Review | Yamaha TW-E3B (earbuds)

Review | Yamaha TW-E3B – Yamaha is in good shape, because not so long ago we had the honor of working with the YH-L700A to get started. Unfortunately, we had to conclude in our review that the audiophile headset simply has too many snags to really be able to speak of a recommendation. Now we return to another audio product: earbuds. The market is loaded with it and Yamaha can’t stay behind either. The TW-E3B is not a very charming name and fits more with a robot, but these earbuds (which have been on the market for a while) get our full attention this time. Read our findings in this review.

Different colours, all equally bulky

The TW-E3B earbuds from Yamaha are available in different colors. Lilac purple, light olive green, gray sand, pink, black and light blue (our one) are the color options you can choose from. The charge case also has the mainly fresco-like colors, which are included in the package. What you’ll also find in the box is another charging cable (USB-C to USB-A) and several eartips, so the earbuds fit snugly in your ears. But here we immediately make a caveat. Although the earbuds have a fairly elegant design and you can put them quite deep in your ears, it feels very bulky. We notice too much that there is a club in our ears, which is not exactly nice.

It could be slightly smaller or more ergonomic, so that it is less noticeable when you have the earbuds in. The charge case is also somewhat elongated and compared to similar cases it could be a size smaller. On the earbuds you will find the Yamaha logo and you have to press this for certain actions, such as recording and connecting to your device. Like the Yamaha YH-L700A, you’re stuck with the same software, which simply offers too few options, so don’t expect too many options here in terms of settings. Still a loss and we hope that Yamaha will do its best with the software.

Pretty decent sound

It’s a shame that the TW-E3B feels so big in your ears. An irritation is how the earbuds connect (via Bluetooth) with your smartphone or other mobile devices. When searching for the TW-E3B, ​​your device will see the two earbuds as two separate devices (TW-E3B L and TW-E3B R). The absurd and annoying thing about this is that sometimes you can connect one earbud and not the other. So get it out of your head to try this with a Nintendo Switch, because at least we didn’t succeed. This while most Bluetooth devices have no problems pairing with the Nintendo console.

We also want to know how the Yamaha TW-E3B sounds. We can say that the sound is better than the other aspects. The earbuds have a very deep sound: the bass is full, while the mids have a warm presentation. The higher tones are somewhat pushed to the background, but that does not mean that you are still left with quite detailed sound. It is actually impressive what the TW-E3B does in terms of sound performance for a suggested retail price of € 99.99. Warm, full and nice sound is the short description we can give. The spaciousness is certainly not wrong, so we can say that it is more than solid. Yamaha scores a lot of points on this.

Gaming and other features

As indicated earlier, you cannot use the Yamaha TW-E3B to play games on a Nintendo Switch. Fortunately, there is nothing wrong if you want to play a game of Fortnite on your mobile; we experienced no latency while gaming. Because the spaciousness can be called decent, it is also very nice to use with games. A nice side effect is that the earbuds are IPX5 water resistant. You can use the earbuds perfectly during sports when you are sweating, even if you have to wait for the bus in the sad rain. The earbuds can handle it all. In terms of battery life, you have to make do with 5 hours and the charge case offers about 16 hours of extra battery life. It’s fine, but nothing special.