Anker’s latest Soundcore Sleep A30 sleep buds do what its A20 buds promised but couldn’t deliver: mask snoring. It accomplishes this with the inclusion of Active Noise Cancellation in the buds and a microphone inside the charging case that actively adjusts masking audio to cancel out the sound of sawing logs.
Of course I want that! said my monkey brain when I first saw those specs attached to slightly smaller earbuds, which should make them even more comfortable for side sleepers. But after testing them every night for the last month, I’ve come to a different conclusion. Then again, my bedtime buddy doesn’t usually snore.

$230
The Good
- Masks light to moderate snoring
- Good for side sleepers
- Smaller than last generation
The Bad
- ANC kills the small batteries
- More expensive than predecessors
- Unresponsive touch controls
First, I should explain how poorly I sleep. I listen to podcasts to quell my busy mind, and that means earbuds – Apple’s AirPods Pro, usually – to avoid disturbing my wife when falling asleep. To complicate matters, I wake up frequently each night, anywhere between one and about five times, requiring a podcast rewind and restart. And if I roll over I have to switch out earbuds since the AirPods are too big to sleep on. It sucks, but that’s my routine for years now.
Anker advertises 9 hours of battery life per charge with ANC enabled (extended to 45 hours with the case), but that’s only when you’re primarily listening to white noise or snore-masking sounds like rain, wind, and campfire crackles stored locally on the buds. If that works for you, then the A30 buds will easily make it through the night.
However, they last closer to 6.5 hours per charge if you’re primarily streaming audio over Bluetooth. At least twice a week, I’d wake before dawn and attempt to restart a podcast on dead earbuds, especially on nights when I got sucked into a doomscrolling session before falling asleep. I didn’t have that problem with the passive A20 sleep buds.




The smaller A30s are more comfortable than the A20s when sleeping on my side. I still have to adjust my pillow just so to make sure the pressure isn’t too acute and that the audio isn’t muffled. And so far, I haven’t woken up with any soreness. Side sleeping with AirPods or any other popular earbuds just isn’t a possibility, so this is a major win for Anker.
To test the adaptive snore masking, I took advantage of Alexa’s ability to play snoring sounds on my original Amazon Echo speaker placed about a meter from my head. With the Soundcore charging case nearby, I tested the A30 buds with ANC turned on, with local snore-masking audio, and with podcasts streamed over Bluetooth. I did the testing with the Echo at volume levels of 3 (akin to my wife after too many glasses of wine), 6 (time to seek relationship counseling), and 9 (divorce!).
At volume level 3, the A30 sleep buds blocked the snoring 100 percent, or 90 percent with just ANC enabled and no masking sounds or podcast playing. It was so good that I had to remove the buds to make sure the snoring sound effects were still playing from the speaker. The buds with masking audio did a reasonable job at level 6, blocking about 70 percent of the sound — but I was able to clearly hear the repetitive drone next to me. At volume level 9, well, you can’t expect miracles.
Anker’s bedtime buds also offer a sleep tracking feature that gives a general sense of how well you slept, but with far too much confidence, enthusiasm, and specificity. For example, on one particularly restless night — I felt like shit after waking up 4 or 5 times over an eight-hour span, including a stretch from 4am to 5:15am where I listened to a podcast from beginning to end. Yet Anker congratulated me on an 87 sleep score, with a “Wow, you slept like a baby! Start your day in the best shape possible!” It also said I spent 29 percent of the night “prone,” even though I never sleep on my stomach.
The buds can supposedly detect when you fall asleep. However, I wonder if this is just a timer — they repeatedly shut off after about an hour of continuous use when watching a movie, for example.
I also found the touch controls to be unreliable. The buds respond to single or double taps to switch from Bluetooth to local modes, skip tracks, adjust volume, etc. Yet they fail frequently enough that I never expect them to register on the first attempt. And battery life is such that when the taps don’t register after a few tries, I just assume the buds have gone dead, only to launch the app and see they’re not. This isn’t what you want to deal with when trying to fall back asleep.
The buds can also be set to playback a wide variety of white noise and other audio soundscapes, with enough bubbling brooks and loon calls to make a spa operator swoon. The “AI Brainwave Audio” feature promises restful sleep by delivering different frequencies to each ear, which supposedly “helps sync your brainwaves with calming patterns to promote relaxation and restful sleep.” I found it pointless, but that bullet point sure looks like gee-whiz tech to investors and wellness nerds. I’m envious of you if these features can calm you and help you fall asleep, as Anker claims.

- The Soundcore app offers personalization features like sleep reminders and alarms. I didn’t find them compelling enough to use or supplant what’s already available in iOS.
- The case doesn’t offer wireless charging; it’s USB-C only.
- Volume for local mode audio can’t be controlled from the phone’s volume buttons, only via the Soundcore app (or the tap controls on the buds if configured).
- The sound emitted from the Find Device feature is loud enough to help find a bud lost in the sheets or under the bed.
- The buds now include a microphone for making calls.
If, like me, you’re a side sleeper who likes to fall asleep listening to white noise or podcasts, then you can save a few bucks with the excellent Soundcore Sleep A20 buds, which can still be purchased for $179.99. Paying a $50 premium for the $229.90 Soundcore Sleep A30 buds will be easy to justify if they help restore sanity to anyone partnered up with a light to moderate snorer, assuming those tiny batteries last through the night.
All photography by Thomas Ricker / The Verge
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![‘Alice in Borderland: Retry’ Makes Up For the Netflix Series Reheating ‘Squid Game’ Nachos
Not to pick at an irritated scab, but when the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones… happened… I, a fan of the series via the show, naively assumed all author George R.R. Martin had to do was pen a different bookend to the series to recover all the lost goodwill of the series. Little did I know that was a touchy subject among book-readers who’ve been tortured by the author’s perpetual procrastination for years. Condolences. While the same scenario isn’t fully analogous with what’s happened with Netflix’s live-action Alice in Borderland TV show and VIZ Media’s English manga release of the series’ extended epilogue, Alice in Borderland: Retry, the manga more than retroactively makes up for the huge disappointment I felt witnessing the show I loved go full Squid Game in the worst way possible in its final season. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49_44FFKZ1M[/embed] Alice in Borderland is a cutting series in which a man named Arisu gets trapped in a sci-fi death game where a group of sequestered survivors must compete in a litany of challenges in an abandoned city. Think Gantz meets Kaiji. Its rules are cruel, but never completely ass-pull, with players logically outfoxing each other to win games lest a laser from the sky punch them through the top of their heads.
The show was so good I didn’t realize it was based on a manga by Haro Aso (Zom 100: Bucketlist of the Dead) that was also adapted into an anime—a fact that speaks to its overall quality in a sea of lackluster live-action Netflix projects. And for two seasons it came and went, adapting that story prior to Squid Game mania and, subsequently, in the throes of its pop culture takeover. That is, until a third season was released last year, ripping Arisu and his lover Usagi from their peaceful lives post-death games and throwing them back into the fray like a kid with a magnifying glass looming over an ant hill.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8p6YkEPVco[/embed] I was rocking with the series for a bit despite the show clearly making stuff up as it went along until it committed the tacky, cardinal sin of copying what Squid Game’s third season did in its final moments, desperately sequel-baiting itself by asking the question no one was curious about in a stinger: What if it took place in America? May that answer never come because of the road it took to tarnish the show’s reputation. As far as I’m concerned, there was no third season. Alice in Borderland Retry is now available in print and digital! Read a free preview: https://t.co/OJcjm9wliH pic.twitter.com/8iqGzwjTIV — VIZ Media (@VIZMedia) July 21, 2026 So imagine my surprise to find that Viz Media’s recently released localization of Aso’s 2020 epilogue manga to the series, set 10 years after its conclusion, would retroactively act as a remedy to the Netflix series’ final season I wish I could wipe from my mind palace. The manga starts out almost exactly the same as the third season of the Netflix series (duh, the manga came out first), with Arisu going from a NEET to a psychologist and Usagi expecting their first child. That’s the last thing similar between the two.
Unlike the Netflix series’ contrived reasoning to get everyone back into the games, Arisu winds up in the games for a pretty simple reason. He and five other participants get hit by a billboard and wind up in the Borderlands. If you’ve watched the show or read the manga, this inciting incident is far from the cataclysmic events that send Arisu to the Borderlands the first time around, but what it lacks in spectacle, it more than makes up for in the challenge that awaits them. In contrast to the more-is-more inventiveness of the Netflix series’ games in its final season, Arisu and company only have to play one game, which is essentially musical chairs but for keeps. Despite the simplicity of the game, the stakes of the 300+ page epilogue far exceed those of the Netflix series, where its collective of players, composed of an insurance employee, a nursery school teacher, an emergency room nurse, a doctor, and an unemployed man, have to debate whose life matters more. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq2p_B5MD0c[/embed] It’s rare that manga get a chance to reach a conclusion without getting the axe, and just as rare for series on an indefinite hiatus to start back up regardless of whether a creator is healthy, willing, and able to spin more narrative yarn years after the fact. Which begs the question whether the juice is worth the squeeze to loop back to a series that’s already over. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one in doubt of what, if anything, could be gained from revisiting a series whose manga concluded pretty succinctly. Aso had his doubts too, which he lays bare near the midpoint of the manga, writing the following:
It’s been ten years since I started working on Alice in Borderland. Like Arisu, I didn’t want to ever revisit a horrifying world like Borderland, but I was given the opportunity to write a sequel and I just couldn’t pass it up. What does it mean to live? What do our lives mean? Now, at 40 years old, I want to retry answering these questions. While its game is a deceptively simple one, a fatal road of agony, betrayal, and second-guessing the inherent good in the human spirit left me in awe as I flipped through its pages and found that Aso still had it in him to concoct an intense, not-so-unwinnable death game, and that what he had to say serves as a footnote to a series that’s more than earned its place in the pantheon of death game narratives. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Alice #Borderland #Retry #Netflix #Series #Reheating #Squid #Game #NachosAlice in Borderland,Manga,Netflix,Viz Media ‘Alice in Borderland: Retry’ Makes Up For the Netflix Series Reheating ‘Squid Game’ Nachos
Not to pick at an irritated scab, but when the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones… happened… I, a fan of the series via the show, naively assumed all author George R.R. Martin had to do was pen a different bookend to the series to recover all the lost goodwill of the series. Little did I know that was a touchy subject among book-readers who’ve been tortured by the author’s perpetual procrastination for years. Condolences. While the same scenario isn’t fully analogous with what’s happened with Netflix’s live-action Alice in Borderland TV show and VIZ Media’s English manga release of the series’ extended epilogue, Alice in Borderland: Retry, the manga more than retroactively makes up for the huge disappointment I felt witnessing the show I loved go full Squid Game in the worst way possible in its final season. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49_44FFKZ1M[/embed] Alice in Borderland is a cutting series in which a man named Arisu gets trapped in a sci-fi death game where a group of sequestered survivors must compete in a litany of challenges in an abandoned city. Think Gantz meets Kaiji. Its rules are cruel, but never completely ass-pull, with players logically outfoxing each other to win games lest a laser from the sky punch them through the top of their heads.
The show was so good I didn’t realize it was based on a manga by Haro Aso (Zom 100: Bucketlist of the Dead) that was also adapted into an anime—a fact that speaks to its overall quality in a sea of lackluster live-action Netflix projects. And for two seasons it came and went, adapting that story prior to Squid Game mania and, subsequently, in the throes of its pop culture takeover. That is, until a third season was released last year, ripping Arisu and his lover Usagi from their peaceful lives post-death games and throwing them back into the fray like a kid with a magnifying glass looming over an ant hill.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8p6YkEPVco[/embed] I was rocking with the series for a bit despite the show clearly making stuff up as it went along until it committed the tacky, cardinal sin of copying what Squid Game’s third season did in its final moments, desperately sequel-baiting itself by asking the question no one was curious about in a stinger: What if it took place in America? May that answer never come because of the road it took to tarnish the show’s reputation. As far as I’m concerned, there was no third season. Alice in Borderland Retry is now available in print and digital! Read a free preview: https://t.co/OJcjm9wliH pic.twitter.com/8iqGzwjTIV — VIZ Media (@VIZMedia) July 21, 2026 So imagine my surprise to find that Viz Media’s recently released localization of Aso’s 2020 epilogue manga to the series, set 10 years after its conclusion, would retroactively act as a remedy to the Netflix series’ final season I wish I could wipe from my mind palace. The manga starts out almost exactly the same as the third season of the Netflix series (duh, the manga came out first), with Arisu going from a NEET to a psychologist and Usagi expecting their first child. That’s the last thing similar between the two.
Unlike the Netflix series’ contrived reasoning to get everyone back into the games, Arisu winds up in the games for a pretty simple reason. He and five other participants get hit by a billboard and wind up in the Borderlands. If you’ve watched the show or read the manga, this inciting incident is far from the cataclysmic events that send Arisu to the Borderlands the first time around, but what it lacks in spectacle, it more than makes up for in the challenge that awaits them. In contrast to the more-is-more inventiveness of the Netflix series’ games in its final season, Arisu and company only have to play one game, which is essentially musical chairs but for keeps. Despite the simplicity of the game, the stakes of the 300+ page epilogue far exceed those of the Netflix series, where its collective of players, composed of an insurance employee, a nursery school teacher, an emergency room nurse, a doctor, and an unemployed man, have to debate whose life matters more. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq2p_B5MD0c[/embed] It’s rare that manga get a chance to reach a conclusion without getting the axe, and just as rare for series on an indefinite hiatus to start back up regardless of whether a creator is healthy, willing, and able to spin more narrative yarn years after the fact. Which begs the question whether the juice is worth the squeeze to loop back to a series that’s already over. Evidently, I wasn’t the only one in doubt of what, if anything, could be gained from revisiting a series whose manga concluded pretty succinctly. Aso had his doubts too, which he lays bare near the midpoint of the manga, writing the following:
It’s been ten years since I started working on Alice in Borderland. Like Arisu, I didn’t want to ever revisit a horrifying world like Borderland, but I was given the opportunity to write a sequel and I just couldn’t pass it up. What does it mean to live? What do our lives mean? Now, at 40 years old, I want to retry answering these questions. While its game is a deceptively simple one, a fatal road of agony, betrayal, and second-guessing the inherent good in the human spirit left me in awe as I flipped through its pages and found that Aso still had it in him to concoct an intense, not-so-unwinnable death game, and that what he had to say serves as a footnote to a series that’s more than earned its place in the pantheon of death game narratives. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Alice #Borderland #Retry #Netflix #Series #Reheating #Squid #Game #NachosAlice in Borderland,Manga,Netflix,Viz Media](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/07/Alice-in-Borderland-1280x853.jpg)
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