Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsOverpriced wired headphones with tacked on bluetooth and a broken feature app
Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2018
First off. As usual. Excellent build quality and comfort from beyerdynamic. These feel very much like a standard pair of beyerdynamic around the ear headphones. They're very light as well which adds to the extreme comfort. Excellent battery life as well. I will say I am not a fan of touch controls on headphones. Why do all the higher end headphones do this? They're so unresponsive and require far too much precision and awkwardness to get it just right when simple buttons could achieve it all. Plus, good luck handling them as you'll be pausing, resuming, adjusting volume, changing track, etc as you're just putting them on or taking them off. One thing to note, which should be obvious. These are not at all very portable. They're meant for home use, which was what I planned to use them for. They don't fold into any compact form and while they do come with a nice carrying case, it's pretty big.
Beyond that I'm struggling to understand how these are $700 headphones especially if you plan to use them as wireless headphones. I cannot justify the price of these in wireless mode.
A key features of these are an app to allegedly fine tune them. Check the app store reviews (ios and android) and note the 1 star reviews. The app simply does not work. It does nothing of use. Beyerdynamic appears to be aware of it, but has made no progress in making fixing it for a while now and it's not looking like they'll fix it anytime soon.
The sound quality in these isn't bad per se, it's just not impressive at all especially for the price. There is good clarity. Excellent clarity. That's to be expected. For being closed headphones though, I'm astounded at the lack of bass quantity and generally anemic sound signature. This is all in wireless mode by the way. These sound far better in wired mode even connected to a simple dac/amp setup. It's astounding how bad the built in dac/amp solution for wireless mode is.
I've owned several pair of beyerdynamic headphones in my past. All wired. I've never been a fan of their piercing highs (good news is these don't really have that as much), but have always liked the overall package. These though. These were the first ones I bought where I truly felt ripped off.
Don't be fooled by these. These headphones are primarily wired headphones with wireless tacked on as a selling point with a broken app for extra features. Even as wired though you can get a far better deal by going with their lower end headphones or get something like the Sony WH-1000XM3 if you want wireless.
