We Tried $995 Louis Vuitton Wireless Earbuds

June 2024 ยท 6 minute read

Following is a transcript of the video.

Michelle Yan: Louis Vuitton is getting in on the wireless headphone game. These Horizon earbuds will cost you $1,000. You could get six sets of AirPods for that. So, are they worth the price?

Louis Vuitton is a French fashion house known for its high-end bags, luggage, clothes, and accessories. And everything it makes has the ubiquitous LV logo on it. So when we found out it was making headphones, we knew we had to try them out.

Inside this box is some Louis Vuitton headphones and we're just gonna do a little unboxing right now. I've never felt more unworthy in my life.

Here's what comes in the giant box:

Look at that. Dang! Branding is pretty on point.

Even though these earphones are branded with LV, the model of them are the MW07 buds from an audio company called Master & Dynamic. The retail price of the MW07 buds are about $300. So you're paying about $700 more for just the LV logo.

So I'm going to test these out for about a week and I'll let you know what I think. I'm going to be testing the earphones for audio quality, design and features, comfort and fit, battery life, and price.

I've been testing the Louis Vuitton Horizon Earphones for a few days now and there are definitely some pros and cons to it.

Audio

Let's start with audio. The audio is pretty crisp, there's a punchy bass, great highs, mids, and lows, and they're slightly better than the AirPods.

These earphones also don't have a noise-canceling feature but they do have a noise-isolating fit, which means they can physically block out ambient noise. When I had these in in the office I couldn't hear my coworkers talking unless they were talking really loudly. When I was walking to work with them on, I couldn't hear the street noise but I was able to hear muffling sounds of cars honking and also the traffic officer blowing his whistle.

The audio for phone calls isn't so great though. I'm going to call Clancy and he'll tell you how I sound.

Clancy: Hello?

Michelle: Hey Clancy!

Clancy: Hey Michelle.

Michelle: How do I sound?

Clancy: Not great. Definitely worse than when you're normally calling on your iPhone. It almost sounds like you have me on speaker phone or like you're in a noisy area.

Michelle: Dang, that's rough.

Overall rating for sound quality: 4 out of 5.

Design and features

Moving on to design and features. The overall packaging looks really nice but the earphones do smudge and the case scratches easily. I really enjoy the buttons on these earphones. On the right side, you have one button and basically you can click it once to pause or play a song, you can click it twice to skip a song, and you can hold down to activate voice assistant. And then on the left one, there are two buttons to control your volume which is really, really great. And just like the AirPods, if you take one out, the music will stop playing and when you put it back in, it'll start playing again. Pretty neat feature.

These earbuds connect pretty quickly to your Bluetooth device but I found that when I was connecting them to my phone and my computer and I was trying to switch off on them, it was getting a little confused. The other annoying thing is putting the earbuds back into the case is pretty counterintuitive. You would assume that once you take it out you could just plop them into the case and it'll fit. You actually have to rotate the left earbud and put it on the right side of the case and then you put the right earbud on the left side of the case. I don't know why they did that.

I also wish the earbuds and the case were magnetic, so that it wouldn't fall out of the case so easily. But these earphones can go up to about 18 meters of range and it has an official IPX4 splash rating, which means you can splash some water on it and it'll still work.

Overall rating for design and features: 4 out of 5.

Comfort and fit

Next up, comfort and fit.

These earbuds felt pretty light at first but they're actually nine grams each and just to compare, AirPods weigh four grams each. So these are like twice as heavy. And I found that when I was wearing these for about an hour and when I took it off, my ears just started to hurt a lot, and I think it's because it was just way too heavy. I also noticed that the earbuds get pretty warm after a while.

Having these ear adjustments were really helpful because I was able to change the ear tip to a smaller size to fit into my ear. I thought these fit wings, as they call it, were weird at first but they actually help fit in my ear more securely and more comfortably. The silicone material makes it really soft and squishy but it does catch a lotta ear wax. I won't show you that. Yeah, they don't fall out.

Overall rating for comfort and fit: 3 out of 5.

Battery life

The battery life isn't the best. The battery life on these is about three and a half hours of constant listening. Whereas AirPods last up to five hours of constant listening. The case is what keeps the earphones charged and it takes about 40 minutes to charge up to 100%. It's pretty heavy to lug around though. The case weighs about 100 grams, similar in weight to a bar of soap.

Overall rating for battery life: 3 out of 5.

Price

For $1,000, it's really hard to justify these earphones. You can get the same headphones without the Louis Vuitton branding for $700 less.

Overall rating for price: 2 out of 5.

Final rating

My final rating for these earbuds are 3 out of 5 stars. If the price was $300 like the earbud model these are based on, then I'd give it four stars which is what they're rated on Amazon. But if you can afford it and you're a big fan of Louis Vuitton...then these may be for you. Otherwise, you're better off with the originals or a different headphone altogether.

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