Cambridge Audio's new earbuds make subtle improvements to a great foundation

Cambridge Audio is one of those smaller brands that keeps on doing sterling work in a world theoretically dominated by giants like Sony, Bose and Apple – and coming in with sensible pricing is a big part of its appeal. A year ago I was impressed by the Melomania A100, true wireless earbuds that did a lot right for a fair price.

Now, a little over a year later, it's debuting a revision of that same earbud, now called the Melomania A100 SE, and it seems like another very sensible launch for those who want earbuds like the AirPods Pro without spending quite that level of cash.

Many of their specs and features are the same as before (including 39 hours of total battery with the case, IPX5 water resistance, and LDAC compatibility for hi-fi audio). However, Cambridge has managed to squeeze in Spatial Audio by Dolby for the first time, which some people love (and which other people love to ignore).

Cambridge also says that it's re-tuned the earbuds and that this should bring better bass, clearer vocals, and richer mids – all good things. Intriguingly, though, this does seem to be the main sum of the changes, which are basically audio tweaks to improve things subtly.

A new Qualcomm chipset inside the earbud is part of this improvement, handling some sound processing to give the A100 SE a little bit more power to work with in terms of that sound presentation.

Still, this underlines why this isn't an A200 launch, then, since Cambridge Audio is indeed effectively just putting out a new, slightly improved version of the same earbud without really changing huge parts of its design or feature set.

The Melomania A100 SE will be available this month (we don't have a more precise date than that right now), and will launch at £129 in the UK, €149 in the EU, and $149 in the US. It's worth knowing, though, that the standard A100 can now be found for quite a lot less than that, which might represent the best opportunity out of this whole launch.