Review: UGREEN Studio Pro BT6.0 Hi-Res Hybrid Active Noise-Cancelling Headphones (HP206, 55687)

In recent years, I’ve been quite pleased with how many of the reasonably-priced products in the personal audio market sound quite good. My most recent favourite for reasonably-priced, high-res audio Bluetooth headphones would be the QCY H3S, but unfortunately, after some use it has transpired that the plastic headband components have decided to develop cracks. While it hasn’t stopped the unit from being wearable and usable, it has led me to consider whether there are any other similar dual-driver ANC products on the market.

Thanks again to OzBargain, I came across the UGREEN Studio Pro, a Bluetooth 6.0 hybrid ANC headphone that has very comparable specifications compared to the H3S. I managed to get it at AU$47, receiving further cashbacks on-top dropping it into the AU$35-40 bracket, which I thought to be a very reasonable price.

Unboxing

The unit came wrapped in a UGREEN satchel which was a bit worse-for-wear. Inside was the product box which has a silver-grey colour scheme. The front of the box shows the headphones with key features including four-mic ANC (indicating the presence of feedforward and feedback microphones on both sides), four-unit coaxial speaker (thus indicating they are dual-drivers, on each side). The unit uses LDAC for high-res audio.

It advertises a long 120h battery life, although likely under very conservative operating conditions, from its 3.7V 820mAh li-poly cell. It claims a charging time of around two hours and charges from USB-C. Although not stated on the rear, it also has the ability to work with 3.5mm input. The unit has a Model Number of HP206 and a part number of 55687.

The side of the box carries some user warnings.

Milky-white plastic bags are used to protect the headphones, which are in a white plastic tray.

In the bag is the “paperwork” and in the box is a 3.5mm TRS male-to-male and a USB-A to USB-C charging cable.

The unit with its earcups folded flat. The majority of the body is plastic, except for metal on the top side of the headband and metal sections on each hinge.

The majority of the buttons are on the right earcup. The volume up, down and power are visible here, alongside one of the microphone openings and USB-C charging port.

At the bottom is the 3.5mm jack for analog audio and to the other side is the ANC button.

The other earcup has no buttons. There appears to be a vent port on the upper side towards the hinge.

Each earcup has L and R printed on the fabric inside to make it obvious which side is which. The ear cushions themselves are well rounded and made of a medium density memory foam covered in a soft pliable pleather. I found these very soft and comfortable, but out-of-the-box they had quite a strong plastic solvent smell.

The headband is extendable on both sides to accommodate heads of different sizes. The hinge mechanism allows for folding flat to save space during transit, but the metal hinge knuckles also allow the earcup to swivel.

With some clearance at the point where the stem enters each earcup, each cup is free to pivot in and out, making for a comfortable fit.

This is how the unit looks when pivoted in the “ready-to-use” configuration. The unit is also available in a white colour scheme.

The rounded rectangular shapes on the rear side does bear a slight resemblance to Bowers and Wilkins products … but the UGREEN branding is somewhat subtle, as a gloss emphasis against a matte plastic background.

Key product information is etched into the inside arm, where it is unobtrusive and doesn’t ruin the rather nice aesthetics.

UgreenAudio App

To configure the headphones, you can install the UgreenAudio app.

Why might you want to do this?

For one, the headphones come pre-configured for compatibility and battery life. As a result, they ship with LDAC turned off! Only by using the app can you turn on LDAC.

Use of the app require agreeing with their terms. Thankfully, you don’t have to sign up for an account, if you see the small text that says “Explore now”.

After more agreeing and allowing the app to send notifications, you can scan for devices.

This requests further permissions related to Bluetooth.

The device is then found and can be added – note that the colour it appears in the app is not related to the colour of the actual product.

The main screen of the product allows accessing various features, some of which are not available via the button controls.

For example, you can turn on noise cancelling, turn on wind noise mode and change the noise cancelling intensity.

While there is an EQ feature, there are only pre-set EQs with no ability to make your own custom EQ. None of the included EQs were to my taste, with the default Classic seeming to be closest to acceptable.

Towards the bottom of the front page, you can configure dual-link which is multi-point connectivity and turn on high-res audio. Here, we can see the connected device is connected in AAC mode.

Enabling high-res isn’t quite as simple as turning the switch on. I turned it on, the unit rebooted and I ended up in SBC mode! From there, you actually have to forget the device and re-pair it to detect its new capabilities.

Once re-paired, I can see HD audio: LDAC and the app correctly reports the codec as LDAC. Now we’re in high-res audio mode.

There is also another “trick mode” that is specific to the Studio Pro which allows for audio sharing to a second Studio Pro. But all of these modes rely on high-res audio being turned off – so it’s multi-point pairing/audio-sharing or high-res and not both.

The Control page allows for changing the functionality of buttons on the unit.

The other page allows for configuration of a few other things.

This includes changing the voice prompt volume and language between English, Chinese and beeps. The Rename dialog allows renaming the device, but the app’s UI seems a bit mangled.

User Experience

The first thing I noticed when I took it out of the box was just how weighty the headphones were (300g) in comparison with the H3S (249g). This would likely be because of the metallic hinge components. The next thing I noticed was the supple pleather memory foam earpads, which felt even softer than the H3S but had a more rounded and comfortable profile. The Studio Pro didn’t clamp hard on the head, but rested comfortably, only shifting slightly when I did moderate levels of activity. The weight was not fatiguing, but the smell of the earpads was significant and took a whole month to subside.

Connecting to all my devices was no challenge – the unit remembers the last-connected device and tries to reconnect at each start-up, falling back to pairing mode if unable to connect.

Battery state is relayed through without the need for the app, although accuracy was poor. Similar to the H3S, it reported 10% when there was still almost 50% of playtime remaining. The low battery warning would prompt several times multiple hours before the unit would shut-down due to battery exhaustion which is a slight annoyance.

The buttons on the headphones are easy to reach and functionality was easily identified by position. While the buttons can be remapped to some extent, the default mapping was sensible. The button I found myself using the most was the ANC button, because the unit does not remember the ANC mode at last shutdown and always starts up in non-ANC mode. To change into ANC mode requires two presses of the ANC button – changing ANC strength requires the app.

The biggest problem is, unfortunately, also the biggest reason for buying the headphones – sound quality. On its own, the dual driver setup on the UGREEN Studio Pro is quite competent – the bass isn’t quite as deep as the H3S but the highs are quite sharp. They are still relatively satisfying overall, despite needing some EQ ideally. The app’s EQ is fixed and none of the presets really did the Studio Pro justice.

The problem is that when ANC is on, the left earcup tends to oscillate. On my head, this results in the audio seeming to “shift” left and right over the course of several seconds, non-stop. When any pressure is applied to the left earcup, the oscillation speeds up into a loud chopper-like “thun-thun-thun-thun” at about 4Hz. This makes the headphones quite hard to use with ANC on and reducing the ANC strength did not resolve this. To be fair, my first QCY H3S also suffered from feedback causing a left-side thump, so it seems the manufacturers may be pushing the ANC just a bit too far. The position of the microphones was also somewhat low on the outer surface, resulting in some rub against clothing causing a loud “rustle” to be injected into the audio.

So you might think to turn ANC off, which I did, only to run into another oddity of this particular unit which likes to mute low amplitude audio entirely, likely a choice to reduce energy usage and perhaps avoid producing noticeable digital hash noise at low volumes. The result was that dialogue in quiet movie or podcast scenes clipped in and out, sometimes losing part of a syllable, and background ambience effects were completely lost. It almost seemed I was listening to something completely different to the intended program – I simply couldn’t stand it.

While connection via 3.5mm worked just fine, even when the battery was flat, connecting the cable shut down the unit immediately. As a result, when connected via 3.5mm connection, the audio sounded a bit duller, but also there was no ability to use ANC at all. The inbuilt microphones were also not used – the cable is a TRS 3.5mm male-to-male, so you’re only using them as a set of passive headphones. That’s a bit of a shame. There’s also no USB digital audio capability either – USB appears solely connected for charging.

On the upside, battery life was phenomenal – I managed a play time of 43 hours and 19 minutes with ANC and LDAC enabled, about 10 hours more than the QCY H3S. Unfortunately, with the indicated battery status being so out-of-sync with the actual remaining charge, the last 10 or so hours were peppered with the occasional low battery warning.

Testing

When it comes to charging, it appears the unit uses a linear charging IC and charging takes 1h 33m 51s with a bulk charge current in the 700mA range. The capacity achieved is 836.8mAh which is very close to the 820mAh claimed, with the unit drawing 1.1mA quiescent after charging is completed.

Supported codecs, once LDAC is turned on, includes SBC with Bitpool 38, MPEG-2 AAC and LDAC as promised.

Partial Teardown

I found taking the UGREEN Studio Pro rather tricky – those earcups clip in very strongly, so I had to pry enough to cause slight damage to the sealing foam around the edge of the clip frame.

Nevertheless, the ear cushion has two foam inserts.

The dual drivers are visible with the speaker cavity being carefully designed. The feed-back microphone is towards the bottom.

Behind each driver “plate” it would seem that all the electronics are fitted from the other side of the unit. Here, we can see the additional mic for call audio is on the right side.

The left-side has the battery and one feed-forward microphone.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see an easy way to get the other side of the unit off without causing significant cosmetic and potentially physical damage, so it’ll stay a partial teardown. But it does seem that there is some interesting teardowns from others that suggest it is powered by a JieLi 7083F chipset. While researching, I found conflicting reports as to whether ANC worked with wired connection (it didn’t for me, but others seem to suggest it did for them), so perhaps there are multiple versions out there.

Conclusion

The UGREEN Studio Pro headphones definitely look and feel like a quality product, with a noticeable weight due to the metallic hinge components and plush pleather over medium-density memory foam pads, although there is a smell which persists for about a month. In general, the dual-driver setup sounds fairly decent given the price although not quite as deep in bass or as crisp as the QCY H3S. The microphone performs well, albeit with the slightest hint of swimminess due to noise reduction and battery life even with LDAC and ANC on was quite decent.

While they might appear the part on first glance, there are plenty of caveats too. My unit had a tendency to oscillate in the left earcup, creating a subtle “platform motion” of sound floating left and right when noise cancellation was turned on, ranging to a more subtle “chopper” style “thun-thun-thun-thun” noise when any pressure was applied to the left earcup. Perhaps it was a one-off defect, but this suggests that the noise cancelling is too aggressively tuned. Even then, the noise cancelling was subtly behind the H3S in my opinion.

Then, we get to usability limitations like the noise-cancelling mode being forgotten, resulting in the unit starting up in regular non-noise cancelling mode. This is something I’d expect only from the lowest-end products. In non-noise-cancelling mode, the headphones cease producing audio altogether when the amplitude falls below a certain level, resulting in clipped syllables and chopping-in and out of quiet scenes in movies or podcasts and a loss of background ambience. Absolutely horrible. The battery indication is way-off (it’s not the only headphone to do this) with plenty of life when it claims to have 10% remaining, with multiple prompts reminding you to charge. Not having any access to the microphone or ANC when using 3.5mm input is a bummer too and there is no USB digital audio as there is on some of the QCY H3 Pro/H3S..

Aside from this, the UGREEN Studio Pro has very little to redeem itself. It shares common limitations with other devices of this class, such as not supporting multi-point pairing when LDAC is turned on. But the app is perhaps still a bit rudimentary and the list of preset EQs didn’t really meet my needs, but without the ability to define a custom EQ which seems to be a big oversight.

As much as I had wanted to like the UGREEN Studio Pro as a replacement for my QCY H3S’ cracking plastic headband components, it simply didn’t measure-up. If you do receive a decent unit, perhaps it would be still value-for-money compared to offerings from some of the bigger brands, but I find it hard to recommend based on my experiences. If only there was some way to meld the QCY’s abilities with UGREEN’s physical design …