To celebrate its 95th anniversary, Danish audio brand Bang & Olufsen is unwrapping a new gift to the audio world.
Bang & Olufsen has debuted the Beoplay H95, an $800 pair of luxury travel headphones featuring what the company calls the “most advanced active noise cancellation of any Bang & Olufsen headphones.” The new headphones will be widely available on September 10, but 95 pairs will be available immediately in commemoration of the company’s anniversary.
Though it’s not the best time to be announcing luxury travel headphones, these still look intriguing.
Design
According to Bang & Olufsen, the Beoplay H95 feature an oval, over-ear design with lambskin ear cushions meant to be ideal for long-term usage. The company says the headband design has been “completely revamped” for a more polished look and combines “top-grain cowhide, custom-knitted textile, and softly padded memory foam,” to boost comfort.
Controls for the Beoplay H95 will utilize a mix of touch controls and mechanical dials. B&O describes these controls as “innovative and intuitive,” though we can’t officially confirm that until we’ve tried them ourselves.
Features
In addition to what Bang & Olufsen describes as “impressive” passive noise reduction, the Beoplay H95 feature adjustable, adaptive active noise cancellation. The technology is based on digital processing and uses both feed-forward and feedback microphones to analyze and reduce noise. The company tuned and tested the ANC processing of the H95 in its own Virtual Acoustic Laboratory, where it put the headphones up against real-life conditions like airplanes, office spaces, and street noise.
The Beoplay H95 are claimed to last for up to 38 hours of playback time on a single charge with active noise cancellation turned on. If the headphones hold up to the specifications, that would be excellent battery life for ANC headphones, even at the steep price. On top of that battery power, the Beoplay H95 have four different voice microphones to aid call quality and a user-adjustable transparency mode to help listeners hear their surroundings while keeping the headphones on.
Audio quality
The headphones themselves are built around 40mm titanium drivers with neodymium magnets mounted in ported enclosures. They’ll work in conjunction with a digital signal processing engine developed by Bang & Olufsen.
The Beoplay H95 comes with ACC and aptX Adaptive, which the company calls a “next-generation, dynamically adjustable audio codec” that is designed to help these headphones produce low-latency, high-quality wireless audio.
Without testing them, we can’t currently comment on how these high-end headphones actually sound, but there’s no question that they have the right specifications to create incredible sound. Really, that’s the most we can say at the moment about all the features in these new cans from Bang & Olufsen. On paper, they look remarkable. For $800, they’ll certainly need to live up to those big expectations, and we look forward to finding out if they can.
