From bedtime stories and lullabies to relaxation techniques and chilling out podcasts, audio is a popular way to help you get to sleep. Through Anker’s Soundcore brand comes the Sleep A20, a lightweight pair of wireless earbuds designed to help and assess your sleep.
Soundcore Sleep A20
The Sleep A20 build on the success of the Sleep A10 buds released in late 2022, and address many of the concerns from the first iteration. The A20 buds are now available to pre-order through Kickstarter before general sales start on May 20th.
I've had the chance to review the A20 buds ahead of the Kickstarter, and for once, it's nice to know that a product putting me to sleep is a good thing.
The Sleep A20 buds have obvious design constraints that daily-use buds don't have to contend with. Because they are designed to work in bed and stay in throughout the night, they need to be not only a secure fit into the ear canal but also a smooth design sitting in the outer ear so that those who sleep on their side (as I do) do not feel any external pressure pushing the buds uncomfortably deeper in the ear canal.
Soundcore has achieved this by stripping out much of what you would expect from buds designed for a smartphone. There's no need to make calls so the various microphones can be dropped. Battery life only needs to last a single night, and they are definitely going back into the case for 10-12 hours a day. There's no active noise cancellation.
The latter might feel like an omission, but the need for more power and microphones in the buds quickly puts paid to that notion. Instead, Soundcore has something a little more traditional to reduce external noise. The Soundcore A20 buds come with two different designs of ear tips; one is designed to cut back as much noise as possible for near complete isolation, and the other allows a certain amount of sound to leak through.
Soundcore Sleep A20
You will have to decide in advance what you are looking for. Personally, I've gone for the full isolation while travelling and the ‘’leaky’ version at home so I can hear the cats sneaking up on me early in the morning. Naturally, Soundcore includes several different tip sizes in the packaging for both styles. You also have three different sizes of sleeves. These wrap around the entire bud and terminate in the classic “wing” shape that helps the bud stay in your ear.
The sleeve is a big part of the all-night comfort the A20s need. The soft textured silicon is a world away from the hard plastic of more popular daytime wireless buds and offers more friction and grip, which is important given the small size of the buds that need to stay in all night while you are sleeping.
I sleep on my side, which means that my ear is against the pillow, which makes many of the current generation of true wireless buds, with their external sticks for batteries and controls, impossible to use. The low profile of the A20 sits inside my outer ear, and I can rest my head on my pillow without a huge amount of pressure being applied and pushing the bud in. It’s not invisible, and a little bit of movement around the pillow is needed to get everything comfy, but that becomes second nature rather quickly.
I've woken up in the morning and forgotten they are in place. I’ve not woken up with one missing after a month of use… if I did there’s a “find my earbud” alert in the app to trigger the speaker to play a beep to help you find it.
Soundcore Sleep A20 (Press image)
One of the Sleep A20 goals is to help you get to sleep through background audio that helps you drift away. This is going to be a somewhat personal choice, and you have two broad options: to use the built-in sound mixer to create your soundscape or to play your own audio, be it custom background noise, podcasts, or musical playlists (I’m partial to old baseball radio broadcasts).
The sound mixer allows you to select several elements to become a track, layer them together, and set the volume for each track. The resulting mix is then sent to buds and stored in the onboard memory. You don’t need a Bluetooth connection to your smartphone to use this feature.
That means the latter will offer longer battery life than maintaining a Bluetooth connection through the night, although that’s not as important in the Sleep A20 buds as it is for buds you would actively use during the day. They comfortably get through the night, and you can pop them in the charging and carry case and have them by the bed ready for the next night.
Soundcore Sleep A20
That the Sleep A20 can tell when you have fallen asleep to stop the sounds playing should let you know the final key function, which is sleep tracking.
When my data gathered by the Sleep A20 is compared to Honor’s Band 6 sports tracker, the results of time asleep are within a few minutes of each other; that’s enough to give me confidence in the A20 results being in the right ballpark. The split between deep sleep and light sleep on the A20 does not map directly to the deep sleep, light sleep, and REM sleep on the Band 6, but I can see a rough correlation.
These sleep trackers are not clinical devices and can only be used as a coarse guide, but the A20s are in step with other trackers I have used.
One thing the A20 can track that wrist-based trackers can’t is positional data: how much I sleep on one side and how many times I roll over at night. I’m not entirely sure how useful the former is, but there’s some value in seeing how restless or not a night may have been.
As of writing this review, sleep data is only available when your phone is connected to the buds. That’s fine when you want to check in the morning, but if you need to look up your patterns (for example, when your Epilepsy Nurse asks how you’ve been sleeping), there’s no cached copy of the data If the buds aren’t with you, neither is your data.
The developers have informed me this will be updated later in the app.
Soundcore Sleep A20
Do the Soundcore Sleep A20 true wireless earbuds work? Anecdotally, yes. There are a lot of satisfied customers for the first Sleep A1, and the A20 builds on the first model.
These are passive headphones with no active noise cancellation, which means they will never be as good as more expensive (and bulkier) buds. The ‘closed’ tips cut out a lot of noise, but you’ll still have some perception of outside sound. These are a great level for me while travelling, but at home, I needed a bit more awareness of what was around me by using the open tips… Yes, this means that the cats terrified me in the morning; their super quiet movement to hunt me awake was amplified by my weakened hearing.
I’d also like more control over the alarm designed to wake you gently. It needs to be gentler; it scales up incredibly quickly to a loud signal and doesn’t integrate with Android’s own alarm system.
If you find that some gentle audio works well to help you sleep at night and you find yourself using a bulky pair of earbuds that need to be removed in the twilight between being asleep and awake, then the Sleep A20 buds should be a good fit for your sleeping patterns. The sleep tracking data is a nice bonus and should show how much the buds help your night-time routines.
The whole package still feels a touch clunky, and I’m hopeful an app update can make everything a bit smoother and easier. But they’ve helped me, and that’s enough to make a product a personal win.
Disclaimer: Anker subsidiary Soundcore provided a set of Sleep A20 Bluetooth Earbuds for review purposes.
