How’s the active noise cancelling performance on the Beats Studio3 Wireless?

Now, the active noise cancelling  is kind of the point of getting these headphones. You can turn the ANC on or off in two ways: one is by clicking the power button twice, and the other is in the actual Bluetooth settings app on iOS. On Android, you can toggle ANC if you download the Beats app. The headphones by default always have the ANC on, and it adapts to the amount of sound going on around you.

The ANC unit is passable, but not great. However, as the Beats Studio3 Wireless are pretty good at physically blocking noise from entering your ears, the cumulative effect is decent.

How long does the Beats Studio3 Wireless battery last?

Beats claims a battery life of 22 hours with active noise cancelling turned on and 40 hours without. For reference, Bose claims about 20 hours of constant playback on their QC35 headphones . In our testing here we got 10 hours, 12 minutes on 100% volume with ANC turned on, so it isn’t hard to see how you could push these well beyond the 22 hours unless you want to blow out your eardrums.

Does the Beats Studio3 Wireless sound good?

When it comes to headphones that I’m going to be using for hours at a time on plane rides and commutes, I want three things: comfort (which I already spoke about), battery life (which is pretty good), and sound quality. If I’m taking a 20-hour plane ride, chances are that I’m going to be staring wistfully out of the window at some point, reminiscing and listening to my favorite Bon Iver song, as we all do. At that point, sound quality becomes really important.

Lows, mids, and highs

Now, these Beats headphones are notorious for favoring bass but it isn’t as loud as you might expect. The boosted bass notes are louder than our house curve  (pink) suggests, though it remains listenable. Particularly bass-heavy tracks may suffer: the bass in the song Never look Back by Slow Club masks the slow finger snaps at the intro. That really shouldn’t happen. The vocals that come in at about the same time but at least the midrange boost makes them fairly easy to hear.

Around 0:08 seconds in, the main melody comes in, which is a female vocal layered on top of another vocal singing that same melody at a lower register. With these headphones, that secondary melody is more or less equal in output to the main melody which, by definition of being a secondary melody, shouldn’t be the case.

How is the call quality?

The Beats Studio3 Wireless contains an integrated microphone for voice calls, though you could also use the audio cable’s in-line microphone. We have yet to measure the in-line microphone’s frequency response. Meanwhile, the internal microphone demos highlight that voices sound slightly muffled and background noise causes distortions, making this headset less than ideal for anything but a quiet environment.