at the time of writing, no such model exists.

This area of the market is incredibly competitive, with Nothing itself offering some tempting entries into the sub-$100 / £100 / AU$200 price bracket, and so a low price alone isn’t enough for the CMFs to get winning grades.

CMF Buds Pro 2 review: Specs

CMF Buds Pro 2 review: Features

• 11-hour buds battery, 43-hour with case
• Limited features in app, including spatial audio
• Mediocre ANC

The CMF Buds Pro 2 uses Nothing’s smartphone tie-in app, called Nothing X, and as a result it borrows a few Nothing features.

Using Nothing X you can fiddle with an equalizer, change the case control scheme, toggle Spatial Audio, change between a few ANC modes and turn on ‘Ultra Bass’ which does what it says on the tin. Hidden in a menu are toggles for wear detection, high-latency mode, a default to LDAC audio, a find-my-buds feature, and an ear tip fit test. Good for the money, eh? Well, on paper, yes. 

I'm going to get into the equaliser in the sound section, so stay tuned for that. The noise cancellation in the app is similar, in theory, to other Nothing earbuds: you can change between it being off, in Transparency mode (which belts surrounding sounds into your ears so loud that you can barely hear your music) and between four ANC intensities: low, mid, high and adaptive. 

I’d recommend sticking with high ANC mode; the Buds Pro 2’s noise cancellation isn’t very strong, and you’ll want to make the most of it when you can. In testing it struggled to do anything about surrounding chatter, air conditioning unit hums, microwaves and other similar noises. Saying that, ANC is far from a given in buds this cheap and so knocking what there is here, rudimentary though it is, feels a little churlish.

Features like Spatial Audio, in-ear detection and an ear tip fit test are useful, but there are a few far more basic features lacking, that many of similar-priced rivals have. The lack of touch controls is something I’ve mentioned before, but many rivals have a full equalizer experience, not truncated ones like this. I also miss Nothing’s much more effective custom listening profile detector from the Nothing Ear.

In terms of battery life, the CMF Buds Pro 2 hit that ‘bang-average’ button: the buds will get you roughly six and a half hours of listening if you’ve got ANC turned on, and 11 if you’ve got it turned off. Those figures are pretty standard for wireless earbuds.

By using the case you can dial those figures up to 26 or 43 hours respectively, the latter of which is actually rather respectable, but remember, the ANC isn't amazing. 

• Features score: 3/5

CMF Buds Pro 2 review: Design

• Novel dial-toting case has issues
• Earbuds don't stick in ear well
• Buds and case are light and protected

Perhaps the most unique part of the CMF Buds Pro 2 is the case design. 

It starts with the color: no boring black or white here but dark gray, light gray (okay, those two are a bit boring), navy blue and bright orange. You can tell which one I tested – ‘bright’ is an understatement – and it’s nice to see earbuds with a range of colors.

The next special feature is the dial, which can be turned left or right or pressed in. This lets you change the volume or pause/play songs easily. 

In theory this is a novel concept, and I did find it really easy to pause music when the case was within reach, but changing volume definitely wasn’t as convenient as bud touch controls tend to be, and I found a range of inconveniences with the buds over the testing period. In fact, I ended up turning off the controls by the latter half of my testing time.

Firstly, rotating the dial resulted in a deafening beep to indicate that the volume was changing. I can see what Nothing was going for here, but the beep didn’t correspond with the new volume; the noise could be painfully loud at times. That became especially annoying bearing in mind that the dial didn’t adjust music much, and I’d need to turn it through endless resolutions to get the same effect as one simple press on my phone’s volume rocker. Oh, and there was a delay between using the dial and seeing an effect which effectively ruled out swiveling the dial loads to bump up the sound, as I’d only find out too late if I’d turned it far too loud.

However, the most annoying aspect for me was that the dial could be quite sensitive in my pocket; I was subjected to endless accidental presses. On one journey in a closely-packed bus, people walking past me would nudge the case in my jacket pocket, pausing my music. When I wore certain pairs of trousers, the constricting and flexing of my pockets when I walked would sometimes press the pause button. And sometimes when I put the case loose in my bad, its companion items would jostle against it and press the button. In the end these everyday annoyances pushed me to turn off the controls, despite my best attempts to like the controls.

Looking at the case itself, it measures 53.4 x 53.4 x 23mm and weighs 46g (not including the buds). Beyond the dial it only has a small button to enable pairing, and a USB-C port for charging.

The earbuds themselves match whichever color of case you opt for. They’re lightweight stem-toting buds weighing 4.9g each. Despite what you'd think given the presence of the dial, the buds also do have touch controls, but I found them quite sensitive and would often accidentally press them when trying to re-align the buds in my ear every time they slipped (for reasons you'll learn in just a moment). As a result I turned them off pretty quickly.

The buds have an IP55 rating against dust ingress and showers of water, though the case has no official rating.

While these buds are light enough to sit comfortably in your ear, they’re also light enough that you might not notice if they fall out of your ear (well, other than your music stopping). And fall they will: Nothing has seemingly opted to use soap for its ear tip material given how slippery they are, and during testing they just wouldn’t stay in my ears reliably, even when I tried different tip sizes. I put this down to the material, which doesn’t seem to have as much friction as the usual silicon tips you see in earbuds. 

It’s fairly easy to remove the Buds 2 Pro ear tips and I’d recommend you try out some third-party ones if you can, because the in-box ones just weren’t reliable for me. Worst of all, they kept sliding just far enough out of my ear for wear detection to think I wasn’t wearing them any more, so it kept pausing my music, and as a result I had to turn that feature off too.

Side-note: if you turn off wear detection, the buds don't even pause your music when you return them to the case, unlike basically every other earbud I've tested. Remember to turn your tunes off yourself!

• Design score: 2.5/5

CMF Buds Pro 2 review: Sound quality

• Heavy bass focus, but treble isn't lost
• Limited sound stage
• Equaliser brings some benefits

As in many other Nothing-built earbuds, bass is the focus of the CMF Buds Pro 2. Whatever genre of music I listened to, the bass was the most palpable part of any song.  

That might put some people off, but it's a staple feature of cheap and cheery earbuds like this. Treble and especially upper mids do suffer a little, but much less than in some other buds I've tested at this price.

That's possibly thanks to the fact that the 11mm bass driver is joined by a 6mm tweeter to carry the flag for higher-pitched lines.

I did miss the sense of soundstage that some other buds offer: the CMF seem to present all elements of a song in one solid block rather than spread out, and it meant that some instruments disappeared behind the omnipresent bass.

The Nothing X app offers the ability to add even more bass to its buds, and I've enjoyed this feature in other propositions from the company. However I couldn't hear much of a bass boost in the CMF Buds Pro 2, even when ratcheting it up to full power.

The equalizer in the app also lets you tweak your music, to a degree. For those of you who’ve cut your teeth on earbud app equalizers, this isn’t quite as in-depth; you can change the prominence of bass, mid and treble, to +/- 6 points. There are also six presets: pop, rock, classic, electronic, vocal enhancement or something called Dirac Opteo which apparently changes the EQ based on your music, but to my ears had little effect.

This EQ isn't hugely powerful, but it's a lot simpler to use than some others, and I did manage to rescue the treble somewhat from songs.

• Sound quality: 4/5

CMF Buds Pro 2 review: Value

• The incredibly low price means they offer value for money
• Definitely consider buying extra eartips though

I've been quite critical of the CMF Buds Pro 2 throughout this review, and that's because the design and feature set don't quite work for me. That said, the price makes the setbacks all-too-easy to overlook.

For just $59 / £59 / AU$99, these are some of the cheapest buds you can find from a reputable company, and while it's a very low benchmark, these buds do offer you reasonable value for money.

That's because you can de-activate the annoying features, leaving a case with an ornamental wheel, earbuds that sound decent for your price, and maybe a slight extra bill for when you buy third-party ear tips.

• Value: 3.5/5

Should I buy the CMF Buds Pro 2?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

CMF Buds Pro 2 review: Also consider

How I tested the CMF Buds Pro 2

• Tested for 3 weeks
• Tested at home, in the office and on walks

I tested the CMF Buds Pro 2 for over three weeks, and that review time saw them paired with both my Android smartphone and Windows laptop. I didn't test them alongside a Nothing phone.

To test the buds I listened to music on Spotify, watched TV shows on Netflix and Prime Video, partook in voice and video calls and played games on my phone. Most of this was done at home or in the office but I used the buds on several long journeys on trains and buses.

I've been testing gadgets for TechRadar for over five years, and in that time I've reviewed many budget headphones, as well as phones, tablets, watches and electric scooters.

• First reviewed in August 2024

• Read TechRadar's reviews guarantee