There are certain areas where Chinese companies currently dominate: amplifiers, affordable earbuds and in-ear monitors. So when I saw a forum post and multiple YouTubers recommended a sub $50 bluetooth headset, I posted about it online. A few people bought them and told me “man, these are pretty good,” so I bought them to mess around. The wisdom was right; they’re well-built, sound solid, and were a great deal when I bought them–before Trump announced his massive China tariffs.
I should stress for anyone reading this later that this is being written in the early parts of Donald Trump’s second term. We do not know the full impact of how his continued trade war with China is going to work practically, although one element of it was the removal of the de minimis rule for goods under $800 that helped the import of inexpensive Chinese goods to flourish. Previously, inexpensive goods were exempt from existing tariffs and close inspection, and the removal of this rule means that not only are consumers hit with the new tariffs, but existing ones as well.
The framing of these tariffs has overwhelmingly been to state that this is a direct attack on vendors of cheap goods like Temu and SHEIN, as well as imports of fentanyl.The last point is a little reactionary, and I am skeptical that the changes being proposed will do much to lessen the flow of fentanyl. And while I agree SHEIN sucks a lot, so does most clothing now, the framing undersells the significance of Chinese goods, including goods that are well made.
Fees on importing Chinese goods are probably going to go up. Some companies halted shipments in moments of uncertainty; delays and new charges are happening, and USPS briefly halted then backtracked on accepting packages from China. Even if you agree with the idea of stopping the de minimis rule or buying less frivolous stuff, none of this seems particularly well-implemented.
This brings us to the Ugreen Max5c headphones, which I got for about $35. You may know Ugreen because they make competitive and solidly built USB-C charging cables, power chargers and power banks. They've also been expanding into other fields like Network Attached Storage (for laymen: a big box you shove hard drives into to store stuff and run a Plex server), although I have not tested them against offerings like QNAP, Synology or Terramaster.
The Ugreen Max5c is not listed publicly on Ugreen’s English-facing site and is currently unavailable on Amazon, but it is available on their Aliexpress store. This is not uncommon with Chinese companies, and if you dig around the official Aliexpress store you’ll find a lot of items they don’t promote as much here, like wireless earbuds and Apple AirTag clones. Ugreen also has models other than the Max5c, like the Max5 Hybrid and Studio Max 2, although I have not read any reviews of either of those.
The first thing you notice when you hold the Ugreen Max5c is that it’s shockingly well built for the money. Like a lot of Ugreen’s products, trim and finish are what I would expect from a much more expensive product, although the buttons themselves are a little clicky when they’re on your head. The cups are on the smaller side but fit comfortably on my head. The headset has both a partial lateral swivel and a hinge that allows you to fold them and put them in your bag. I dislike pleather or leather earcups personally, as I run pretty hot as a general rule. While these are no exception, I found them fairly comfortable as far as these things go. I would love the ability to swap the cups out for something aftermarket, because pads always disintegrate, but anything involving noise canceling requires a good seal, which can make that a tricky proposition.
The stock equalization for the Max5c is distractingly bassy, which is not uncommon when designing headphones for a mass market. Switching the tuning requires you to download a companion app from Ugreen and switch to one of the many presets. I found that “Jazz” and “Classic” tended to tame the bass into something far more transparent and clear. The app is slightly fiddly and annoying to use, and the ability to do any of this without adding clutter to my phone would have been preferential. The ability to have a parametric or graphic EQ would also have been a nice touch, but as it stands you need to use an external app to do that, which I don’t because I am a basic iPhone user. Apps like Equalizer APO and wavelet for Android are a good way to address this. The good people at Audio Science Review, where I first heard about these headphones, actually have a good preset that should work with those apps.
My ability to assess just how good these headphones are is limited by several factors. The first is that I was not able to test the headphone with the advertised LDAC codec because this is one noteworthy area where Apple refuses to treat people like adults. Though it is possible to use LDAC on a Windows PC with annoying workarounds, the ability to turn the LDAC feature on in the headset requires you to enable it in the Android version of the app. It’s understandable that Ugreen does not want to implement a codec you can’t use with an iPhone on the iPhone app, but this and the lack of tuning made it difficult for me to give a full assessment on mobile. The other issue is that I don’t have a measurement rig like a B&K 5128 – a big fake head that not only measures how headphones sound but how they behave on the head. Maybe one day if Aftermath gets serious money I’ll be able to get one of those, but for now I’m going on the measurements of others and how they sound to my own ears.
But to be honest, I’m not sure how rigorous I need to be given that these things sound pretty fantastic for about $35. For that money, what do you expect? It’s impressive that a pair of headphones has noise canceling at all at this price and even more impressive that it performs decently there. The app features four distinct levels of noise canceling, one of which is an awareness mode that worked ok, although I’ve definitely heard better. These are not perfect headphones, but they might be close to perfect $35 headphones.
The Max5c features an under-explained game mode, but I assume this helps with latency. The mic quality is a little distant but performs OK for the money. I still dream that someday a company will start making mic quality a bullet point and implement something like the freakishly good array mic from the Valve Index. The battery life is advertised at 75 hours with ANC off and 45 hours with it on, and while I haven’t run it through a full charge yet, it seems to last a long time.
Though it has its quirks, the Ugreen Max5C is an incredible value for the money, or at least it was when I bought it. After I got the notification that it had entered the country and passed customs, USPS enacted and then rescinded a freeze on packages coming from China, one of many moves recently that seems to have been shot off with little thought of the cascading effects on consumers and businesses in America. That same day I got multiple panicked emails from tea suppliers I’d ordered from in the past, pleading patience as everyone figures out how any of this shit is supposed to work. I can only imagine being someone whose livelihood depends on imports and feeling your stomach drop as the underpinning of your life changed and reverted back in about a day.
This specific moment is volatile, senseless and ambiguous; every function of our life can change hour-to-hour as the world slouches towards an increasingly unstable future. It makes recommending any action uncertain, even something as frivolous and silly as buying surprisingly nice budget headphones. This review might not be relevant for very long, but if tomorrow looks anything like today and next week looks anything like tomorrow, then I suppose it’s worth noting that these headphones sound solid and were an absolute steal when I got them.
Update: While this article was being edited, Trump further delayed implementation of the de minimis rule, which underscores the point about how nobody knows what’s going on.
