Beats have unveiled its brand-new Studio3 Wireless headphones. While on the surface they appear to simply be an upgrade of the last Studio headphones there’s more going on under the surface than you might think.
Not only do the Studio3′s now offer Pure Adaptive Noise Cancelling (Pure ANC) but these are the next pair of headphones to be given Apple’s custom-built W1 chip.
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Beats
First things first though. While noise-cancelling isn’t new (brands like Sennheiser, Bose and Beats have been using it for years) Beats believe its new technology is a step forward.
Traditionally, noise-cancelling works by having microphones on the outside of the headphones listening to the ambient noise. Software inside the headphones then recreates that ambient noise and inverts it, piping it through alongside your music and effectively cancelling the disturbance out.
According to Beats this is too heavy-handed an approach, so with its noise cancelling its engineers decided to use something quite different.
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Beats
The Studio3 still have the microphones on the outside, except this time it compares in real-time the noise-cancelled music with the original track.
It then looks for anomalies in the waveform between the two and makes tiny adjustments to best fit the original piece of music.
What’s pretty astonishing about all this is that it’s doing it 50,000 times every second.
Despite all this Beats are promising a seriously impressive battery-life of 22 hours with Pure ANC turned on and 40 hours of playback with it turned off. How does it do this? Well this is where Apple steps in.
Alongside Apple’s wireless AirPods, it announced that it had created a new type of audio processor called the W1 chip. This intelligent chip was designed to both improve audio quality, help you connect to your Apple devices but more importantly improve the battery-life.
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Beats
To do this it constantly switches the Bluetooth between high and low-power modes, maintaining the connection between your devices while using the bare minimum power.
Apple recently put its W1 chip inside its PowerBeats3 Wireless headphones and the difference to battery life was pretty astonishing so it’ll be interesting to see if the Studio3′s can maintain this level of improvement.
Finally, and potentially more excitingly for you the consumer is that these are actually cheaper than Beats’ previous Studio headphones costing £299.
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