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Bowers & Wilkins has long been one of our favorite brands for bookshelf speakers and headphones, but the name
typically carries a high price tag. Their headphones fetch for $800, while the most high-end pair of B&W loudspeakers will set you back over $100,000.
Fortunately, not every B&W product is that expensive — right now, the brand’s Px7 S2e over-ear noise-cancelling headphones are discounted to $229. Typically $400, the headphones feature a similar design to the brand’s most high-end models and identical battery life.
ON SALE
Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S2e
It’s considerably less than the latest headphones from brands like Apple, Bose, and Sony, although certain colors are already sold out. For now, you can still pick up a pair of the headphones in cloud grey, forest green, and ruby red.
While we haven’t tested the Px7 S2e model, on paper, they have a lot of the same features that we love about the Px8 S2. They have the same solid 30-hour battery life, plus noise-canceling with an ambient setting. You also get wear detection (so the headphones pause when you take them off), and a zippered carrying case.
The headphones also feature tactile buttons, rather than touch controls. There’s a slider to power the headphones on, distinct buttons for raising and lowering volume, a multifunction playback button, and a button to switch noise-canceling modes.
There are some tradeoffs with these headphones compared to the flagship model. B&W swapped the high-end leather finish for fabric, and the headphones use 40mm bio-cellulose drivers, rather than the carbon drivers used by the Px8 S2 headphones.
The flagship model also uses Qualcomm’s AptX Lossless codec for higher resolution audio over Bluetooth, compared to the AptX Adaptive codec used by the S2e model for high (although your source device has to support the codec for the best result).
That said, you still get many of the flagship model’s great features at a much (much) lower price.
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