The Aviot TE-V1R-HEN is a pair of true wireless earbuds designed specifically for Hololive fans. Don’t discount the $169.99 buds as purely gimmicky fan merch—they’re excellent dual-driver earphones that show off Aviot’s chops as an audio manufacturer. Their active noise cancellation (ANC) is underwhelming, but they sound excellent, especially if you favor crisp highs to booming bass. That said, if you aren’t familiar with the VTuber scene, you can get far better noise cancellation for less money with the $129.99 Anker Soundcore Liberty 4 Pro ($129.99).
Design: Fans Will Know, Others Won’t
Aviot, a division of the Preseed Japan Corporation, is a fairly new headphone brand you probably haven’t heard of. Outside of its collaboration earbuds, most of its releases have been exclusive to Japan. Aviot entered my radar at Anime NYC last year with its booth showing off the TE-V1R-HEN, and since then, I’ve tried a few of its earbuds and met with Preseed’s president Shuto Inoue in Japan to discuss the brand’s audio philosophy. Aviot’s pricey Cowboy Bebop-themed TE-ZX1 earbuds really impressed me with their five-driver design, excellent clarity, and built-in voice actor sound clips, but I decided against a full review at the time because of their Japanese-only nature (you’ll be hearing Koichi Yamadera and Megumi Hayashibara when you put them in your ears, not Steve Blum and Wendee Lee).
The TE-V1R-HENs are the first Aviot collaboration to feature English voice clips as an option, so you can hear your favorite Hololive-EN Myth VTuber in English or Japanese. Even if you disregard the gimmicky aspects, the earbuds sound excellent and show that Aviot is worth keeping an eye on if it expands further outside of Japan. As it stands, the company operates a fairly small Amazon US store and an online mall that ships globally but is still priced in yen and relies on a third-party shipping agent service.
With a two-tone black and copper design, the earbuds look stylish without being garish or over the top. The bodies of the earpieces are rounded and glossy black with a flat, metallic panel on the back. The panels have the Hololive Myth logo in black. Microphone grilles for ANC are built into the sides of the panels and the back surface holding the logos are touch-sensitive tap controls.
(Credit: Will Greenwald)
The charging case is similarly unobtrusive. It’s a basic pill-shaped, flip-top glossy black case with a USB-C port and battery status button on the back and a small status LED bar on the front. The top of the case has Aviot X Myth on it and the front features another Hololive Myth logo, this time in copper against black.
If you’re self-conscious about being a fan, the earbuds won’t give you away. Since their logo is of the entire Hololive Myth generation, they won’t out your particular choice of oshi. Still, what they lack in flair, they make up for in elegance.
Aviot claims the TE-V1R-HENs can last up to 19 hours on a charge (or 62 hours if you include the charging case). This is incredibly long for true wireless earbuds, though how close you get to those numbers will depend on your volume and ANC settings. It feels like a generous estimate, but in testing, the earbuds easily lasted over a week with several hours of use per day before the case’s LED turned red to indicate it was running low.
The Big Draw: Hearing Your Oshi
As with Aviot’s previous collaborations, the big draw of the TE-V1R-HEN earbuds is the voice clips used for status notifications. The Hololive Myth collaboration is Aviot’s first to feature English clips. All five members of Hololive Myth recorded a combined 200 new voice clips in both Japanese and English. You can choose among Amelia Watson, Gawr Gura, Mori Calliope, Ninomae Ina’nis, or Takanashi Kiara, who will speak to you in either language.
Each VTuber will let you know when the earbuds power on and off, connect and disconnect, switch between ANC modes, and when the battery is low. These interactions aren’t extremely common apart from when you put the earbuds in or enable transparency mode to hear your surroundings, but they’re still a treat for fans. You can also tap and hold the right earpiece for two seconds to trigger a random voice clip. Gura might say, “Shark!” Kiara might introduce herself as the manager of Kiara Fried Phoenix, or Mori might politely ask you to die. It might seem random, but Chumbuds, KFP members, and Dead Beats will understand the appeal.
The English voice clips for Mori Calliope’s voice pack (Credit: Aviot, Cover Corporation)
Aviot doesn’t load every voice pack on the TE-V1R-HEN earbuds by default, only Mori’s English voice pack. Aviot’s Sound Me mobile app (free for Android and iOS) lets you load Mori’s Japanese lines or switch to one of the other four VTubers and upload their content in either English or Japanese. The app will upload the chosen voice pack to the earbuds, a simple and automatic process it says should take between five and 10 minutes. In testing, my Pixel 8 reliably transferred voice packs in just over three minutes. I didn’t encounter any hiccups when switching, and while I couldn’t listen to music during the process, I could still keep the earbuds in my ears instead of resting them in the charging case, and the newly uploaded VTuber let me know when it was done.
VTuber fans usually have their own specific oshis, so while the TE-V1R-HEN earbuds are visually designed around the entire Hololive Myth generation, the modes are specific to each VTuber. This means you can’t get a medley of voice lines from the full cast like you can on most of Aviot’s other collaboration earbuds. That’s slightly disappointing, but the most important feature is being able to go with your preferred oshi and, as a proud Dead Beat, I kept Mori Calliope’s English voice pack loaded most of the time.
Audio Quality: Better Sound Quality Than Noise Cancellation
The TE-V1R-HENs use a dual-driver design with a 10mm dynamic driver and a balanced armature in each earpiece. It isn’t as ambitious as the wild five-driver design of the TE-ZX1s (a dynamic driver, a planar magnetic driver, and three balanced armatures), but it still puts out full, clean sound. It’s significantly better than the single-dynamic-driver TE-D01v base Aviot uses for many of its other collaborations like Gridman Universe, Kamen Rider, Konosuba, and Shigure Ai. Aviot previously sent me the Konosuba earbuds, which I used for comparison with the TE-ZX1s earlier. They sound fine, but the Cowboy Bebop and Hololive earbuds are significant steps up. The TE-V1R-HEN earbuds use Bluetooth 5.3 and support the AAC and LDAC Bluetooth codecs for high-quality audio.
Inoue says Aviot tailors its sound signatures to its primarily Japanese audience’s tastes, which leans more toward high-mids for idol singing and anime themes than bass. That comes through when listening to our bass test track, The Knife’s “Silent Shout.” The bass synth notes and kick drum hits sound round and full but fall well short of head-rattling. The low frequencies aren’t skimped on and they don’t feel remotely hollow; they’re clean and accurate, just not loaded with palpable thump or body.
(Credit: Will Greenwald)
The dual-driver design affords treble finesse in Yes’s “Roundabout,” where the opening acoustic guitar plucks get plenty of crisp string texture while retaining strong low-mid resonance. When the track kicks in fully, the bassline, drums, guitar strums, and vocals all share the spotlight in the busy mix, without any element overshadowing another. It’s an audio signature anchored in the high-mids, and the bass notes don’t reach very low, but it’s still very balanced and detailed.
Because this is a Hololive collaboration and I’m a Dead Beat, I have to talk about how Mori Calliope sounds. Because her style is heavily influenced by American hip-hop, “Excuse My Rudeness, But Could You Please RIP?” is anchored with a crunchy kick drum and backed with spooky horrorcore instrumentation. Mori’s voice stays front and center on the earbuds, filled with detail and range. The synth notes and hollow percussion sound clean and present behind her vocals, and while the kick drum doesn’t seriously thump, it does reach deep enough to properly punctuate the beat.
Aviot’s sound engineering can be excellent, but its active noise cancellation isn’t very impressive. The TE-V1R-HENs can dampen consistent buzz, hum, and rumble from computer fans and air conditioners, which is OK if those are your usual distractions. However, they aren’t very effective at all against any kind of noise that varies, like coffee shop chatter or construction work.
The Anker Soundcore Liberty 4 Pro earbuds are much more effective at blocking sound across the board
(Credit: Will Greenwald)
Verdict: Fantastic Fan Merch
If you don’t already know what the word “yabai” means, the main appeal of the Aviot TE-V1R-HEN Hololive English Myth Wireless Earbuds will be lost on you (but thank you for reading this far anyway). But if you’re a Hololive fan and want to hear your oshi every time you put your earbuds in, they’re easy to recommend. Moreover, they’re reasonably priced for excellent-sounding earbuds with impressive battery life that double as fan merch. The Anker Soundcore Liberty 4 Pros cost about $40 less and offer far better noise cancellation, so we recommend them more highly for most people, but if you’re a VTuber fan, the TE-V1R-HENs are worth the splurge.
Aviot TE-V1R-HEN Hololive English Myth Wireless Earbuds
The Bottom Line
The Aviot TE-V1R-HEN true wireless earbuds are aimed specifically at fans of Hololive English’s Myth generation, but even without the collaboration gimmicks, they sound quite good.
Like What You’re Reading?
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links.
By clicking the button, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our
Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy.
You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
About Will Greenwald
Lead Analyst, Consumer Electronics
