ARC 3 Open Ear Earbuds

I love the Cleer ARC 3 headphones and I’m impressed! They have a sleek, modern design, and fantastic sound quality. I also appreciate how comfortable they are; I can wear them for hours without discomfort. I own the Oladance OWS Pro, but the Cleer ARC 3 are definitely better.

I am sure it will work just fine with a phone, and if I planned on running the Boston Marathon. But that’s not what I bought this for. I needed something I could use at work sitting in front of my (Windows) computer. But I returned mine because the Cleer Firmware and/or software will not permit it to pair with Windows 11 without a crap ton of work, and even then its problematic. I even spent time with their tech support trying to get it to work right–which I should say was excellent and really wanted to help. But before Cleer can consider this unit to be a viable entry into the world of open ear headsets, they need to get serious about fixing their obvious technical issues and deficiencies.

I needed some buds for activities to augment my current high end buds which fall out of my ears when I’m moving around.I first started down the bone conduction earphones journey but was severely disappointed in the sound quality. I realized I would have to make some sacrifice in sound quality to gain activity focused earphones but even the best of the bone conduction models sounded like old transistor AM radios (younger folks have no idea what I’m referencing there).Anyway, I moved on to testing some of the best open ear headphones currently available and was happy to find that the sound quality improved greatly. Even the worst open ears were much better than bone conducting units imo. Of these the Cleer ARC 3’s was the victor in sound quality and even came pretty close to matching my current set of much more expensive buds. The sound is clear and crisp with plenty of bass and much more defined sound separation than the open ears I tested. My main activity that I wanted these for is bike riding which of course means lots of wind noise. The sound quality remained great even at the highest volume. One problem I had was that the highest volume output wasn’t quite loud enough when biking at higher speeds, but that is more the limits set by my Android and was the same problem with all of the other buds. My solution was one of the free EQ apps which also provide volume boosting. A 20% volume boost gave me more than enough volume to counter the higher wind noises. This is also a big positive for the ARC 3’s since there was zero distortion even with the boost. This wasn’t the case for most of the others I tested.Another thing I found myself loving is the voice commands that do not require going through your phones voice command system which means direct to earphone commands and response. They are fairly basic such as volume up/down, pause/play, fast forward, but I found them to be so much easier to use than saying “ALEXA… VOLUME UP!”Comfort has been great. I can wear them for hours without feeling pressure on my ears, even with glasses and my bike helmet on.One last note, I reached out to Cleer for some clarifying questions about the ARC 3 and they were super responsive and informative. If I had been in the fence about which headset I was going to buy this level of customer service would had me going with Cleer, but I wasn’t on the fence because even prior to this experience the choice for me was Cleer (see what I did there?) Corny I know, but still the truth.