Beats By Dr. Dre has announced the release of the Beats Studio3 Wireless headphones, the company’s latest generation of premium over-ears. Apple claims the new headphones will feature a number of internal improvements over previous models, including better active noise cancellation and improved battery life.
The latest pair in the the Beats Studio Wireless lineup mostly retain the same look and feel of the popular model. They’re still made of colorful plastic — though the company is offering more subtle matte gold and matte silver colors to pair with modern iPhone iterations — and feature the Beats logo prominently on the outside of each earcup. Despite very similar looks, the Studio3 Wireless offer a number of improved internal features over the old model.
Battery improvements are a central draw of the new cans. The Apple-owned company is including Apple’s W1 chip inside the Beats Studio3 — which is also in Apple’s Airpods — to improve battery life and enable fast charging. With the company’s proprietary Pure Adaptive Noise Canceling technology enabled, the headphones are claimed to offer an impressive 22 hours of battery life, and Beats claims that number will leap up to an incredible 40 hours with the noise-canceling feature off. The W1 chip also means that the headphones can reportedly draw three hours of playback time in just 10 minutes via the included micro USB cable.
Beats claims the Pure Adaptive Noise Canceling tech works by constantly monitoring your listening environment using advanced algorithms. Because of this constant monitoring, the headphones are claimed to be able to actually evaluate fit and adjust for leakage caused by hair, glasses, ear shape, and even head movement. It will be interesting to see how the tech works in practice, and how the Beats Studio3 Wireless match up to some of our favorite noise-canceling headphones such as the Sony MDR-1000x, given the proprietary tech being used by the new model.
Other features afforded by the W1 chip include proximity-based pairing, and the company also says Apple iPhone users can more easily switch between devices that are logged into the same iCloud account, meaning Apple faithful can switch between, say, listening to music or talking on their phone to watching a video or streaming music from a Macbook Pro.
The latest Beats Studio model will likely offer a similarly bass-forward sound to previous generations of Beats headphones, a sound signature that has dominated the audio world in the decade since the company first launched.
The new headphones are currently available for sale on Apple’s website, retailing for $350.
Update: The Beats Studio3 Wireless have added two new colorways to pair with Apple’s latest iPhone models.
