Apple’s Beats division has formally unveiled the highly-anticipated Beats Studio Professional — a brand new $349 different to the corporate’s expensive AirPods Max.
Though Apple has stored Beats as a separate, arms-length model since buying the corporate almost ten years in the past, it’s nonetheless a wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple, which implies its merchandise aren’t developed in a vacuum.
This makes the brand new Beats Studio Professional all of the extra attention-grabbing, as they characterize not solely the primary new over-ear headphones to be launched by Beats since 2017 but in addition the primary time Beats has put out a product that straight competes with one thing in Apple’s AirPods lineup.
Nonetheless, on this case, “competes” may not even be a robust sufficient phrase. As rumors hinted ultimately month, the brand new Beats Studio Professional appeared destined to surpass the AirPods Max in nearly each conceivable manner.
On the one hand, that shouldn’t come as a lot of a shock. Beats will naturally put one of the best know-how ahead, and Apple’s late-2020 AirPods Max merely can’t compete with a contemporary 2023 set of premium headphones. If something, it exhibits how lengthy within the tooth the AirPods Max have gotten previously two and a half years.
The New Beats Studio Professional
First up, Beats Studio Professional are promoting for $349. That’s a full $200 lower than the sticker worth of the AirPods Max and nonetheless lower than a few of the greatest costs for a set of renewed AirPods Max headphones.
Don’t let the cheaper price tag idiot you, although. The Beats Studio Professional pack within the newest acoustic know-how and options that the corporate’s engineers can give you.
This consists of top-notch Lively Noise Cancellation, new 40mm drivers “engineered for optimum readability, with near-zero distortion even at excessive quantity,” and a full transparency mode. Additionally they help lossless audio over USB-C — the primary time any set of Apple or Beats headphones have supplied this. Even the AirPods Max, regardless of their Lightning port, can’t deal with digital lossless audio enter — that port is solely for charging and passing in analog 3.5mm audio with the suitable cable.
After all, as Beats-branded headphones, they’re additionally designed to work simply as properly with Android telephones as iPhones, which provides one other ironic twist, because the USB-C digital audio enter means you’ll really have the ability to get pleasure from Hello-Res Lossless Apple Music straight from an Android telephone — one thing that’s not doable on an iPhone with out fussing with exterior DACs.
Curiously, Beats Studio Professional additionally provide three audio profiles which are solely out there when utilizing wired USB-C audio, permitting you to toggle between the balanced “Beats Signature” profile to Leisure and Dialog modes that regulate for immersive movie-watching or calling and podcast-listening experiences.
As anticipated, the design of the Beats Studio Professional hasn’t modified a lot from the Beats Studio3 that preceded them. Nonetheless, the corporate has made a couple of enhancements, together with nicer outer earpads that mix reminiscence foam with a leather-based end.
The within of the brand new Beats Studio Professional is one other matter totally. Along with the brand new finely-tuned 40mm drivers, you get a bunch of options which were unique to Apple’s AirPods till now, together with the dynamic head monitoring and Customized Spatial Audio of the third-gen AirPods, AirPods Professional, and AirPods Max. It’s an enormous first for a set of non-Apple-branded headphones, even when they’re nonetheless technically made by Apple, no less than not directly.
Regardless of missing the particular Apple chips discovered within the AirPods and older Beats headphones, the Beats Studio Professional provide the identical seamless pairing and setup as AirPods, which syncs throughout all of your units signed into the identical iCloud account. Nonetheless, with Google’s Quick Pairing know-how, they will additionally do the identical on the Android aspect. Ditto for Discover My, which works throughout each ecosystems.
Assuming Apple hasn’t given up on full-sized headphones underneath its personal model, it’s a protected wager that we’ll finally see an “AirPods Max 2” launch that catches them up with the brand new Beats Studio Professional. Nonetheless, for now, it’s more durable than ever to justify splurging on the AirPods Max when the Beats Studio Professional present almost all the similar options and extra for significantly much less.