QCY N70
Specifications
| Driver | 1×DD, 1× U-Sound MEMS |
| Bluetooth Version | 6.0 |
| Chipset | Not known |
| Codecs | LDAC, AAC, SBC |
| ANC | Yes, up to 56dB |
| App Support | Yes |
| Multipoint | Yes |
| Water Resistance | IPX5 |
| Battery Life | ~7h with ANC (10h without) |
| Total Battery | Up to 50 hours |
| Quick Charge | Not specified |
| Wireless Charging | Yes |
| Wear Detection | Yes |
| Spatial Audio | Yes |
Pros
- MEMS driver at an incredibly low cost
- Improved case build quality
- Precise (although slightly overcooked) treble
- Feature rich - wear detection, find earbuds, control customisation, etc
- Google Fastpair supported
- Wireless charging
- Low latency even without gaming mode activated
- Adjustable tone volume
- Surprisingly good ANC and transparency
- Five supplied eartip sizes
Cons
- Trebles are a little overcooked which impacts tonality
- Timing mismatch audible without EQ to mitigate
- Thicker eartips vs MeloBuds Pro improves fit but can worsen ANC
- Adaptive ANC isn't always immediate
- Slightly Counter-intuitive case layout
- Clunky hearing test
Verdict
Superb bang-for-buck budget all-rounders that need a little EQ tweak to soften the timing mismatch
Review Reference: RC184
Price at Review: £35
Introduction
QCY dominated many of my early reviews with a string of budget releases along their journey from busy OEM to where they are today - a consistent presence in the budget TWS market that is more than capable of standing on their own two feet. They’ve gone from ‘cheap and acceptable’ with releases like the T1 and T5 to feature-rich products at aggressive price points like the HT08 and HT10, and with this release, the next logical step for QCY was to improve the sound, since for me, it had taken a step backwards slightly from their excellent LCP driver release, the HT05.
The N70 is their latest flagship, and they’ve continued the theme of packing the buds full of features, but have also chosen to pair a MEMS driver with a dynamic driver, aiming to improve those grainy trebles on the MeloBuds Pro and give you more precision and faster transients to boot. The N70 is positioned slightly above the N60 - the single driver version, that aligns closest to the HT08 MeloBuds Pro, but I’m not going to review that model because we are all about moving forward not standing still!
The N70 retail at around £35, which even before we dive into the nitty gritty is eye-wateringly good value for a set with a MEMS driver and wireless charging. The N70 competes directly with not only other MEMS options like Creative’s Aurvana series, SoundPEATS’ Capsule3 Pro and forthcoming Air5 Pro+, but other dual-driver alternatives such as Moondrop’s planar-equipped Golden Ages 2, Realme’s Buds Air 7 Pro and OnePlus Buds 4, and it certainly holds it own. That said, the decision over whether it should be a guaranteed purchase is a little more nuanced - the sound has certainly improved, ANC and transparency have (with the right fit) also upped a notch, and whilst QCY have improved the packaging and added some flagship features like Google Fastpair support, there’s still a rather agricultural feel to their app that will put some buyers off. Hopefully by the end of this review, you’ll be in a better position to decide whether those cut-corners that inevitably come with a low price tag are emphatic enough to put you off or send you straight to AliExpress with your reddies at the ready.
Design, Fit and Comfort
The N70 are an unremarkable looking short, stem-based TWS that differ somewhat from the MeloBuds Pro in terms of both fit and design. As with seemingly most stem-based offerings these days, the rounded shoulder approach of Apple’s AirPods Pro is out-of-fashion, with brands favouring a more angular finish at the top, presumably to accommodate logical separation for the touch controls and squeeze in feedback microphones to augment calls and ANC. It’s only a subtle difference in the case of the N70, balancing practicality and looks fairly well compared to something like Moondrop’s Golden Ages 2, which stick out a little too much at the top.
The finish of the buds - glossy on the outer edge - means they are - in a similar vein to their lookalike the Redmi Buds 6 Pro - a bit of a fingerprint magnet. The medium-sized oval nozzles - again something of a trend among stem-based earbud designs - ensure a fairly secure albeit shallow fit. Whilst they passed the 100 jumping jacks test without any issues, their over-reliance on the thicker eartips to provide the traction in the ear would sometimes result in the buds thinking they were not seated, and as a result de-activating Active Noise Cancellation, before the adaptive mode realised and then kicked back in. I’ve seen a few moans about the ANC not being effective - and I suspect this is why, because when the buds are properly seated and an effective seal is present, they cancel more noise than their predecessor.
The N70 strike a decent balance between comfort and stability, albeit with a caveat. I put them through the 100 jumping jacks test and they managed to get to 100 - just - although as sometimes happens with this sort of TWS, this was achieved by ‘sizing down’ from the eartip that gave me optimal ANC performance. This again comes back to the design brief of using thicker eartips to provide the traction - it gives the best seal for ANC, but not necessarily the best fit for exercise. If you find yourself in the same position, well, at least you know what to do! They’re IPX5 btw - again great to see QCY certifying their sets, something they didn’t do with past releases, giving you a little more peace of mind when you’re caught in yet another UK winter rainstorm.
The Case
The immediate and most striking observation about the N70 is the massive improvement in the charge case - both in practicality and build quality - over their previous releases. In contrast to the MeloBuds Pro, the N70 no longer feels like a toy, and is compact and robust, belying the lowly price tag.
The finish has stood the test of time, with virtually no scratches or scuffs after a month or so of rigorous use and testing. The finish to the back of the case in particular is a big improvement over previous QCY offerings, with better attention to detail around the hinge and logo. Unlike previous efforts, the magnetic force around said hinge means it won’t fly shut when you open it in the wind.
A big upgrade is the option of wireless charging, which takes a little longer than wired, but is a convenience that should only be celebrated, especially at this price. Few of QCY’s competitors are giving you this in their similarly-priced offerings.
I mentioned in the cons section above that the layout of the case is slightly counter-intuitive, with the stems standing back-to-back and the tips facing outwards. I guess this is a subjective observation because it will depend on what you’re used to, but I’ve seen it mentioned by a few users so it felt worthy of mention. The space on the outside is limited, meaning third party eartips may not fit - a shame, because as we’ve established, there’s a fairly good chance you’ll need them.
Audio & Sound Signature
You don’t need to be an audiophile with an intimate understanding of FR to understand what QCY were trying to do with the sound here. It’s a typical QCY-tuning - forget about neutrality and reference-style presentations, the N70 exhibit your archetypal v-shape consumer-style sound with a sub- and mid-bass elevation, some way above the Harman target, before tucking the lower midrange to try (unsuccessfully!) to minimise bleed, with a fairly flat midrange up to the presence region where we see vocals brought forward to balance the boom, before some treble extension flexes the MEMS driver to add that fully-expected extra shimmer. This sound profile should come as no surprise to past QCY buyers, because it’s only really a very minor variation on what they’ve done previously, and whilst it fixes one problem the MeloBuds Pro had, it introduces another, and will probably require you to tweak the sound slightly to get the desired effect.
The treble is definitely more detailed and represents a big step forward from the MeloBuds Pro, removing some of the metallic-ism and artifacts that were quite easy to hear. If you’re not used to MEMS drivers, though, this change in timbre can be a little disconcerting, or at least require some internal self-regulation - in other words, you might need to get used to it for a bit as it will sound a tad, well, different. And whilst I get the design brief - that QCY boosted the bass to offset the extra treble to balance the sound out a bit - the result exposes a fundamental challenge with hybrid driver configurations where speed and character differ between drivers - and to the discerning ear, unfortunately this will take centre stage over power and precision. The MEMS driver, being solid-state in its origin, responds almost instantaneously to transient signals with minimal overhang, meanwhile, the dynamic driver handling the bass has physical mass that needs to move back and forth, creating inherent inertia. This means bass notes linger slightly longer than they should, with a bit of bloom and decay that extends beyond the initial attack.
When you’ve got trebles that snap into place with precision while the bass is still settling from the previous note, the result is a low-end that feels a step behind - not always a problem, but it can leave the different frequency ranges sounding a little disattached, almost like the whole band isn’t quite playing in the same room together, and we can actually observe this in the Group Delay and THD metrics.
Below the sub-bass, group delay remains mostly well-behaved, but you do see a small rise in the 60–120 Hz region that hints at the dynamic driver’s inertia — not enough to be sloppy, but enough that the leading edge of bass notes softens compared to the razor-sharp behaviour of the xMEMS tweeter. It’s subtle, but once you hear that split-second difference in “settle time”, you can’t un-hear it.
Then, as we move back up through the 2–4 kHz crossover zone, the measurements expose the other side of the hybrid compromise: the drivers simply aren’t perfectly time-aligned. The xMEMS unit jumps ahead — as it naturally does — while the DD is still completing its decay from the previous transient. The Group Delay plot shows this as a few milliseconds of mismatch, and the THD trace reveals a cluster of midrange harmonic artefacts that wouldn’t be there if the drivers were locking together seamlessly.
None of this is catastrophic — the N70 isn’t smearing, and it’s not distorting in a way that becomes harsh or fatiguing. But it does create a kind of “phase texture” across the mids that gives instruments a slightly sculpted, almost hyper-separated character. It’s not unpleasant; in fact, for some listeners it’ll sound exciting. But compared with more cohesive sets like the H3 or Golden Ages 2, where the drivers act more as a single assembled acoustic unit, the N70’s hybrid crossover is definitely the part that breaks the illusion.
In short: the N70 delivers great treble definition and an undeniably modern sense of clarity — but the trade-off is that the bass and treble don’t always land at the same time, and your ear can occasionally sense that gap.
This alignment issue is something I don’t really want to dwell on for the entirety of the review, because for many users they won’t notice nor care, and will probably welcome the boom if my observations on audio hangouts like the earbuds subreddit are anything to go by, but if you are in the camp that is left slightly dissatisfied, thankfully it doesn’t take too much tinkering to get the most out of this effective budget setup, although in truth I had more success using Wavelet for this because whilst the QCY app is feature-rich, it seems to do things to the sound that it isn’t showing you, to the point I pretty much gave up on it.
Focus should be on trimming that thunderous lower frequency presentation that overawes instruments and vocals, and making adjustments at 2kHz, 8kHz and beyond. I’ve shared my initial EQ and perhaps you could use this as a starting point. Much of this section has focused on what the sound of the N70 doesn’t do, but after making these quite subtle adjustments, you reveal a horizontal presentation and sharper imaging that is clearly a leap from the constrained sound of its predecessor, obviating the timing issues to deliver a fun, energetic sound that is bigger on macrodynamics than microdetail - a Saturday night set, but probably one to leave alone on Sunday mornings.
It sees the N70 take pride of place as the best performing in its’ price category in my Audio League Table, scoring similarly to more expensive contemporaries, including OnePlus Buds 4, Realme Buds Air 7 Pro and SoundPEATS’ Air5 Pro, although it’s probably worthy of one final mention that they require a little more customisation than those aforementioned options to really get the best out of them - basically, you’re saving money for possibly even better sound, but you’ll likely have to work a bit for it. Note - the N70 do offer a ‘spatial sound’ setting, adding a bit of reverb without any head-tracking or other such gimmicks. For me, unless you’ve got a great implementation of this, it’s better to leave it offer, but as always, YMMV.
Controls & Features
If you’re someone who values features and functions, well QCY have them in abundance, although the delivery of these features can lack finesse, to say the least, with their app still looking a little Windows XP-like.
The control customisation is practically limitless, allowing you volume control with a single tap. It’s touch controls as opposed to physical buttons, but they are fairly straightforward to use and I didn’t struggle too much with accidental touches. There’s a ‘find my’ device feature, which although I’m not exactly thrilled at the prospect of sharing my constant location data with an app which looks like it was thrown together pre-vibe coding. Still, if remembering what you’ve done with the your earbuds is of paramount importance, the option is there, and there’s loads of other nice little features like channel re-balancing (if your hearing is better in one ear, for example), setting disconnection and power-off timers (for those who use their earbuds to drift off to sleep - note, the shape doesn’t make these particularly useful for side-sleepers) and the ability to adjust the beep volume and update firmware, although in their latest release, trying to do this causes the app to crash on all of the Android devices I tested it on.
There’s also fit detection, wear detection and wind noise detection. The first of these options tells you whether you’ve got a good deal, the second allows you to macro certain actions (remove an earbud and sound will pause, pause and resume when reinserted or neither, for example, or switch off ANC). The final one - search me - I’ve not seen this through QCY previously, and when testing in the wind I didn’t notice any real discernible differences.
The N70 are, I believe, the first QCY set to support Google Fast Pair integration, so within Android settings you can easily and quickly see how much battery is remaining and switch between your different active noise cancellation modes. This gives you some basic functionality without the travails of using or installing the app - which you may well come to appreciate given its beta-nature and array of unnecessary permissions.
The N70 offers multi-point connectivity and gaming mode. When it comes to latency, the N70 actually does pretty well, even with gaming mode switched off, registering 157ms and dropping down to 66ms with gaming mode activated. This is more than satisfactory for light gaming and streaming videos, and doesn’t impact too much on battery life. I got over 7 hours at moderate volume with ANC off, which is credible and in line with, if not better, than the majority of QCY’s direct competition.
On the other hand, taking advantage of hi-res codecs - i.e. LDAC unfortunately does, with ANC and LDAC almost halving single use playtime. I got around 5.5 hours with ANC only, but this dropped to just over 4 with both activated - for the negligible improvement you get in sound, personally I’d stick to AAC, as tempting as it might be to take advantage of what you may perceive to be the latest and greatest in technology advances. As I’ve reiterated many times - in my days as a DJ and producer, we would render our productions late on a Friday or Saturday before leaving for our gigs in 320k mp3 rather than waiting around for wav files to complete, and only we would be able to tell the difference. That was invariably on clear and powerful funktion-one sound systems, not tiny earbuds with tiny drivers. Don’t believe the hype - there’s a reason vendors are quick to promote LDAC over the drivers and their composition/placement or sound quality metrics - it’s easy to implement and even easier to fool people who are used to purchasing by spec sheet.
One of the drawbacks with sets with more complex driver arrangements is they are typically more power hungry, which directly impacts battery life. Even switching ANC on and turning the volume up had a massive impact on single use playtime. QCY gives you extra personalisation in the form of a hearing test - the first time I’ve used it with QCY buds - but it was incredibly clunky and didn’t give me particularly good results. Like most hearing tests, you need to be in a very quiet room, and will then spend the next few minutes tapping away at your phone screen when certain frequencies finally become audible. The best example I’ve seen of this is the Mimi personalisation that Creative and Nothing use with their earbuds - unfortunately, QCY are a million miles from this, but still, the option is there if you want it.
With ANC off and AAC, and using the H3 at a low volume, I could just about get over 5 hours playtime, but with ANC on it dropped to 3 hours 45 even on AAC. It’s not unusual for this kind of driver setup to be power-hungry, but for users who value long uninterrupted listening sessions, even the quick charge feature of 2 hours extra juice from 10 minutes in the case might not be enough to save the H3.
ANC & Transparency
As you’ll be aware, I ignore claims about xdB noise reduction on marketing briefs, and instead do some varied ANC tests, including recording what the simulated ears hear on a subway and in a coffee shop (which is inlcuded in the YouTube version of this review), but also setting the ears up to deliver the above graph which is generated thanks to a blast of pink noise at the same angle and volume for each earbud I test. You can now actually compare the ANC performance of all of the buds I review using my own bespoke ‘ANC Tool’ (accessible using the menu at the top of this site) - give it a try!
The grey line on the graph shows the “raw” noise floor — what the mic hears with nothing in the ear. The N70 (yellow) and MeloBuds Pro (green) sit below that line by varying degrees across the spectrum, and that gap is essentially the whole story.
The MeloBuds Pro have the edge at the very bottom end, taking out more of the 20–45Hz sub-bass rumble that you get from buses, tube trains and building vibration. They also sit slightly lower than the N70 through much of the 80–250Hz band and again between 250–550Hz, which covers broadband hum, room resonance and the lower portion of environmental clutter. They reassert their advantage again in the 1.5–3kHz region, knocking a little more energy out of upper-mid harmonics and certain speech consonants.
The N70, meanwhile, take control in the regions people actually perceive as noise on a day-to-day basis. They outperform the MeloBuds from 45–80Hz — one of the most important bands for road noise and engine resonance — and then deliver a decisive win across 550Hz to 1.5kHz, a range that covers HVAC roar, traffic wash, café noise and the fundamental “body” of human speech. Above 3kHz the two sets trade blows without a consistent winner, and neither earbud attempts heavy cancellation up there anyway. In practice, the N70 tend to feel quieter in day-to-day use, while the MeloBuds Pro blunt the lowest bass and some higher speech harmonics a touch more effectively.
In short:
If you’re dealing with urban noise, commuting, cafés or supermarkets, the N70 can feel meaningfully quieter. If you mainly want to blunt deep engine resonance on buses or trains, the MeloBuds Pro still hold a tiny advantage. But taken as a whole, the N70 represent the stronger, more balanced ANC system, provided that fit is optimised - and it’s a big if.
Transparency performance between the two is a bit mixed, but the N70 generally have the more natural presentation. Up to around 175Hz, the N70 track the baseline more closely, letting in low-frequency ambience without over-inflating it. Past that point they introduce a touch of extra energy — most noticeably between 500Hz and 900Hz — which gives the environment a slightly lifted midrange, but not enough to sound artificial.
The MeloBuds Pro, by contrast, add noticeably more low-end and lower-mid noise up to around 300Hz, making outside ambience feel thicker and less realistic. They settle down between 300Hz and ~900Hz, where both sets run fairly close, but above that you start to see the two models trade places. The MeloBuds Pro pull ahead slightly from 2–4kHz, giving sharper definition to speech and transient detail, then lose that advantage between 4–5kHz, before coming back on top again between 5–7kHz. Beyond that, both behave similarly.
In practice, though, the N70 tend to sound the more believable of the two: less low-mid bloom, fewer tonal artefacts, and a smoother overall presentation. The MeloBuds Pro let in more information in places, but with a colouration that reminds you you’re listening through microphones, not your own ears.
Neither model is aiming for AirPods-level transparency, but the N70 are far more believable. They simply sound less processed, which, in a feature designed to be invisible, is exactly what you want.
Some other notes - you can switch ANC modes during calls (using the app) but unfortunately there’s still no ANC in single-bud mode. QCY offer a bunch of different manual modes, although I found adaptive to give the best results, despite sometimes lagging a little in its recognition of how and when to switch. Transparency offers six manual levels, with levels 5 and 6 far less natural sounding with plenty of white noise at the cost of hearing more. The level we tested in the graph is the default - level 4. The N70, like most budget buds, will ‘pop’ a little when you get sudden sharp sounds, such as dropping cutlery in a cutlery tray, although it isn’t as invasive as something like Earfun’s Air Pro 4.
Call Quality
You’d have a hard time separating the MeloBuds Pro and N70 when it comes to mic performance - in fact, I’d say it’s probably using the exact same mics in the same setup, as both sets punch above their weight, striking a good balance of environmental noise reduction and voice clarity. In my coffee shop tests, some background noise could be detected, notably the sound of the steamer wand and, albeit very muffled, a little indistinct chatter. Outdoors, however, QCY have got the ingredients tasting just right, with traffic noise and even light breezes effectively blotted out.
At the price, I haven’t found anything that competes with QCY for calls given we have pretty much accepted that mics have hit a ceiling when it comes to noise reduction. The only way to effectively improve on this is using bone conduction voice mics like Huawei and Samsung do, or using some post-noise-processing like Apple do within iOS. It isn’t the cleanest nor most authoritative representation of your voice, and it won’t remove everything from the scene like the FreeBuds Pro 4 do, but for the majority of users the majority of the time, it will allow you to make and take calls without having to repeat yourself over and over, just be sure to understand the constraints within this budget segment.
Summary
Kudos has to be given to QCY for once again not only improving on their previous best efforts, but cramming in features and functions and delivering all of this at a very competitive price. Don’t pay the Amazon price - QCY are routintely on offer through AliExpress and the approx. $45 price tag is pretty remarkable given everything you’re getting here.
The sound is, after some tweaking, good enough - just be mindful of the driver drawbacks and how you like your music to sound, and building on the tweaks I’ve shown above will get you to where you need to be. The N70 does all the basics well too - ANC, transparency and calls all deliver, and the latency is good enough for casual gaming.
To see improvements across the board, you have to pay quite a bit more for products like OnePlus’ Buds 4 - if you’re on a budget, once again QCY are to the rescue. The N70 is a better choice than the MeloBuds Pro, better than anything Soundcore or SoundPEATS have at a similar price, and probably not only the best pick under $50, but worth saving for if your budget comes in a bit lower.