The new Px7 S3 headphones from Bowers & Wilkins have re-engineered drive units, Qualcomm aptXTM Adaptive 24/96, aptXTM Lossless and dedicated headphone amplifiers. With a comprehensively re-imagined industrial design that elevates the brand’s design DNA, the Px7 S3 is designed to deliver the next level of Bowers & Wilkins performance, comfort and style. I’ve reviewed the last several years of Px7 headphones and they are all fantastic. Here’s what the press release had to say.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 Headphones
Sound Taken To New Heights
The Px7 S3 headphones delivers dramatic advances in acoustic performance over its predecessor, the Px7 S2e. Almost every element in its design is new: its 40mm biocellulose drive units feature a redesigned and improved chassis, voice coil, suspension and magnet, with only the cone material itself carrying over from the previous generation of headphones. The comprehensively redesigned drive units deliver lower coloration and distortion, improved resolution and superior dynamics. As before, they are carefully angled to the listener’s ears to ensure a consistent distance from every point across the surface of each driver to each ear, ensuring better imaging and stereo spaciousness.
For the first time in a Bowers & Wilkins over-ear headphone, these high-resolution drive units are powered by a dedicated, discrete headphone amplifier. This provides notably more scale and energy to the sound, ensuring Px7 S3 is as dynamic and exciting as it is accurate and realistic to listen to.
Building on that high-quality acoustic platform, the Px7 S3 headphones include both aptXTM Adaptive 24/96 wireless technology and the latest Qualcomm innovation, aptX Lossless. Both technologies can automatically optimize wireless music transmission from compatible phones, tablets and computers, ensuring the best possible sound quality with high-resolution music streaming services such as Qobuz and TIDAL, both available to stream directly from the Music app.
Supported by powerful Bowers & Wilkins-developed DSP (Digital Signal Processing), the result is outstanding 24-bit / 96 kHz high-resolution sound quality. 3.5mm analog audio connections are also supported, as is high-resolution-capable USB-C – a great benefit for both computer users and owners of compatible mobile devices, including the latest generation of iPhone. Both cable types are included in the carry case that accompanies the headphones.
Block Out The World
Bowers & Wilkins engineers are confident that the Px7 S3 headphones feature the most powerful and effective active noise-cancelling technology the brand has ever developed. As is always the case, the chosen approach carefully balances effective cancellation of unwanted noise while doing no harm to the musicality of the performance – and in this new generation of headphones, the results are simply exceptional.
Using a proprietary Bowers & Wilkins-developed platform, the Px7 S3 headphones feature eight high-performance microphones, carefully located around the periphery of each ear cup and working together to deliver the best results. Two of them measure the output of each drive unit, four – positioned at opposite ends of each earcup to ensure the best possible coverage – monitor ambient noise from the outside world, and two more provide outstanding voice clarity. Careful positioning and angling of those microphones enhances performance even in the noisiest environments. When making calls, unwanted noise is effectively suppressed by the latest generation of voice processing technology, ADI Pure Voice. All eight microphones work with the noise-cancelling and voice-processing technologies to ensure outstanding call clarity wherever you are.
Enhanced Features
Offering 30 hours of battery life with full noise cancellation on, the Px7 S3 headphones can play all day long – and more – on just a single charge, while a 15-minute quick recharge is sufficient to provide up to seven hours of additional listening time.
As with all other current generations of Bowers & Wilkins headphones and earbuds, the Px7 S3 headphones can be configured and controlled using the brand’s Music app. You can activate or disengage the noise-cancelling transparency mode to let in more or less of the outside world, monitor the headphone’s charge levels, select the wear sensor sensitivity and define your preferred operation for the physical ‘Quick Action’ button on the headphones. In a significant upgrade, listeners can now opt to fine-tune the sound through an adjustable five-band EQ, complete with the option to store their preferred settings as easily accessible presets. If preferred, the EQ option can be bypassed by selecting the True Sound mode, which represents the preferred audio tuning selected by the acoustic team at the Southwater Research Establishment (SRE).
As before, physical controls on each earcup are also included, ensuring full control even without the Music app. The revised button layout, which reshapes the volume up, volume down and play/pause buttons to improve their tactile interaction and also relocates the power button to the left-hand earcup, is more intuitive to use than ever. The Quick Action button allows users to either quickly cycle through the Px7 S3’s noise-cancelling options – Off, Pass-Through, and On – or seamlessly launch their phone’s Voice Assistant at the touch of a button.
For the first time in a Bowers & Wilkins headphone, the Px7 S3 headphones will offer support for spatial audio. In line with the brand’s True Sound philosophy, the engineers at SRE have developed a proprietary audio processing technology designed to give listeners a realistic sense of acoustic space and a natural, yet immersive, experience with spatial audio. This new technology will be rolled out as an over-the-air update later this year.
In another first for Bowers & Wilkins, Px7 S3 headphones will also offer support for Bluetooth® LE Audio, complete
with Auracast broadcast functionality, enabling a single audio source to broadcast to an unlimited number of receiving headphones. LE Audio also includes a new high-quality audio codec, LC3, which offers the potential for higher quality sound than standard Bluetooth audio. Bowers & Wilkins will roll out LE Audio compatibility to Px7 S3 as a future update.
Pricing and Availability
Excitingly, the all-new Px7 S3 headphones are just the first new headphone model from Bowers & Wilkins in 2025. Later this year, the company plans to launch a new flagship model, the Px8 S2. More details on those when we get them.
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