Pros

Convenience factor > Wired

Has LDAC support

Great Battery life

Premium look & feel

Surprisingly good mids

App with great features

Noise cancelling works perfectly

Cons

Bass on higher volume gets a bit distorted.

Roseselsa Earfree i5 TWS review

I am an audiophile from sunny South Africa. The Earfree i5 was send to me by Roseselsa in return for my honest opinion together with the Ceramics X. Roseselsa is a sub brand of Rose Technics and man have this brand flown under the radar for me. I have to admit I am old school audiophile and wireless vs wired is like the analog vs digital debate. The package took about 21 days to reach me and the Roseselsa staff are really friendly and helpful. I do not want to give away too much in the beginning but the Earfree i5 changed my mind on wireless earphones

Specs

Driver Unit- 12mm DLC Dynamics

Audio Format- LDAC/ AAC/ mSBC/ SBC

Impedance- 32 Ω

Output Power- 15 mW

Frequency Response Range- 14 – 23600 Hz

Bluetooth Version- 5.3

Communication Range- 10 m

Earphone Battery Capacity- 40 mAh

Charging Case Battery Capacity- 500 mAh

Charging Time- Approx. 1h

Unboxing

The Earfree i5 sells for $72 and if I see what other earbuds sell for, especially those from the mobile phone brands I have tested I think I am very happy with the packaging for the price. You get a nice sturdy cardboard box with a big photo of the Earfree i5 on the front and some marketing insignia like LDAC. Inside the box on top, you will find your metal carrying/charging case with the two earbuds inside. At the bottom is your three pairs of ear tips and a Usb-C to Usb cable to charge the case.

Connectivity

Connectivity and convenience have to be the biggest selling point for these Earfree i5. They are so easy and convenient to use that it is the only earbud that I use every single day. You can connect them to any cellphone, Dap (digital audio player), Laptop, tablets and pc. Bluetooth 5.3 makes good quality codecs like LDAC possible.  Being a bit of a geek, I liked the app a lot. It gives you all sorts of cool features like ANC and a small equalizer which makes you choose between things Like Pop, Rock etc. The ANC really works and I can tell as I have some experience from the brilliant noise cancelling on my Sennheiser PXC 550 ii headphones. You can also set the degree of noise cancelation you want. As I was evaluating this unit, I got a message every time there was an update on the Earfree i5 through the app and the cool thing is each earbud is updated separately. The app also tells you the battery life state of each earbud and also the battery life state of the charging case. I also connected it to my phone to use for calls and I rarely now make and receive phone and video calls without them at home. The mics are brilliant and clear and the sound I will describe in the sound part of the review. Roseselsa gives the operating distance as 10m but they underestimate that a lot as I got 20m if the signal was uninterrupted by walls. I could also easily walk to the next two rooms in my house and still have connection. Just these features alone make the $72 price tag worth it for me.

Look & Build

As per my previous reviews and because I am workshop owner when I open a box and the first thing, I find is metal, I think quality. The carrying/charging case is metal. All the previous earbuds I got and seen, the cases were all plastic. So, the case and a small detail like that really stood out for me. The earbuds themselves are made from a hard plastic and feel light in your hands. The nozzle stems are very short and also oval ships so not a lot of choice for ear tip swapping there. The fit for me was great. The only thing that irritated me was the touch controls on the earbuds themselves. They fit comfortably but do become a bit loose if you move around, have touch controls activated and touch both earbuds to readjust them into your ears, it paused the music and turned on Gemini assistant on my phone every time. I deactivated touch controls on the app and I think it is just a personal gripe I have with technology and being 42 and won’t affect others so much. They never fell out of my ears while walking or doing chores and I only found them in my bed every morning as I go to sleep with them every night. I did not test the battery life and I think the longest I had the Earfree i5 in my ears was 8 hours and they still had battery life to spare.

Sound

As my review for the Ceramics X is to follow, I do not want to compare the sound of the two in this review.

Before I get into the sound, I want to note that if you have different earbuds, headphones and in-ear monitors, you start using certain ones for certain purposes. The purpose I use these for is general casual loud music listening when I am doing chores, just relaxing and watching TikTok, YouTube videos and taking and receiving calls.

The low volume on Tidal and Hiby app was a let down for me. On TikTok and YouTube it was fine as those always have more loudness because of weaker sound file quality. I also noted in my conns that the bass distorts on high volume. This is not the fault of the driver. It is the fault of the amplifier inside the earbud. It explains it is not strong enough, hence the low volume and distorted full volume sound. I am sure I could prove this if there was a way for me to hook them up wired and give them some decent amplifier juice. This is not the type of earbud I use in my collection for mid volume audiophile Jazz and I am not advocating hearing damage when I say I want to listen to AC/DC full blast when I am mowing my lawn. I hope if there is ever a revision of this model, that Roseselsa takes this to heart and fit a stronger amp.

As luck would have it Divinus sent over a pair of their Velvet TWS tips and the Earfree i5 was the perfect opportunity to test them out with. The very weird thing is that the Divinus and Original tips of the Earfree i5 looks almost identical. Do not let my complaint about the low volume put you off please as like I said I use the Earfree i5 every day since I got them and will until I can find a better TWS earbud or in-ear monitor.

Switching to game mode and low latency on the app, I played some Call of Duty mobile on my pc and have no complains as I experienced no latency and the footsteps were clearly audible and I could pinpoint where they were coming from. The V-Sape sound signature makes the footsteps in 90-120KHz range sounds really clear.

I know I stated that I won’t be using these for anything else but leisure listening, I still decided to evaluate the various sound aspects and include in my review.

I could not distinguish in sound character between the Divinus TWS and the original tips so I kept using the Earfree i5 with the Divinus TWS tips just to try and be cool.  I also use the HIFI equalizer profile on the app. On Bass & Drum intro by Nils Lofgren Band Live album I got the impression that the sound is more mid-bass focused. I also found that if you press the Earfree i5 deeper into your ear, in this case deeper is better. The bass improves a lot and there is even sub bass rumble. Switching a size down in ear tips did not solve this. One of my favorite songs when listening for bass is Chris Jones- Long after you’re gone. I know every part of this song as I have listened it more than 1000 times on various systems and Earfree i5 bowled me over here with tight controlled bass. Also, on this song I discovered the mids was thick and Chris Jones sounded so good. I could really evaluate the whole audio spectrum just on this song alone as there is a harmonica on the song that goes really high and with the Earfree i5 the Harmonica stood out in its own space and time, which means great instrument separation. The instrument that sounded the best to me on the Earfree i5 were drums as on Toto- I will remember those drumlines are so satisfying.

As I had the Earfree i5 in my ears for hours at a time, I never experienced any listening fatigue or discomfort. Where we are at the moment in the audio scene, I do not think bragging to your old school audiophile wired pals with your TWS Bluetooth Earbuds is a good idea yet.

Conclusion

Well, it is pretty obvious that I think these are really good as I won’t be using something bad every day. Before the Earfree i5 I had a pair of Bounce earbuds and the first 10 seconds of listening I discovered a channel imbalance so I threw them away. This tech has so much potential and I hope audiophile TWS Earbuds will be on the research and development agendas of portable audio companies this year in 2025. In my opinion everyone should buy this.