When my AirPods Max broke at the beginning of the year, I was faced with a difficult decision: double down and spend another $549 / £499 / AU$899 on headphones that certainly haven’t dropped in price since their December 2020 release (and might let me down again) or find a pair that I could count on.
Swapping them for a pair of headphones that cost half as much has made me realize there’s something better out there for me. And I’d argue there’s something better out there for you, too.
It’s hard to overstate how much I loved my AirPods Max when I first got them and they still absolutely merit a mention as some of the best headphones out there. Their sound is exquisite, both dynamic and detailed yet bassy and zealous. And spatial audio was still a bit of a rarity back then, making them a real game-changer for watching movies and TV on the go. Even their noise cancelling – oft placed in a distant third place after that of Bose and Sony – was a revelation, still offering blissful silence on busy streets and public transport.
Sure, they’re a bit on the old side now and despite adding wired USB-C lossless audio earlier this year have been been sorely in need of some quality-of-life updates for a while. Their cheaper stablemates, the AirPods 4 and AirPods Pro, include a bunch of features they don’t, such as Conversation Awareness, more powerful chips and weatherproofing, despite their much cheaper price. But I was willing to put up with their occasional quirks, given that they were always so dependable – it was easy to fool myself into believing they’d always be there for me.
Until they weren’t. After just over two years of use, my AirPods Max started to act up. In contrast to their previous rock solid connectivity, they developed the Memento-esque habit of forgetting their connection every time they slept, even though my Macbook and iPhone’s OS still showed them as paired. Attempting to reconnect would fail; performing a soft reset did nothing. Worse, whenever I pressed their pairing button, I was greeted with a slow blinking orange light, a distress signal I’d never witnessed before.
The only solution I eventually did hit on was to perform a full restore to factory settings and set them up from scratch. They would then stay connected until the next time they were switched off or left idle for 15 minutes, at which point they’d lose the connection again.
I dealt with this the same way I diagnose any mystery malady – I turned to Dr Google, which helped me diagnose the likely culprit as a faulty Bluetooth module. Unfortunately, as Apple Care+ only lasts two years, the cost of repair was likely to be expensive; Apple’s repair prices are frustratingly opaque but users online who’ve undergone similar repairs have said they’ve been billed up to half the cost of the device.
This left me with a bit of a dilemma. Paying the repair cost would have undoubtedly given my headphones more life. But how long would it be before the next issue arose, like the battery reaching the end of its lifespan? Even if Apple replaced the whole unit – as it’s often wont to do, to save on the hassle of repair – where was the guarantee I wouldn’t just get a further two years of life, followed by another hardware fault?
Mentally totting up the cost of several hundreds pounds of repairs or buying a whole new pair every two years, I started to wonder if I was really willing to burn potentially thousands of pounds to feed my headphone habit for the next decade.
Typically, I’m not one to make a decision today that I can instead procrastinate over tomorrow, so I wanted to pick up a stopgap pair of cans I could use until I’d made my mind up. As TechRadar’s review editor, I’m lucky enough to have access to a library of the best noise cancelling headphones for testing, so I borrowed a loaner pair for using in the office: the Cambridge Audio Melomania P100. And, boy, was this an eye-opener (read: ear-opener) and a half.
Starting with audio quality, the P100 sounded way better than I’d expected for a mid-range pair of noise cancelling headphones – they lack the whomp of some of their bassier rivals but they’re also seriously expressive and don’t neglect certain frequencies just to artificially boost the low end. I can’t work without music playing so I wear headphones for easily eight hours straight, yet at no point did they start to feel uncomfortable. And at a list price of $239 / £199, I wouldn’t find it quite so galling even if they gave up the ghost in just a couple of years. And that won’t happen, since Cambridge Audio tells us the battery module can be replaced (although for how much, I’m not sure).
For me, that really drove home something that often gets overlooked with modern wireless headphones – we’re increasingly paying more for lower longevity. And maybe you’d actually be better off spending a bit less.
Most headphones aren’t built to last
Look, I appreciate in some ways two years is quite a long time. Twenty-four months ago, I didn’t even write for TechRadar. Elon Musk was in charge of the dumpster fire that was Twitter rather than the dumpster inferno that is X. And the phrase ‘Brat summer’ would have attracted mystified looks, rather than weary eyerolls.
But in the world of audio equipment, two years is not a long time. Most audio equipment doesn’t tend to be a biennial purchase; instead it’s built to last. I bought my budget pair of KEF Cresta 3 floorstanding speakers and Cambridge Audio A5 amplifier when I was 20 years old. Terrifyingly, I’m almost double that now and yet both gadgets work as well as the day I bought them. Even wired headphones, properly taken care of, can last years – especially given they’re often repairable and have replaceable parts.
I don’t need to be a soothsayer of snark to know that some will likely write off this whole episode as being unique to Apple products, given they’re notoriously hard to repair and often tied to short product cycles. But I’d argue the issue runs far deeper than that: across many of the major headphone brands, premium prices have become a guarantee of fancier features, not necessarily increased reliability. And part of that is down to their evolution from a predominantly analog product to what amounts to a sophisticated computer in their own right.
As wireless headphones have become smarter, they’re increasingly reliant on chipsets and firmware that aren’t necessarily designed with longevity in mind. The CPUs and modules required to apply sophisticated audio processing or drive connectivity are incredibly sophisticated components and each introduces an extra point of failure. Meanwhile, firmware updates can be abandoned at a brand’s discretion when shinier products become their new priority. Just like our smartphones, which many of us throw out on a three-year upgrade cycle, we’re increasingly sacrificing audio gadgets’ Methuselah-like longevity and sustainability for something that burns much brighter but for a fraction as long.
Clearly we shouldn’t abandon all the great features offered by noise cancelling headphones just because they have the life expectancy of a butterfly entering a jet engine’s air intake. I’m not going back to the dark days of having to untangle a bramble of wires every morning or hear other human beings’ conversations on the subway. But it has all made me wonder whether I’m willing to commit myself to spending $549 / £499 / AU$899 every two or three years, just to gain relatively modest improvements in terms of features and sound quality.
This feeling has been compounded the more I’ve tried out some of the excellent competitors available at the lower end of the market. For example, the aforementioned Cambridge Audio Melomania P100 have expressive spacious sound, decent – if not exactly silent – noise cancelling and a battery life that puts most rivals to shame, lasting a ludicrous 60 hours with ANC on and up to 100 hours without.
Inevitably, the P100 lack certain features: you don’t get proprietary spatial audio (Cambridge Audio doesn’t dig that kind of thing), nor the sumptuous bass of Apple’s cans but, even if they did die after a couple of years, their $239 / £199 price means I could get 2.5 times as long a period of use before I’d spent as much as I would on another pair of AirPods Max. And the fact that elements like the battery are user-replaceable with standard tools means that they shouldn’t cost anywhere near as much if you’d rather opt for the sustainable option of repairing them, rather than handing them in at my local recycling center.
So while I’ve loved all the premium, audiophile-grade noise cancelling headphones I’ve owned in the past, I think those days are behind me. Sorry, AirPods Max: I’m not coming back.
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