Baseus has started selling the MC2 NC, clip-on earbuds that leave your ear canal open and still try to cancel the noise around you. They’re on sale in China on JD.com, one of the country’s biggest online stores, for the equivalent of about USD 117, or about KES 15,100.
Baseus, a Chinese accessories maker best known for chargers and power banks, first showed the MC2 NC at IFA, the Berlin electronics show, on 4th September 2026. Its IFA release said the earbuds would launch in October 2026. It didn’t name markets or a price, and the MC2 NC isn’t on Baseus’s global store yet.
The question for anyone who wears open-ear earbuds is whether noise cancelling can work on a pair that doesn’t plug your ear. Baseus’s answer is to plug it a little.
Why noise cancelling is hard on open earbuds
Noise cancelling, or ANC, works by listening. Microphones on each earbud pick up the sound around you, and a chip plays the opposite sound wave into your ear so the two cancel out. On regular earbuds, the silicone tip sits inside your ear canal and blocks a lot of the noise on its own. So the chip only has to deal with what gets past the tip.
Open-ear earbuds don’t plug anything, and that’s why people buy them. You hear the traffic on a run and the colleague talking to you, and nothing presses inside your ear for hours. But it also means outside sound reaches your ear from every side, so there’s far more noise for the chip to cancel and no sealed space for it to work in. Earlier this week we covered Samsung’s Galaxy Buds On, which clip on the same way and don’t list noise cancelling at all.
The part of each MC2 NC earbud that sits in your ear is wrapped in a soft silicone air cushion. Baseus’s IFA release says the earbud’s Air Ear Wing “creates a natural acoustic seal” that works with the noise cancelling. Its Chinese listing goes further and calls the MC2 NC a semi-in-ear clip. It puts the noise reduction at -50dB, from the cushion blocking sound and the ANC chip working together. The cushions come in four sizes, and a footnote on the same page says you need the one that fits your ear to get the best noise cancelling.
So the MC2 NC should quieten a bus or an open-plan office better than a fully open pair, as long as the cushion fits. The same cushion probably means you’ll hear less of the street than with the original MC2, which is why many people buy open-ear earbuds in the first place.
What else changed from the MC2
The MC2 NC follows the MC2, which went on sale in China in April 2026 and is sold elsewhere as the Bowie MC2 at USD 79.99, or about KES 10,400. Baseus’s US store has it at USD 59.99, or about KES 7,800, right now.
The new pair has a bigger 12mm driver, the speaker inside each earbud, against 11mm on the Bowie MC2, and six microphones for calls against four. Each earbud is 0.8g heavier at 5.9g. Battery life with the case is the same 60 hours with noise cancelling off, measured at half volume, and drops to 42 hours with it on. Ten minutes of charging gives three hours of music. Both pairs are rated IP67, which means the earbuds are sealed against dust and can survive up to a metre of water for 30 minutes.
The China version also connects to three Chinese AI models, ByteDance’s Doubao, Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen and DeepSeek, for recording transcription, an assistant that answers in real time, and live interpretation. The IFA release doesn’t mention any of them.
| Baseus MC2 NC (China) | Baseus Bowie MC2 (global) | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | CNY 783 (about KES 15,100); CNY 598 with subsidy in some regions (about KES 11,500) | USD 79.99 list, USD 59.99 on Baseus’s US store (about KES 10,400 and KES 7,800) |
| Noise cancelling | Yes, up to -50dB (Baseus’s figure) | No |
| Driver | 12mm carbon-fibre dynamic | 11mm dynamic |
| Microphones | 6 | 4 |
| Weight per earbud | 5.9g | 5.1g |
| Battery with case | 60 hours ANC off, 42 hours ANC on | 60 hours (SuperBass off), 55 hours (SuperBass on) |
| Codecs | LDAC, Hi-Res Wireless | SBC, AAC, LDAC, Hi-Res |
| Water and dust | IP67 | IP67, earbuds only |
| Bluetooth | Not announced | 6.0 |
| Global price and date | Not announced | On sale |
| Kenya | Not announced | Not listed |
What Baseus hasn’t said, and what it means for you
Baseus hasn’t said how it measured the -50dB or at which sounds. Its Chinese page says the MC2 NC passed an A+ grade noise-cancelling certification in China, without explaining the test. Its own documents don’t agree on the system either: the IFA release calls it dual adaptive ANC, while the Chinese page calls it triple adaptive.
Shokz launched the OpenFit Pro, open-ear earbuds with what Shokz calls Open-Ear Noise Reduction, on 6th January 2026, at USD 249.95 or about KES 32,400. At about USD 117, the MC2 NC costs less than half that, though one is a Chinese price and the other a US one.
For a Kenyan buyer there’s nothing to buy yet. A price near the Chinese one would make the MC2 NC far cheaper than the OpenFit Pro. Still, the -50dB is Baseus’s own number, and the noise cancelling works by partly closing the ear that open-ear buyers want left open. We’d wait for an independent test and a global price.
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