The Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip might be worth crossing the border for

Fans of open earbuds have been eating well the past couple years, but many of the options on the market are either budget-oriented options or top-of-the-line wallet-busters. Filling the gap in the mid-range open-earbud market, the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip has its work cut out for it — and Sennheiser has confirmed that, in the Americas, it’s launching in Canada, Central America, and South America. No US release at the time of writing. So are they worth jumping the border for? I used these for a week to find out.

What’s it like to use the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip?

The Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip is a pretty standard set of open, clip-style earbuds — but they work well enough to fit the needs of most people looking for this type of product.

Design

The Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip is a set of rather unassuming clip-style earbuds, with a speaker element that sits apart from your ear canal, and most of the electronics hidden in a rounded rectangle that sits behind your ear. On the outside of each speaker housing is a capacitive touch plate that allows you to control the product. If you’re looking for a workout buddy, the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip bears an ingress protection rating of IP54 — meaning they won’t give up the ghost just because you sweat on them a bit. Similarly, they should be able to survive light rain or errant moisture.

Using the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip feels pretty comfortable — though anyone with ears that sit more flush to your head may find issue with the rather large rear bulb. The clip assembly is a little odd if you’ve never used it, but unless you absolutely cannot have anything touching your ears: the low mass of the buds (6.9g) will be easily ignored by most. To wear properly, you’ll have to put the bulbous end behind your ear, and the part with the metal grille into your concha. Adjust until the speaker element is firing directly at the opening of your ear canal — or simply where your music seems loudest.

The case of the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip is fairly featureless, save for the indented Sennheiser logo on the top of the lid. It’s a little chunky, but it sorta has to be in order to contain open earbuds; they may not be heavy, but things that go around your ear take up a fair amount of space.

For those of you sensitive to acrylates, there’s no ear tip or silicone to worry about, so you shouldn’t have to worry about a reaction to the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip like you might with more traditional in-ear designs. However, if you’re sensitive to nickel, be mindful that the charging contacts for the earbuds are positioned in a way that places them next to your head. They’re inlaid, so it’s unlikely your skin will make contact, but something to be aware of.

Features

Feature-wise, the ACCENTUM line of headphones is a little light on the advanced stuff, and the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip is no different. Though the earbuds do offer a handful of bells and whistles like Find headphones, control customization, and a five-band equalizer: most of the interaction you’ll have with the app will be brief and infrequent.

That said, there’s a bunch of stuff in there that doesn’t make headlines that I’m really thankful for. For example, the Battery Protection Mode allows you to prolong the usable life of your earbuds by enforcing charge habits that don’t put excess wear on the cells. Though it caps charge at 80%, it will dramatically increase the lifespan of your product. Other features, like audio mode priority, will allow you to jump between codecs if you’re unsatisfied with the one you’re using for any reason. For these, I suggest sticking with AAC in the “Advanced sound quality” option over LDAC, as it will sip power much less, and have reduced latency.

How does the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip connect?

The Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip uses Bluetooth 6.0 to connect to sources via SBC, AAC, and LDAC. Though the last codec in that list may be a bit overkill, for the purist, it’s a nice security blanket. Additionally, the earbuds also support multiple connections, and Fast Pair. Though I didn’t see much in the app discussing the more advanced features of Bluetooth 6.0, it’s possible those come with a firmware update.

Interestingly enough, the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip does not claim to support Auracast or LE Audio by default, and may need a firmware update in the future to add this functionality. Which is a shame — there’s not a ton of things that get me excited about wireless audio, and LE Audio is one of them. Hopefully this gets added soon, as Auracast is great for sharing audio broadcasts with friends, invaluable at the airport, and LC3 is awesome for maximizing battery life without too much of a hit to audio quality.

How long does the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip’s battery last?

This is an interesting question, as it depends largely upon whether you’re using LDAC to listen to your tunes, your listening level, and whether or not you’re using the Battery Protection Mode (you should definitely be doing this). Sennheiser claims a battery life of 9 hours of playback on a single charge, which seems dubious. With the base codec enabled and our test track level-matched to 75dB, we recorded 8 hours and 39 minutes on a full charge. But I should point out that I call the battery life when the first earbud calls it quits, not the last earbud. During this test, the other earbud lasted 9 hours and 4 minutes, which is closer to Sennheiser’s claims, but only one bud making it that long isn’t exactly meeting that.

As I mentioned, this is heavily dependent on how you use your earbuds, but it’s at least nice to know that you can count on your earbuds lasting through a commute or bike ride without dying on you. As long as you’re not hoping for continuous listening sessions over 10 hours, you should be more than fine enough with the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip.

How well do the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip block out noise?

Given that the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip sits outside your ear and doesn’t attempt to attenuate noise — and that’s really the whole point of open-ear earbuds — it’s no surprise that it just lets in everything around you. Though there’s a little bit of outside noise that doesn’t reach your ear, on the whole: the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip just lets everything right on through.

But given that’s the point, it’s almost better to see that the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip does work as intended. Try not to read into that isolation score being extremely poor: having standardized data-driven scores are good most of the time, but can lead to issues like this one.

The upshot here is that there’s no need for transparency mode — it’s just kinda default behavior. But the downside is everything that comes with having poor isolation. For example, you may find yourself fiddling with the volume a lot to drown out cars and other noisy things, only to feel like you’re getting blasted by sound when you listen at home.

How do the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip sound?

Much like most other open earbuds, the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip sounds like tiny speakers are sitting in your ears.

Reviewer’s notes

Editor’s note: this review uses a hover-enabled glossary to describe sound quality based on a consensus vocabulary. You can read about it here.

Can you use the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip for phone calls?

Like most wireless earbuds, the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip comes equipped with external microphones to enable voice calls. But rather than tell you whether the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip sounds good or bad, I’ve collected standardized speech recordings from a calibrated simulator so you can directly compare our samples from product to product. Given that the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip struggles a bit with outside noise, I encourage you to listen to the real-world samples if you often take calls in an office, on the street, or in a windy area.

Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip microphone demo (Ideal conditions):

Should you buy the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip?

If you’re in Canada and looking for open, clip-style earbuds, the Sennheiser ACCENTUM Clip is a decent buy — if not an exciting one. It’s reliable, it avoids some of the shortcomings of competing options, and at $269.95 CAD it won’t break the bank. The addition of a battery protection mode means you’ll be able to hold onto these for much longer than normal earbuds, which is a nice security blanket if you’re sweating the cost.

Of course, the open-ear category is as diverse as it is unconventional, so there are plenty of options for those of you looking for alternatives (or live in the US). For example, the Nothing Open ($149 at Amazon) has a more secure over-the-ear hook design. If you like the ear cuff style, the Sony LinkBuds Clip ($229.99 at Amazon) and Bose QuietComfort Ultra Open ($299 at Amazon) perform decently enough — but at a bit of a premium. If the idea of a fully-open earbud is a bit odd to you, check out the Sony LinkBuds Open ($199.99 at Amazon), or Sony LinkBuds Fit ($178 at Amazon). Both sit within your ear, but offer the comfort benefits of an open earbud.