Over and on

Bowers & Wilkins PX

wireless noise-cancelling headphones

While Bowers & Wilkins has been making speakers since the 1960s, it entered the headphone market only a decade ago with the on-ear P5 Mobile Hi-Fi headphones. Those strongly leveraged B&W’s reputation for luxury, all leather and shining metal, connected stethoscope-like with twisting metal rods — in our review back then we called them “truly drop-dead gorgeous things shouting executive luxury from every curve”, though they were then priced accordingly at $500, above the market-leading noise-cancellers of the day, despite the P5s being smaller and lacking noise-cancelling.

It was another three years before B&W launched an over-ear model, a more serious headphone at the same price, again linked up with sculptural swirls of steel, and we loved them, though again, no noise-cancelling, and back then no wireless operation either.

The first Bluetooth model came in 2015, returning to the P5 sizing, while in 2017 the P9 Signature arrived, a luxurious wired home headphone which remains available.

But now this PX7, and the on-ear PX5 reviewed overleaf, bring the company fully up to date with a technological full monty of wireless (or wired or USB) playback, active noise-cancellation, and app control.

Carbon-fibre

And at $599.95, the PX7 arrives at price parity with other premium wireless noise-cancellers like the latest Sennheiser Momentum Wireless and Bose 700 designs. Yet their build and construction now seems focused more on