Are boAt Nirvana Zenith Pro and Ivy Pro the best budget TWS earbuds? An honest review
To say boAt is one of the most popular homegrown brands in the past five years or so wouldn't be wrong. The personal wearables and audio-centred brand has recently come out with not one but two pairs of true wireless earbuds - Nirvana Zenith Pro at ₹2,999 and Nirvana Ivy Pro at ₹4,999. Let's try and explore if these have enough to take on the likes of OnePlus, Realme and Nothing:
The Nirvana Ivy Pro comes in a flat rectangular charging case with a matte finish top that carries the Nirvana by boAt branding. It's slightly oversized case but is still pocketable for daily use. The right side has the USB type-C port and the corner has holes for using a lanyard with it.
There's a small LED at the front and a physical pairing button resting inside the case. The Zenith Pro has a little more distinct look with a half-transparent plastic case that opens up to reveal the earbuds in a standing position. The lower side is where you see the physical pairing button as well as the USB type-C port. There's an LED inside the case to indicate power and pairing. All four buds have a small LED on their own as well. Both have the stem cell design with the Ivy Pro having slightly longer in-ear fit than the Zenith Pro.
The Zenith Pro (IPX4 water-resistant) comes in Velvet Grey, Platinum Gold and Crimson Red (the one I tried), while the Ivy Pro (IPX5 water-resistant) comes in Crystal Black, Purple Haze (the one I tried), Ivory Gold and Mist Blue colour options.
Coming to the audio quality, both pairs have LDAC along with AAC and SBC audio codecs support with Bluetooth 5.3 for the Ivy Pro (dual 11mm and 6mm drivers) and 5.4 for the Zenith Pro (12mm drivers). These support Dolby Atmos playback with head-tracking. I found both the buds to offer sufficiently rich bass and mids for most genres like hip hop, Bollywood, Punjabi, and so on. You can hear vocals clearly without missing the background details, though the one place where they can sometimes lack is background drums when playing something rock or metal with other instruments going on at the same time.
On the other hand, noise cancellation is surprisingly decent in both these devices as they cancelled out indoor and some outdoor mid-pitch noises quite consistently. While the Znoeth Pro has three mics each, the Ivory Pro has six mics and I found mic quality to be good in both, but a little better in the Ivy Pro when used outdoors. While playing something on the Ivy Pro, with LDAC enabled, I found it used the higher-end codec consistently across apps, while the same can't be said for the Zenith Pro, which would often downgrade to AAC during the playback. Head tracking is supported on third-party apps, including Apple Music, but I found it only occasionally working well to its affect, when turning your head with some music on, which isn't a deal breaker for the price tag.
Ivy Pro comes with 43mAh battery on each of the buds and 400mAh in the charging case, while the Zenith Pro gets bigger 60mAh battery on each of the buds and 600mAh in the battery case; you can expect to go for over a fortnight with three hours of usage each day without having to worry about charging again. Even longer in the case of the Zenith Pro. Both buds take around 1.5 hours to charge from near empty to full.
One thing I really didn't like about these is that you can't lower the volume of notifications from the buds themselves, such as the ambient mode or EQ mode announcement and the app, too, has no option to switch that off. It gets too loud and jarring at times.
You can use the boAt Hearables app to adjust the touch controls, update the firmware or also listen to JioSaavn and Kuku FM, though it's only a limited number of tracks.
All in all, they aren't the most comfortable TWS out there, but still comfortable enough and provide good audio quality and noise cancellation for the price tags. While the Zenith Pro is a nice new option for those looking for a slightly different-looking TWS and want long battery life, while the Ivy Pro is good enough itself with overall good audio quality and mic performance for music and work on the go at this price point.
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