Cambridge Audio Melomania 1 True Wireless Earphone Review

Cambridge Audio is no stranger to making quality audio products. The British brand has a long history of producing great-sounding audio equipment at a reasonable price. With the release of their first true wireless the earphones, the Melomania 1, that tradition continues.

Cambridge Audio has sent us a set of Melomania 1 earphones to try out and I have been using them for the past two weeks before starting this review.

What’s in the Box?

The first thing you notice when you open the box is just how small these earphones, and their charging case actually is.

Once you open the box up book style, you are greeted with the left and right earphone along with the charging case just below. Beneath the inlay, there is a Micro USB charging cable, three other sets of tips and some documentation which includes a handy little card that lets you know what the different button presses do. More on that later.

The Earphones

The earphones measure just 27 x 15 mm and weigh only 4.6g each. They are the smallest and lightest true wireless earphones I have reviewed so far, which makes their battery life all the more impressive.

As there are no hooks to help secure the earphones in your ear, you do need to insert them deeper in your ear canal than you would with normal earphones. It’s important to find a tip that fits your ear properly as using one that is too large will result in fatigue or discomfort while using too small a tip results in the earphone slipping out of your ear a little and diminishing the sound quality.

For the first day or two, I did find them a little fatiguing to wear for more than about an hour but as my ears got used to them that lessened and I could wear them for longer. Like anything, it will depend on the shape of your ears and what tips you use to find the best and most comfortable fit, but when you do, the earphones are so light you will forget they are even there.

The Melomania 1 uses Bluetooth 5.0 to connect with your devices and we’ve had a flawless time with them with no connection errors or dropouts occurring at all.

I paired the earphones to a Galaxy S10+ and fired up a playlist on Tidal I usually use when reviewing earphones. As I worked my way down through the non-vocal songs on the list I was impressed with the punch from the bass from these small earphones and with the clarity on offer.

On first impressions, I found vocals to be quite recessed and sounding a little flat. The Melomania 1 use a 5.8mm graphene-coated diaphragm as its only driver so I decided I would run in the earphones as much as I could before starting to review the sound quality further. I used a handy app from another earphone manufacturer (who will remain unnamed here!) to run in the earphones when I wasn’t using them over the course of a week or so and the difference it made to the mids was fantastic.

Overall I would say the volume is a little low. You need to push the volume right up on your devices to get the best from the Melomania 1 but considering their small size it’s hard to expect much more.

The soundstage is narrow and music sounds like it’s coming from between your ears but that is in line with most other earphones in this class.

The sound produced is clear and never distorts. Except for the volume being a little low, the listening experience is great and I’d happily take the Melomania 1 with me on the daily commute or when you are out and about and just want something that’s easy to use with no battery life worries. Once you have found the right tip, sound isolation is good enough to block out most background noise.

Melomania 1 Features

The earphones can last for up to 9 hours per charge. The charging case can add another 36 hours to that before everything needs to be charged again. During my time testing them I never ran out of battery. The most I wore them for was a few hours at a time and then they’d be put back in the charging case ready for the next time I needed them.

The playback time from these tiny batteries has got so good now that you are never really worried about being caught short so battery anxiety is a thing of the past as long as you remember to charge the case every now and then. Unless you use them when travelling long distances or you like to wear earphones all day at your desk the Melonmaina 1 will get most people through a full day no problem and they’ll still not need to be plugged into a charger for another few days after that.

The charging case itself has five small LEDs on the front which light up to indicate the charge level once you open the top. The case takes about 90 minutes to charge fully.

The minute you remove either earphone from the case, it will begin pairing with your phone. It makes pairing really quick and unlike many other true wireless earphones on the market, it’s not important which earphone is paired with first. For the listener, it means the earphones are ready to go long before you have them fitted both to your ears.

There’s no sound presets or other ways to adjust the sound output of the earphones. While some people might like to see this included after the earphones were run in I never felt it was needed or wished was present.

Something I wasn’t a fan of was the plastic material the charging case is made from. It seems to absorb the oil from your hands and leaves smudges on the surface which don’t look great.

There is a small ring light around the buttons on the earphones which offer some info about the current state they are in. A white, pulsing light indicates the earphones are charging. No light means they are charged. Flashing white and blue means they are in Bluetooth discovery mode and flashing blue fast means something has gone wrong and you need to let them power off and return them to their case to resolve.

The earphones can remember up to 7 devices that they are paired to in total. While not waterproof, they are IPX5 rated which means they will survive splashes and sweat if you wear them while exercising. The fact they sit in your ear without hooks to secure them means more vigorous exercising will probably not be an option though.

The Buttons

I’m not a fan of the poor UX that buttons on earphones often provide but one thing Cambridge Audio have got spot on with the Melomania 1 is the inclusion of a tactile button instead of the touch or swipe controls seen on many others.

Touch controls can be infuriating with accidental touches or with touches not registering at all often leading to multiple touches being needed or the wrong function being selected. While it’s still possible to experience accidental presses with the buttons on the Melomania 1, when you actually want to press a button it is so much better to actually feel a click and know you have selected what you wanted.

As there are no other listening modes as such on the Melomania 1 it makes the combination of presses a little more straight forward. Cambridge Audio has implemented the clicks in a rational manner so for example if you press and hold the button on the left it turns down the volume while doing so on the right side turns it up. Double presses on the left skips to the track before while the right side skips ahead and so on.

It’s the easiest button pattern I have used to date on any earphones like these. Cambridge Audio also includes a little card for your wallet with instructions for all the different click combinations which is handy for ones that are not as obvious such as invoking your voice assistant.

Conclusion

True wireless earphones are evolving at a very fast pace. From something that used to cause endless frustration with connection dropouts to now being a far more reliable and dare I say, worry-free, experience.

The Melomania 1 needed some time to run them in and get the best from them but it’s hard to remember too many other issues and I’ve enjoyed using them during this review. As they rely on the fit of the tips to hold them in and for best sound quality, it may take some experimentation for people to get the best fit.

Cambridge Audio has produced a set of earphones that work as expected, have great battery life, are neat and small and are very competitively priced. If you are in the market for a new set of wireless earphones the Melomania 1 should definitely be on your list.

You can find out more about the Melomania 1 on the Cambridge Audio website.

They are available now from Amazon for £119.