For Malaysians who spend half their calls walking through a mall or sitting in traffic, soundcore's newest earbuds are built around one promise: clearer voice pickup handled by a chip inside the buds instead of a distant server. Anker's audio brand has launched the soundcore Liberty 5 Pro series, made up of the Liberty 5 Pro and the step-up Liberty 5 Pro Max.
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What soundcore's Thus AI chip means for the Liberty 5 Pro
At the centre of both models is soundcore's new Thus AI chip. The company says it delivers up to 150 times the processing power of its previous flagship generation, and it pairs with a 10-sensor array: eight microphones plus two bone-conduction sensors that read jaw and skull vibration. Together they work to lift your voice out of background noise on calls. soundcore says that system earned a Guinness World Record for the clearest call audio on a pair of true wireless earbuds.
Both buds share 9.2mm drivers, Dolby Atmos support, and LDAC hi-res streaming over Bluetooth 6.1, with multipoint pairing for up to three devices at once. Battery life runs to about 6.5 hours with active noise cancellation switched on, or roughly 28 hours once you factor in the charging case.
Where the Pro and Pro Max split
The clearest difference sits in the case. The Liberty 5 Pro Max carries a 1.78-inch AMOLED touchscreen on its charging case, so you can change noise modes and manage pairing without pulling out your phone. That case also works as a voice recorder: a double-tap starts capturing audio, and the soundcore app turns it into transcripts and speaker-labelled summaries, with the processing done on the device rather than sent to the cloud. The case stores up to 12 hours of recordings. The standard Liberty 5 Pro keeps a smaller display on its case and drops the recording feature.
Why it matters
Most earbuds lean on your phone or a server to handle the heavy audio processing. Moving that work onto a dedicated chip in the buds is soundcore's pitch for faster, more private call cleanup, and the recorder angle on the Pro Max reads as a play for students and working professionals who sit through long meetings and lectures. Whether the on-device transcription holds up in everyday Malaysian use, across accents and noisy kopitiam settings, is the part worth testing once units land here.
Price and availability
soundcore set launch pricing at USD169.99 for the Liberty 5 Pro and USD229.99 for the Liberty 5 Pro Max at its Anker Day event in New York. Malaysian pricing and availability were not confirmed at the time of the announcement, so treat the US figures as a reference point rather than a ringgit conversion. Anker is backing the series with an 18-month warranty.
For now, the Liberty 5 Pro series is soundcore's clearest signal yet that the next earbuds fight will be won on smarts as much as on sound.