CES 2025: Cleer Audio
Cleer Audio is one company I wasn’t very familiar with. Doing a little research before going into my appointment with them today, I found a lot of positive reviews of their audio products. Besides traditional headphones, Cleer Audio has a speciality in producing open earbuds that seem to be very well received.
They have done some gaming centric products, but yesterday was the first time they announced the Cleer Audio ARC 3 Gaming. These open earbuds are designed to fit comfortably and securely on each ear with a hook that wraps around the top to the back of your ear with the drivers sitting over your ear canal. This design was done to ensure that you can have quick, fast head movements and not fear one being flung off your head like some earbuds out there. As far as I know, these are the only open style earbuds for gaming and I was pleasantly surprised by how well they performed in the demo I had in their booth at CES.
What makes these good for gaming? Included with the earbuds is a USB-C dongle that facilitates low latency transmission. I’ve only done another gaming-centric earbuds and that also used a USB-C dongle as well. With the dongle, you can connect it to mobile gaming devices such as a Steam Deck, Nintendo Switch, or a tablet. Cleer states that the dongle will do sub 30ms in terms of latency. Yes, these do support Bluetooth or Bluetooth 5.4 to be exact, but that’s going to incur some latency when gaming. The USB-C dongle will allow for low latency audio in gaming and compatibility with a wide variety of devices.
Whereas the EPOS GTW 270 Hybrid didn’t have voice communication until much later on, the Cleer Audio ARC 3 Gaming will allow you to voice chat with your friends on the onset. There are two beamforming mics on the ARC 3 Gaming to help produce clear chat, which we’ll see how well they do once we test them.
The case is pretty interesting in that it has a screen that allows for some controls of not only customizing the earbud sound profiles, but it can also provide media controls to your mobile device among other modes of operation. You can cycle through the screens by swiping left or right and there’s enough built in settings that you don’t need an app to set up the ARC 3 Gaming if you don’t want to. And something that’s really slick about the case, they have built in UV lights so when you place the earbuds in to charge, it will disinfect them as well. Now that’s truly unique.
There’s just a laundry list of features for the ARC 3 Gaming that makes this product really feature rich and seems like you really are going a lot for the money here. Of course, none of this matters if they don’t sound good. At their booth, I was presented with the demonstration of an ARC 3 Gaming paired up with a Switch.
Even though they were just sitting on top of my ear, the sound was really loud and clear. Playing some Mario Kart, all the game sounds came in crystal clear and I was really surprised at how loud they were even though they weren’t in my ears. The bass was even a little punchy as well, but not overpowering.
The benefits of being an open design is that you can hear your surroundings. Should you want to keep tabs on what's around you audibly, the Cleer ARC 3 Gaming will let you do that. At the booth, I was able to hear one of the representatives talk to me while I was still listening to the game sounds. Yes, you can turn them up loud enough to drown out the world around you, but even though you’ll still get a hint of something like if someone’s trying to talk to you.
I have to admit, I was really surprised at how much I enjoyed the Cleer Audio ARC 3 Gaming open earbuds demo. Going in without any prior knowledge of the company or experiencing any of their past products, I was left thoroughly impressed by their second foray into the gaming space. I’m grateful to Cleer Audio for providing me with a review sample, so expect a more thorough dive into the ARC 3 Gaming in the near future.
