House of Marley’s Rebel True Wireless Earbuds are more eco-friendly than your average pair of wire-free earphones, with a design crafted from sustainable materials. Unfortunately, for $129.99, little else about these earbuds stands out. They have a sculpted sound signature with powerful bass and boosted highs, with just two EQ modes that don’t allow for enough customization. And the on-ear controls are frustrating, particularly because they lack a play button. I hate to knock on a product with a sustainable design, but ultimately, that just isn’t enough to get by in such a crowded market. The simple fact is that you can get a far better pair of earphones for the same price or less.
An Eco-Friendly Design
The Rebel True Wireless Earbuds are available in black or white, with bamboo accents combined with recycled plastics and a wood fiber composite. Even the charging cable’s braided material is eco-friendly. The earpiece has a stem-like design, with bamboo panels on the exterior. The in-canal fit is secure, but some users might find it slightly uncomfortable over long listening sessions. The earphones ship with three sizes of eartips in small, medium, and large.
The on-ear controls are a bit of a mess. First off, there’s no play/pause control, which is the first time I’ve encountered this after testing hundreds of pairs of true wireless earphones. The manual tells you to simply remove or replace an earpiece in order to play or pause music, and while this does work, it’s a feature that many people (including me) find obnoxious. I don’t want music blaring into my ear the second I place an earpiece in, and most manufacturers have realized this, and thus make this an optional feature you can enable or disable in an app. But there is no app here, so you can’t disable the auto-detect feature that is moonlighting as the playback control. Otherwise, the on-ear controls are sensitive to touch, and various taps or holds will control everything from track navigation to volume. The touch-sensitive panels work, but can be a bit of a pain to operate—I had a few misfires when trying to skip tracks or adjust volume.
An IPX5 rating means the earpieces can handle splashes and water projected from any direction, but not serious water pressure, so sweat and light rain shouldn’t be issues. The water-resistance rating refers to the earpieces only, not the charging case, so make sure the earphones are completely dry before docking them.
The case has a flip-top lid and status LEDs on its front panel. Its bottom panel houses a USB-C port for the included USB-A-to-USB-C charging cable. There’s also a pairing button on the bottom panel, and the case can charge wirelessly on Qi-compatible chargers.
The earphones are compatible with Bluetooth 5.0. There are two built-in EQ modes (you switch between them by tapping three times), including More Bass and Less Bass (my names, not theirs, since the modes aren’t named anywhere I can see on the product page or in the manual). We’ll discuss these in the next section.
What’s missing? An app with actual EQ, or at the very least a screen view of the EQ modes (instead of tapping the earpieces three times to switch back and forth) would have been nice—and for this price, not out of the question.
House of Marley estimates battery life to be roughly 8 hours, with another 24 hours in the charging case, but your results will vary with your volume levels.
Rebel True Wireless Sound Quality
Let’s quickly discuss the EQ modes, which are really, as I mentioned, More Bass or Less Bass. Neither of these modes is ideal. The More Bass mode adds seriously boosted lows to the equation in a way that can make things sound unnatural. Therefore, we tested the tracks below in Less Bass mode—but know that we listened in More Bass mode as well, and the result was too much thumping low-end, with very little clarity in the highs.
Tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” sound booming and large in both modes, and at top volumes, the lows don’t distort.
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Bill Callahan’s “Drover,” a track with far less deep bass in the mix, gives us a better sense of the general sound signature. The drums still sound quite full and bass-boosted in what we’re calling Less Bass mode, but they aren’t overwhelming the mix the way they do in the other mode. Callahan’s vocals sound rich in the low-mids and crisp in the highs. The highs are sculpted and the lows are pushed forward, but to a reasonable degree. This is a sculpted, bass-boosted, bright sound signature.
On Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” the kick drum loop receives less high-mid presence than we typically hear, dulling it to a degree. The vinyl hiss and crackle in the background is pushed forward a bit, so the boosting in the higher frequencies isn’t universal. The loop is beefed up with some extra low-end, and the sub-bass synth hits that punctuate the beat are delivered with serious power—even in Less Bass mode, these earphones are very much bass-forward. The vocals on this track are delivered with solid clarity and not much added sibilance, but the lows at times seem to overpower the mix and take the focus over the vocalists.
Orchestral tracks, like the opening scene from John Adams’ The Gospel According to the Other Mary, are a bit too bass-heavy in both modes. The lower-register instrumentation is pushed forward in the mix and this messes with the balance, even when the higher-register brass, strings, and vocals retain their brightness.
The mic offers decent intelligibility. Using the Voice Memos app on an iPhone 8, we could understand every word we recorded. The mic signal is relatively strong, even if there is still some typical Bluetooth distortion in the mix.
Sustainable, But Not Standouts
Something about the Rebel True Wireless Earbuds feels like a beta product, one that’s crying out for an app so that you can adjust EQ, disable the auto-detect feature, and address the absence of a proper play/pause button.The audio performance is good, not great, and the eco-friendly materials are nice, but if you’re making a product that’s not up to snuff with the rest of the competition in its price range, buyers might be likely to replace it sooner with another option, making it somewhat less eco-friendly. Simply put, for $150 or less, there are plenty of better options in the true wireless realm, including the JBL Live 300TWS, the Anker Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro, and the Jabra Elite 3, all of which sound better and are easier to use than the Rebels.
