I had a pair of Tozo Crystal Earbuds, which were at least as good as my Sony Linkbud S earbuds but cost a faction of the price. I say had: my daughter acquired them when she lost one of her Sony Linkbuds S earbuds and she shows no signs of giving them back.So, I was intrigued to find out how good these Tozo Golden X1 earbuds were that cost about the same as my Sony Linkbud S earbuds. Expectations were high. So here is my comparison with my Sony Linkbud S earbuds which are an excellent pair of premium earbuds from a Top brand.Firstly, the sound quality is truly wonderful and significantly better than the Sony earbuds. The highest Highs and the lowest lows that your ears can hear come through loud and clear and are a total joy. You can do a hearing test with them, where it plays sounds of different frequencies and you indicate if you can hear them or not, these go off the scale at both ends. All types of music are reproduced with great clarity and range and if you don’t appreciate the sound emphasis right out of the box, e.g., too base heavy or too base light, you can change it with 16 standard EQ setting on the accompanying Tozo app. Then each of these standard EQ settings can be tweaked, if you wish, to get the sound just as you like it. Sony also has an app for the Linkbuds, with features that the Tozo app does not have. However, the Tozo app is better focussed on the sound quality and less on features like muting the music when you start talking, which end up as turning the music off when you strain lifting something heavy, yawn, cough, sneeze or sing along with the music.Secondly, the Active noise cancelling is similar to the Linkbuds. However, right out of the box this did not work for me. The problem was that the eartips that came fitted to the X1s were not the best fit for my ears and they need to be. However, the X1s also come with 5 additional pairs of eartips of varying sizes. This is a lot of options so a really good fit should be in there somewhere. However, it is also a lot of options to wade through. I found that ideally when testing them out to find the best fit you really needed to be in an environment with a reasonable level of ambient sound, because that is what you are trying to cut out. Unfortunately, my house is very quiet, so I needed to create noise e.g. from a vacuum cleaner or high speed blender to work through the options. It should also be noted that the shape of the speaker that the eartips fit onto is oval, so they only fit a certain way round and are quite a tight fit, so this can be a bit fiddly and time consuming.To illustrate the effect of the eartip fit and ANC. Imagine yourself in a building next to a busy road. The ANC has 3 setting: ANC off, ANC on and Transparency mode and the earbuds themselves provide passive noise isolation since they essentially block your ear canal.• Transparency mode is like having both the window and door open in this building: you get the vast majority of the sound from outside coming in.• ANC off, just relying on the passive noise isolation from having something blocking your ear canal, is like closing the door, you lose some of the outside noise but a fair bit still gets through.• ANC on is like closing the window as well. If the room itself is quiet, you can still hear the traffic outside, just. However, if you have the TV or some music on you can hear it just fine and don’t hear the outside traffic.The importance of fit for the earbuds is like the fit of the window and door. If there are gaps around the door or window these gaps will let a surprisingly large amount of the sound through, so opening them or closing them will make little difference. This was exactly what I experienced when I tried the earbuds right out of the box. The eartips that came already fitted were not a good fit for my ears and so the ANC settings made little difference. Once I had replaced them with ones of a better fit from the 5 other pairs supplied, the ANC worked very well.Thirdly, the waterproofing on X1 earbuds is much better than the Linkbuds: IP6 (waterproof) for the X1s vs. IP4 (splash proof) for the Linkbuds. For serious cardio in the gym or running outside in the rain IP4 is a bit risky.Fourthly, X1s have charging via USB-c lead or wireless charging, whereas the Linkbuds have charging via USC-c lead only. This is not a big deal but it is nice to have wireless charging available.Finally, one reason why the Linkbuds are so great is that for their sound quality and features they are so small and comfortable to wear. These golden X1s are a similar size and similarly comfortable to wear. The X1s case also shows the percentage charge in the case and an indication of the charge in each earphone in the case on the case’s display, whilst the Linkbuds have no such display.In summary, these are a truly excellent sounding pair of wireless earbuds, that remain excellent sounding even in noisy and wet conditions and are better than an excellent pair of premium earbuds from a Top brand.