It’s almost as good at muffling voices in a open office environment as the Bose QC 35 II, but the Beats has a very faint hiss, while the Bose doesn’t. You won’t hear that hiss when your music is on, but turn the music off and you hear it. As for audio performance, on tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” the headphones deliver powerful lows, and don’t distort, even at top, unwise listening levels. At more moderate levels, the lows are still quite strong, but the high-mids and highs are also balanced out nicely, for a crisp sound signature with rich lows. The Beats Studio3 Wireless are better headphones than the Skullcandy Venue Wireless.
The Beats Studio 3 are the most prominent example to date of a pair of headphones that is dependent on the ecosystem it’s in to perform at its best. I don’t like it, but I think this trend will continue and deepen over time as smart assistant integrations become more common and worthwhile things to have. The same iMac where iTunes operation is nice and straightforward with the Beats Studio 3 is also the stage of my great frustration when trying to listen to Spotify or Tidal.
You can fold the Studio 3s into themselves and tuck them into the nice, hard-wearing pouch that Beats provides. I find that setup a lot more portable and straightforward than the less flexible B&W alternative. But then Beats faces beats flex review up to yet another formidable rival in the shape of the $350 Sony 1000XM2, the successor to the critically acclaimed 1000X. The 1000XM2 also collapse down, and they have a more rigid case, and they have superior noise canceling.
If you happen to use an Android phone or a bunch of Windows PCs, the proposition becomes much trickier. Beats wins on practically none of the major parameters of comfort, design, or performance. It’s decent beats flex review in all, but without the W1 augmentation, it’s a master of none. I can’t recommend the Studio 3 to anyone outside the Apple ecosystem, and that’s as uncomplicated as my recommendation for those within it.
This might be the first time in TMS history, that we had to go to a retail store, track down a pair of headphones, and retest them to make sure we weren’t losing our minds – or our hearing. We tested two other pairs of Studio3 Wireless, and one other pair of Solo3 Wireless, just to double check that we weren’t missing something. And, without one shred of a doubt, we can say that our conclusion was the same. These are the worst pair of headphones we have ever tested in this price-range. Anyone who says otherwise, please feel free to fight us in the comments.