00Context
Quick context before anything else, because it shapes everything below: I have never used an open ear product before. No Ear (open), nothing clip style. My daily drivers are the Nothing Ear (3) and the Headphone (1), so my reference point is sealed audio with ANC. Over the last five days I took the Clip Pro everywhere I would normally wear headphones. Desk work, out and about, at home, and on calls. Sessions of three to four hours were normal, so this is not a two hour impression.
01Comfort and the learning curve
I want to avoid the usual line about forgetting they are there, because that is not quite true. If you pay attention, you notice them. But the moment you focus on something else they disappear, exactly like a well fitting in ear does. After three or four hours there was no pressure point, no hot spot on the cartilage, no fatigue, nothing I would file as a negative. I do not wear glasses, so I cannot comment on that combination.
What did surprise me is that there is a small learning curve, and nobody really mentions this with clip style buds. It took me a few days before putting them on and putting them back into the case became consistent and automatic. The fit itself was fine from the first try, it is more that the exact angle and the way they drop into the case need a bit of muscle memory. After day three I stopped thinking about it entirely, but going in I expected zero adjustment period and that was not the case.
02Sound
I expected worse, honestly. Bass is genuinely good here, and Bass enhancement is doing real work rather than just adding mud. Interestingly, in louder surroundings it is not the bass that goes missing first, it is the treble. Detail thins out before the low end does, which is the opposite of what I assumed would happen with an open design.
That leads to the biggest caveat of the product, and it is a category caveat rather than a CMF failure. In loud environments the Clip Pro is not the right tool. On a bus or a train you hear everything around you almost as if you were wearing nothing at all, so you push the volume to the top just to keep up, and at that point it stops being pleasant for your ears. Same story on a busy road. It works, but I would not recommend it. If that is your main use case, buy sealed in ears instead and keep these for everything else.
Indoors it is the opposite story. My ears seem to be a perfect match for the acoustic pod, and I get a full, comfortable sound at the lowest volume steps. Worth stressing that fit varies from person to person here more than with in ears, since there is no tip to compensate.
Because of that, I never actually needed Anti-leakage mode. Indoors people only start hearing something at higher volumes, and on the bus the surroundings are far louder than anything leaking out of my ears anyway. I did test it properly and it does work, the leakage drops noticeably, but you pay for it with sound quality and volume. My take is that it is a situational tool for a quiet office or a library, not something you leave on.
LDAC is there and it is fine, but the difference to AAC is not big enough for me to accept the extra battery drain. I turned it off again.
03Calls, controls, app
Calls were solid. Nobody on the other end complained, including outdoors, and I did not have to change how I speak.
The physical buttons are the highlight for me. They are easy to press, they never misfire the way touch controls do, and they always do exactly what you expect. I now genuinely miss them on my Ear (3). There is no wear detection, which I assumed would bother me and does not, because you press a button when putting them on anyway. It is one motion either way.
The Smart Dial on the case is a genuinely good feature, very customisable, and the haptic feedback is satisfying in a way case hardware usually is not. It does get triggered in my pocket now and then, which is probably exactly why it ships disabled by default.
Battery is excellent. Five days at three to four hours a day and I still have not charged them once.
Nothing X is clean and easy to navigate, and I mean that as a compliment. The one weak spot is the equaliser, which gives you very few presets and not much room to shape things yourself. There have been several firmware updates during my five days. I did run into occasional half second dropouts in playback, and an update landed just now that is supposed to fix exactly that, so I will see how it holds up.
04Build
Plastic, but it feels solid and properly made rather than cheap. The case especially. It sits nicely in the hand, the finish is pleasant, and the dial has real, weighted resistance to it.
05Where they fit
They stay a second device for me, and I think that is the honest answer for most people. If you owned no headphones at all, I would buy ANC in ears first, then decide between clip style and over ear depending on what you actually do all day.
But that decision is not a formality. With the current heat, wearing these at my desk instead of over ears is a genuine game changer. And because this is real openness rather than a transparency mode piping the room back through a microphone, staying in a conversation while audio keeps running just works, with no processed layer between you and the person talking.
If you want to see them come out of the box before reading any of this, the unboxing is over on Instagram: CMF Clip Pro unboxing ↗
— nostream