The last time we had a set of the Creative Aurvana earbuds range on our desk was the Aurvana wireless, and those earbuds, despite having a chunky neck support strap were absolutely awesome. When the new Aurvana Trio LS turned up at HQ, I wanted them to sound good. Creative are after all touting their new Rubber Silicon Driver system with these earbuds.
One thing I don’t quite get though is the fact that Creative kept the Trio part of the name, as the Trio stood for the triple drivers in previous Aurvana earbuds. But alas, this is a small thing, it’s just a name. The Aurvana Trio LS uses a single driver setup this time around for better efficiency. Creative is also showing off their new sawtooth sheath cabling, which is designed to minimise microphonic disturbances in your music, which comes from cables rubbing against clothes. Whether this does begs to be seen. It’s nice to say you have it, but in real-life use, I never noticed any difference between these and other earbuds I own. Design-wise they follow the same shape as the other Aurvana earbuds in the range with an all-black finish except for the two gold/bronze-like plates on each earbud. There’s a tiny in-line remote to play and pause music, but that’s it for the remote. No skip tracks or volume changes here. If you have the SXFI Amp, you can do this from here without unlocking your phone.
Now we’ve mentioned it, let’s talk about the fact they’re fully cabled. A performance choice of course, as cables, offer a much cleaner signal than Bluetooth, but it’s not really again noticeable. Plus, with the removal of the 3.5mm headphone jack from mobiles, you’re really isolating a huge chunk of people from purchasing your product. Though mobile phone providers do include headphone adapters in their boxes, it’s still not ideal. A USB Type-C on the end of your earbuds would have been better I think. Or better yet, if you use a Creative SXFI Amp, you get a Type-C to Type-C cable anyway, plus a much higher quality of music and an equaliser to really fine-tune your music listening style.
Also in the box, you get a nice carrying pouch made from leather and a few set of earbuds for those with different sized buds. As usual, I dived straight for the biggest size, and they fit very comfortably and gave me a decent amount of noise isolation. There’s no ANC here but the outside world was pretty shut out to me when using them.
Unfortunately due to the fact I own a Google Pixel 4 XL, I couldn’t plug directly into an audio source and receive raw audio. I had to use the Creative SXFI Amp and their partner app, which has already been personalised to me. I had my head scanned at CES a couple of years ago and saved it on my phone. There are two settings to the Amp. You can either choose to listen to your music with the spatial audio turned on or off, which is Creative’s way of widening the soundstage of your music. And for the most part, the Creative Aurvana Trio LS earbuds sounded superb with spatial audio off, and are really on the brink of audiophile levels of quality. Listening to some Tyler the Creator, his song Yonkers was an absolute delight. The low bass tones rumbled through the music but were so well controlled that Tyler’s vocals, drum tones and the main melody line were heard with top clarity. Nothing sounded muddy or distorted, even at higher volume levels.
However, turning on the spatial audio effects can be a love it or hate it kind of scenario. I absolutely loathed it when playing more punchy music like hip hop that relies more heavily on a thumbing kick drum or bass line, as the bass is really thinned out in favour of treble, but with something like Radiohead’s Paranoid Android, it really opened up the soundstage, and all of a sudden felt as if the music was coming from all directions, rather than firing directly into your ears. It gave it a more ‘live performance’ type feel which I actually liked. But it might not be for everyone. It worked very well for big band music like Prince’s Purple Rain, or Aerosmith or some AC/DC. It gave band led music a very stadium-like feeling as if I was there watching them live. It was just absolutely brilliant, and in my opinion, actually shone over if the spatial audio was switched off.
The Creative Aurvana Trio LS earbuds are fun. They sound absolutely blinding for all types of music thrown at them, and the inclusion of the SXFI AMp will only heighten your audio experience further. Being wired only is going to be the deciding factor here for many, and for me, I don’t mind going old skool if it means better audio quality, but of course, style over substance kicks in for many. They’re also priced exceptionally well too, at around £40-45 online, it’s an absolute steal for such a cracking set of earbuds.
