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We wore Anker's Soundcore Liberty 4 NC daily for five weeks -- gym, commute, two flights, and one accidental wash cycle -- to see if its ANC, battery life, and built-in heart-rate sensor hold up to real use.
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Anker's Soundcore line has spent the last few years chipping away at the idea that you need to spend $250+ to get earbuds that do everything: real noise cancelling, a battery that survives a transatlantic flight, and sound that doesn't need an equalizer app to sound decent. The Liberty 4 NC sits right at that pressure point — a $149.99 list price that routinely drops into the $99-$119 range during sales — and it throws in a party trick almost nothing else at this price bothers with: a heart-rate sensor built into the earbud itself. I wore these daily for just over five weeks, through gym sessions, two long-haul flights, a return to an open-plan office, and one embarrassing incident involving a washing machine, to figure out whether the extra features are worth using or just spec-sheet padding.
The box is small and dense in the way Anker packaging usually is — no oversized cardboard theater, just the case, the buds, a USB-C cable, three sizes of extra ear tips, and a quick-start card that for once actually explains the multipoint pairing process instead of assuming you'll figure it out. The charging case is a rounded rectangle finished in a matte plastic that resists fingerprints far better than the glossy case on the older Liberty Air 2 Pro. A single LED on the front shows charge status, and the case supports Qi wireless charging, which matters more than it sounds like it should once you've got a charging pad already sitting on a nightstand or desk.
Each earbud weighs about 5.7 grams, noticeably lighter than Anker's older Liberty 3 Pro, and the stem design is short enough that it doesn't catch on hoodie drawstrings or scarf fabric the way some longer-stemmed buds do. Anker rates them IPX4, which in practice meant they shrugged off a light drizzle on a run and survived a genuinely sweaty leg day without a single dropout, though I wouldn't trust them in the shower or a downpour despite what the marketing photos imply.
Pairing is standard Bluetooth 5.3 with Google Fast Pair support on Android, and the Soundcore app (iOS and Android) is where the actual configuration happens. HearID, Anker's hearing-test feature, runs a short frequency-sweep test in each ear and builds a personalized EQ curve from it — I noticed a genuine difference in clarity on vocal-heavy tracks afterward, less so on bass-forward hip-hop where the stock "Bass Booster" preset still won out for me. Multipoint connection to two devices at once worked reliably in my testing between a MacBook Air and a Pixel phone, with only the occasional half-second of audio catching up after switching sources.
The heart-rate sensor is the feature everyone asks about first and the one I was most skeptical of. It works by shining light through the ear canal (similar tech to a wrist-based optical HR sensor) and reporting readings inside the Soundcore Health app. Compared against a Garmin chest strap during three separate runs, the Liberty 4 NC's readings tracked reasonably close during steady-state cardio — within 3-5 bpm most of the time — but lagged and occasionally spiked erroneously during interval sprints with sudden pace changes. It's a genuinely useful bonus for people who already don't want to wear a watch, but I wouldn't trust it for anything more serious than "am I in the right zone for this jog," and Anker doesn't market it as medical-grade, which is the right call.
Anker calls this "Adaptive Active Noise Cancelling 2.0," and it's the biggest practical upgrade over the older Liberty Air 2 Pro I was using before. On my regular commute — a mix of subway platform noise, a bus, and a walk along a busy arterial road — ANC handled the low-frequency rumble of transit engines and HVAC hum very well, cutting them to a faint background wash rather than eliminating them entirely. Where it fell short of pricier competition (Sony's WF-1000XM5 and Bose's QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds both still lead here) was on sudden, sharp transients: a dog barking nearby, a car horn, someone dropping a tray in a cafeteria. Those cut through the ANC noticeably more than on the Sony buds I compared them against side by side on the same commute route over two separate days.
Transparency mode, which Anker calls "Wind Noise Reduction" when active outdoors, is genuinely one of the better implementations I've tried under $200. Voices sound natural rather than processed and tinny, and it does a reasonable job suppressing wind noise on a bike ride, though it's not magic — above about 15 mph of headwind you'll still hear that telltale rushing sound most in-ear transparency modes struggle with.
Sound signature out of the box leans warm with an emphasized low end, which suits pop, hip-hop, and electronic music well but can occasionally muddy dense orchestral or metal tracks until you dial back the bass slider in the app. The 10mm dynamic drivers have enough headroom that I never hit distortion even at uncomfortably loud volumes, and LDAC codec support (Android only) noticeably tightens up instrument separation on higher-bitrate streaming compared to standard SBC/AAC — a difference I could reliably pick out in a blind A/B test with a coworker swapping codecs on my phone without telling me which was active.
Anker claims up to 9 hours per charge with ANC on, and roughly 28 hours total with the case, or up to 11 hours per charge and 40 hours total with ANC off. In real use, with ANC on and volume around 60-70%, I consistently got 7.5 to 8.5 hours per charge across a dozen full-charge cycles logged over the test period — close enough to the claim that I don't think Anker is being dishonest, just optimistic in the way every earbud maker is. With ANC off, I comfortably cleared 10 hours on a red-eye flight with battery to spare. The case itself is the pleasant surprise: after five weeks of daily use, topping the buds off two or three times a day, I only had to plug the case in via USB-C roughly once every eight to nine days, which lines up with Anker's total-battery math. Fast charging is genuinely useful here too — a 10-minute top-up in the case delivered close to 4 hours of playback with ANC on, which saved me more than once when I'd forgotten to charge overnight.
Comfort is where the Liberty 4 NC pulled ahead of a lot of buds I've tested in this price range. The nozzle angle sits at a slightly shallower insertion depth than Sony's or Apple's designs, which meant less of that "plugged" pressure sensation during four-hour work sessions. That said, ear-tip fit is highly individual, and I had to size up from the default medium tip to the large one to get a reliable ANC seal — worth doing the in-app fit test rather than assuming the pre-installed size is right, since a bad seal tanks both noise cancelling performance and bass response noticeably.
Touch controls on the stem are responsive but a little too sensitive to accidental taps when adjusting the earbud in my ear, an issue I never fully solved even after remapping gestures in the app. Call quality over the built-in beamforming mics was solid in quiet rooms and noticeably worse outdoors or in wind — coworkers on the other end of calls made from a windy sidewalk described my voice as "underwater," a common failure mode for in-ear mic arrays that lack a dedicated wind-noise processing chip like the one in AirPods Pro 2.
The one genuine mishap of the test period: I accidentally left one earbud in a jacket pocket that went through a wash cycle (cold water, no dryer). It survived — a reminder that the IPX4 rating buys you more margin than the "sweat and light rain" language on the box implies, though I wouldn't recommend testing that on purpose, and Anker's warranty explicitly does not cover water damage regardless of how it happened.
Against Sony's WF-1000XM5, the honest comparison is that Sony wins outright on ANC depth and call quality, and its app's adaptive sound control is more polished — but it also costs roughly $150 more at full price, and there's no heart-rate sensor or wireless charging case at that tier from Sony either. Against Anker's own step-up model and against budget-tier competitors from brands you'll see piled up at any electronics market stall, the Liberty 4 NC's advantage is that Anker has actually iterated the ANC algorithm and driver tuning meaningfully across generations rather than just re-skinning the same hardware — something that isn't true of every budget earbud brand chasing the same form factor.
If you're coming from Apple's ecosystem, it's worth being upfront that the Liberty 4 NC's iOS experience is noticeably more limited than Android's — no LDAC (Apple devices don't support it anyway), and a couple of the app's more granular EQ tools felt like an afterthought on iPhone during testing, with occasional Bluetooth reconnect delays after leaving the app's Bluetooth settings screen open in the background overnight.
The Liberty 4 NC makes the most sense for Android users who want real ANC, all-day comfort, and long battery life without spending flagship money, and who'll actually use the heart-rate and personalized-sound features rather than treating them as gimmicks. It's a worse pick for anyone who does frequent outdoor calls in windy conditions, anyone deeply invested in Apple's ecosystem who'd get more seamless functionality from AirPods Pro 2, or serious runners who want clinical-grade heart-rate accuracy rather than a rough-estimate bonus feature.
After five weeks of daily use — gym, commute, two flights, and one unplanned trip through a washing machine — the Liberty 4 NC earned a permanent spot in my rotation for workouts and travel specifically because the battery life and ANC combination means I stop thinking about the earbuds and just use them, which is really the only bar that matters for a product like this. It isn't the best-sounding or best-noise-cancelling earbud you can buy, but it's a genuinely well-rounded one at a price that doesn't require justifying the purchase to yourself.
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