The Anker Soundcore Life Q20 ANC won’t win any design awards, but it’s still nice and unobtrusive. Black is the only color available, but in reality it looks more like a slightly metallic dark blue/gray. The plastic case makes it lightweight and comfortable for prolonged listening, but as a compromise it feels cheap. Also, the buttons rattle uncomfortably when pressed. Frequent travelers will appreciate the fact that the headphones have rotating ear cups and fold up for storage and transport. However, there is no hard case included, but there is a case in the box if you don’t want to scratch the headphones in your bag. Each ear cup has large and easy to use buttons. On the left side are buttons for power on/pairing and ANC. On the right side are buttons for media playback, a multifunction button to activate your phone’s voice assistant, and BassUp, Anker’s name for the bass boost function. Even better, when you run out of juice, the headphones refill pretty quickly: Anker claims you get 4 hours of music playback from a 5-minute charge. Unfortunately, though, the noise cancellation of the Anker Soundcore Life Q20 ANC is only OK. While the headphones were able to suppress most quiet background noise, they can’t keep up when it comes to deep bass or high frequencies. Sony and Bose still set the standard in terms of ANC. The Ankers also support Bluetooth 5.0 and we had no issues with audio dropouts. We were even able to walk around the apartment without the signal dropping out, although it does drop out if the signal goes through too many walls. The sound quality of the Anker Soundcore Life Q20 ANC is good, but nothing to get excited about. There’s not a lot of detail and the sound balance is definitely on the warm side, emphasizing bass. This makes it easy to listen to the headphones for extended periods of time as the sound is not fatiguing, but those looking for more detail in their listening experience will be disappointed. Unfortunately, Anker doesn’t offer an app that allows you to adjust the EQ to your liking, so you’ll have to make do with Anker’s default setting. The bass is already pretty muddy, and the BassUp feature only exacerbates this shortcoming.
