CMF Clip Pro Review: Can Budget Open-Ear Buds Compete with Premium Rivals?

The price lands well below the Sony LinkBuds Clip, Bose Ultra Open Earbuds, JBL Soundgear Clips, and Shokz OpenDots 2 — flagships that trained shoppers to expect a $200+ ticket for the clip-on form factor. CMF, the budget arm of U.K.-based Nothing, just made its first open-ear hardware play — Nothing itself already ships the Ear Open at its own tier. The price is the headline. Whether the product earns it is the only question.

What $99 actually buys

Gizmodo's review puts the stock tuning in solid territory for the bracket. Vocals sit forward out of the box. A "Bass Enhancement" toggle — usually a red flag for synthetic, overcooked low end — delivers controlled lift without overpowering. The reviewer kept it pinned at level 2 across rock tracks. On Steely Dan's "Any Major Dude Will Tell You," guitar separation and keys held up cleanly. Daft Punk's "Da Funk" exposed the limit: bass starts crowding the midrange in electronic mixes.

The Nothing X app offers presets plus a custom EQ. Caveat emptor. The "rock" preset is described as borderline unlistenable — vocals drown, the mix flattens. The "enhance vocals" preset earns its keep for podcasts and subway listening. No personalized tuning to your hearing, a feature most flagships now ship. A spatial audio toggle exists; it makes everything sound slightly darker and unbalanced. Ignore it.

Where the price shows

Volume is the receipt. Every open-ear design struggles in noise, but the Clip Pro sits a notch below Shokz and Bose in raw headroom. Loud commutes, traffic-heavy streets, gym floors — the ceiling matters more than the spec sheet admits. Gizmodo calls this out directly: the Clip Pro struggled more than the higher-end pairs in the same scenarios.

EQ presets are uneven. App polish is thinner than the flagships. No hearing-personalization layer. You're buying the form factor and the tuning at a discount, not the full package. The volume gap is the slippage you only catch after stress-testing the tool against the spec sheet: read the actual output, not the marketing claim.

Buy, wait, or pass

At $99 MSRP, the Clip Pro is the new price floor for clip-on open earbuds. For office listening, walks, and podcast stacks, it clears the bar. For loud environments and bass-forward electronic genres, the math flips — you're trading audio headroom for the form factor and the brand.

If you've been eyeing the Shokz or Bose options, anchor on CMF: anything above $99 has to justify the gap with volume headroom and app polish. The Clip Pro is a first-generation product with no track record. Don't pay full sticker on day one. Watch the first sale window, then click.