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- Utterly gorgeous audio
- Slim, light and super comfortable
- Premium build quality
- Noise cancelling isn’t quite the best
- They only fold flat
The Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 are a pair of headphones that have gone through a number of significant changes over the years since they first released back in 2020. I was hugely impressed with the sound quality of those original headphones and design, but slightly less enamoured with other aspects, such as comfort and noise cancellation.
As you’d fully expect of a company like Bowers & Wilkins, however, the product designers and engineers didn’t rest on their laurels. They sat down, stroked their collective chins and thought long and hard about what would make the product better, gradually improving both the sound and the ergonomics for the Px7 S2 and Px7 2e, until arriving at this latest update.
What you need to know
Iterative improvements are what turns good products into great ones, and the Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 has plenty of these. So, although the headphones look similar to their predecessors from a distance, in the words of Bowers & Wilkins’ Andy Kerr: “everything” has changed. Well, everything apart from the cones in the driver units.
The earcups are slimmer and lower profile than before, meaning the headphones fit closer to your head. The headphones are lighter, too, and come with a slimmer, more compact semi-hard carry case. They don’t fold up any more compact than the previous headphones, but the buttons have been repositioned to make it less likely you’ll press the wrong one when you’re fumbling around trying to adjust the volume.
Other improvements include more microphones, which have also been repositioned to improve the effectiveness of the headphones’ noise cancellation. There’s new silicon to help with more effective noise rejection and better call quality.
The earcups themselves have been redesigned for improved sound quality (more on that lower down) and, perhaps more importantly, the Px7 S3 are the first Bowers & Wilkins headphones to have discrete DSP (digital signal processing) and amplification – a development that improves dynamic range, particularly at low volume levels.
Price and competition
Another thing that has changed here is the price. It has only risen from £379 to £399, though, and given the various global financial upheavals going on right now, that doesn’t seem too bad. Still, it’s a price that pits the Px7 S3 against some pretty tough opposition.
The Sonos Ace, which won our coveted headphones of the year award earlier this year for their innovative approach to personal audio, are currently available at £379 from Amazon. They might not be the outright best for sound quality and noise cancellation, but they’re super comfortable, the controls are dreamy and the way they integrate with your Sonos sound system – switching from soundbar to headphones for late night movie sessions at the touch of a button – is second to none.
You can’t go wrong with the Sony WH-1000XM5, which can often be found on sale for under £250. These are brilliant headphones for the money, with super-effective adaptive noise cancellation and they sound pretty good, too.
For iPhone users, the super-stylish AirPods Max will set you back a hefty £499. They sound great and have effective noise cancelling but we didn’t much like the fit. And, of course, the Bose QuietComfort Ultra deliver class-leading noise cancelling for around £349.
Design and features
The way the Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 look and feel doesn’t differ all that much from their predecessors. They’re available in black, canvas white and blue colourways, the earcups and the headband are finished in tough-feeling ballistic nylon, while plush memory foam and PU-leather pads surround your ears and wrap around the top of your head.
Overall, build quality is solid and the fit firm without verging on discomfort – they’re far more comfy than the originals I tested back in 2019 – and, coupled with the lower profile fit and slimmer carrying case, they’re generally easier to live with. I do wish you could fold them up a little tighter, though, but I’ll take a little inconvenience if that means better build quality overall.
The (rather small) buttons are positioned on the outer rear edges of each earcup’s centrally raised sections. The volume and multifunction play/pause/skip button are situated on the right cup, and the pairing/power switch and noise-cancelling mode button are on the left cup. You can customise the latter to call on your phone’s voice assistant but that’s the extent of any customisability as far as the physical controls are concerned.
I struggled initially with the size of the buttons and their location, but I quickly adapted and learned where to reach to activate the various functions. The only other thing to note from a design standpoint is the new slender grille, sandwiched between the nylon outer and the foam ear cushions, which the additional microphones hide behind.
There are now two of these on each ear cup monitoring ambient sound for the noise cancellation system, accompanying the single internal microphone inside each one – plus another pair of microphones, one on each side, for voice pickup in audio and video calls.
Load up the Bowers & Wilkins Music app, and a few extra options open up for customisation. As well as the ability to assign your voice assistant to the left earcup button, you can now tweak the sound profile via a five-band EQ, turn the wear sensor on or off and adjust its sensitivity and enable or disable the headphone’s auto standby feature. I didn’t feel the need to tweak any of these settings while I was testing the headphones, but it’s good to know you can change things if you need to.
What you don’t get here are support for any form of spatial audio (it’s promised later this year) or head tracking, which is absolutely fine by me. And battery life is a claimed 30 hours with noise cancelling enabled. Again, that’s perfectly acceptable.
Sound quality and noise cancelling
Far more important is sound quality, and the Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 have several big improvements in play here that really up the game. First up, codec compatibility has been boosted from aptX Adaptive 24-bit 48kHz to 96kHz, and the headphones now support aptX Lossless, too.
Apple devotees won’t be able to take advantage of this, alas, but the Px7 S3 do come with a USB-C to USB-C cable in the box for those desperate to listen in high resolution on their iPhones and other i-devices. There’s also a USB-C to 3.5mm headphone jack provided for connection to legacy devices such as aeroplane entertainment systems.
However, it’s Bowers’ tweaks to the Px7’s internals that make the biggest discernible difference to sound quality. Notably, the headphones have separate headphone amp and DSP chips, and the design of the chassis surrounding the driver units has been redesigned to add more rigidity to the system. Add upgrades to the voice coil, chassis and magnets and there’s potential for greater control over dynamics and improved dynamic range, too.
The headphones go louder than Px7’s predecessors, but Bowers & Wilkins says the biggest benefit of the redesigned architecture is that they sound better at lower, more normal listening levels.
The reality certainly bears this out. In fact, I’d go so far as to say the Px7 S3 are among the very best sounding over-ear wireless headphones I have ever tested over the course of my career and this was apparent as soon as I fired up my go-to torture test – Six By Seven’s Eat Junk Become Junk – a track that chews up lesser headphones and spits them out on the roadside.
Not only is it brilliantly listenable, the layers of vocals, distorted guitars and droning, driving bass all clearly identifiable, but there’s still plenty of weight to the overall presentation at both low and high volume levels. That’s a result in my book.
It’s not all about being able to handle the worst that modern rock music has to offer, though; there’s also a deftness to the Px7 S3’s presentation that makes subtler forms of music just as easy on the ear. Switching to the melodrama of Mozart’s Requiem, as sung by the choir of King’s College, and the wall of choral voices was presented with more immediacy, more texture and greater dynamism and depth than I’m used to.
I grabbed a pair of Sonos Ace to compare with and, although the difference was subtle, I did prefer the way the Px7 went about their business. In fact, my experience of the way the Px7 S3 handles these two pieces of music sum up the whole listening experience: Bowers & Wilkins’ latest somehow manage to exhibit grip and control, transparency and detail while taming just enough of the harshest edges to make almost every kind of music a toe-tapping, head-nodding delight.
I particularly loved listening to Joe Satriani’s Thinking of You on the Px7 S3, the strident, wailing of Satriani’s virtuoso electric guitar playing underpinned by an ocean of deep, enveloping bass that wraps around your head like the warmest luxury duvet. On the Sonos Ace, the bass is more boomy and less in control, while the guitar is harsher and more strained sounding.
If there is one tiny teeny weakness, it’s that the insistence on being all things to all people means the highest frequencies lack a little air, a little of the finest definition that open-backed headphones get so right. This, however, is the very slightest of criticisms.
Clearly, Bowers & Wilkins’ efforts to improve sound quality have worked because these are stupendous-sounding headphones. The question is, have the improvements to noise-cancelling worked as well? With one new rear-facing microphone to add to the main forward-facing microphone, it’s definitely better than before, but I’m still not convinced that it’s quite on par with the very best in the business.
In back-to-back tests against the Sonos Ace — at my desk and on the deafeningly loud Northern Line stretch of the London Underground between Bank and Old Street station— I found the Ace performed better, deadening sounds of all frequencies much more effectively than the Px7 S3.
I wouldn’t say this is a huge problem, but when the ambient noise ramped up to the loudest of levels, I did find myself turning up the volume with more frequency than I would while wearing the Sonos Ace, for example, or the in-ear AirPods Pro 2 USB-C.
Should you buy the Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3?
It all comes down to your priorities because all headphones in this bracket are, ultimately, a series of compromises. If your priority is shutting out the outside world at any cost, you’ll want to look elsewhere – perhaps to the Sonos Ace or a pair of Sony over-ears because despite Bowers & Wilkins’ best efforts, the Px7 S3 still haven’t quite nailed that side of the equation.
On the other hand, however, if the ultimate in sound quality on the move is what you truly seek, then these headphones are a strong contender for the best in the business. They sound simply awesome – one minute all aggression and thrust, the next delivering less complicated acoustic tracks with a beautifully light touch – and they’re also comfortable and easy to get along with.
Ultimately, if you love listening to music and you have around £400 to spend on a new pair of headphones, you owe it to yourself – and your ears – to put the Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 on your list: they’re a pure acoustic delight.
