Bowers & Wilkins PX7 Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones Carbon

PX7 Carbon Edition is a celebration of PX7's carbon–fibre structure in a sleek new finish reminiscent of the design of our first headphones, P5. And just like the P5, PX7 Carbon Edition is tuned using decades of experience to deliver the best–possible mobile sound experience. Wherever you go experience music at its highest level. No matter where you are powerful drivers and adaptive noise cancelling put you in the center of the music. With the PX7, Bowers & Wilkins produced a headphone with great sound and some excellent features.

Features:

Noise cancellation adapts depending on the amount of noise it detects.

Wear Detection sensor.

Sensor pauses music when headphones are taken off aptX, aptX HD, aptX.

Adaptive audio.

Supports hi-res audio Bluetooth playback.

The PX7 are Bowers & Wilkins’ current flagship PX model, boasting support for ANC, aptX sound and 30 hours of battery life. The PX7 feature 43.6mm drivers, the largest in the B&W’s headphone range, which contributes to the headphones weight of 310g. The frame is made from a woven carbon fibre composite that is as strong as a more traditional steel or aluminium frame – so they should be able to withstand a bit of punishment.

B&W has stuck with physical buttons, and on the right-hand side are buttons for power, which also doubles up as the switch for Bluetooth pairing. Beneath that is volume up button, followed by the stop/start/skip (tap twice to go forward, tap thrice to go back) and then the volume down button. There’s also a USB-C and 3.5mm connection, while on the left earcup is a solitary button for toggling through the noise-cancellation modes. The assurance with physical buttons is that they work every time, so it’s a question of which interface you prefer.

With the wear sensor tech, you can lift up an earpad and playback stops; place it back down and the music starts again. Leave them unattended for long enough and they’ll conserve energy by going into standby; put them back on your head and they’ll come back to life. Battery life has been boosted to 30 hours. A fifteen-minute charge props battery life up by five hours. Regarding the noise cancelling performance, office sounds, ambient noises and passing vehicles dissipate into the background.

Pass-Through, allowing control over how much sound is passed through, and this can be adjusted via a slider in the B&W Headphones app. The Headphones app is a simple affair with options for noise cancelling and Ambient pass-through mode. You can also adjust the proclivity of the wear sensor, add another device for the multi-point pairing feature and listen to soundscapes from the natural world. The PX7 are compatible with Bluetooth 5.0 and support aptX all the way up to the Adaptive audio.

Sure handling of bass. Spacious soundstage. Crisp and natural performer. The sense of space and width is impressively roomy for a closed-backed pair of headphones. You can place where instruments are in the soundstage, the organisation of which gives the performance a sense of flair. It’s a tightly knitted and woven performance, and that makes for a cohesive, natural and engaging performance.

Their character is crisp and neutral, balanced across the frequency range with bass tight, punchy, and weighty, providing The Pharcyde’s Runnin’ (TIDAL) a firm foundation to work with. At the other end of frequency spectrum, they prove just as capable, delivering a brightness to treble notes that’s judged well with the amount of shine and insight that brings out the delicacy of the piano notes.

The detail drawn out from music is good and knitted together with an impressive sense of timing. The PX7 are fairly forgiving too, taking lower-quality files, and making perfectly acceptable to listen to, but for the best performance ought to feed them the highest music quality to reap the best results.