Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 review: seriously cool, classy cans

The new Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 headphones have a fight on their hands. Not only are they successors to the truly-excellent Px7 S2 headphones — five star cans in their own right — but they launch into a segment of the headphone market where the competition has never been fiercer.

Whether it’s Sony’s WH-1000XM5, the Bose QuietComfort Ultra or the Apple AirPods Max, you’ve got lots of great-sounding, feature-rich options where B&W is positioning its latest over-ears.

So the team at Bowers & Wilkins must be feeling pretty smug right now. Not only are the Px7 S3’s exceptional sounding, but smart tweaks to the industrial design makes them more comfortable than ever too. These might well be the best headphones you can buy at this price point.

Read on to find out why...

Price and availability

The Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 headphones are available now, priced at £399. You can purchase them directly from the Bowers & Wilkins website, and select retailers.

It’s a different story for US readers —although the headphones are heading stateside, their launch is being delayed while the current market fluctuations settle. As such, we’re still waiting on a price and release date for the States.

1. Premium design details

Bowers & Wilkins has a knack for creating classy-looking headphones — well engineered, with a sports car sheen to the finish.

The Px7 S3 is no different. Available in Anthracite Black (which is more of a metallic grey), Indigo Blue and Canvas White, all models look seriously chic.

A textured fabric weave goes over the headband and around the external perimeter of each earcup, while a leather-like finish covers the substantial memory foam padding across the band and earcups.

The arm which holds each earcup has been redesigned to create a firm, but comfortable, clamping force around your head, with the cups reshaped to give them a slimmer profile when worn.

Each arm can be extended to adjust for comfort, with the mechanism allowing them to twist in and lay almost flat. Though they can’t be folded in, they’re thin enough to lay in a relatively slimline hard carry case (finished with the same textured fabric as the cans themselves), meaning they’ll slip into a bag or case without much hassle.

Hidden inside a snap-open compartment in the carry case you’ll find the USB-C and USB-C-to-3.5mm cables that charge the headphones and / or connect hardwired to your audio source.

If you’re done fiddling with lousy touch-sensitive headphone control panels, the Px7 S3 will serve you well — all controls make use of physical hardware buttons. On the left cup you have a power toggle that doubles up as a Bluetooth connectivity switch when held in the up position, and a Quick Action button for cycling through noise cancelling modes.

That button can be configured to summon a voice assistant instead, too. The other side is home to physical volume up and down buttons and a play/pause button — shaped and textured differently to the volume controls to help avoid mistaken presses. They’re great.

In a nice nod to future sustainability and the long-term life of the headphones, you’ll also be able to get ear cushions and headband components serviced by B&W engineers should something start to age or break. It’s not a DIY repair option, but it’ll help to extend the life of the headphones should the worst happen.

2. Superior sound quality

The most important bit — the Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 sound phenomenal. Taking a ground-up approach to the acoustic build here compared to the Px7 S2e predecessors, multiple tweaks come together to make for a really glorious sound. Bowers makes use of 40mm biocellulose drive units, with redesigned chassis, voice coil, magnet and suspension to aid clarity and reduce distortion

Each drive unit also gets its own discrete headphone amplifier, keeping dynamism and detail high, and enabling high-resolution 24-bit / 96 kHz playback where available, and processing aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless codecs.

Another byproduct of the new design is a pair of headphones that can be driven surprisingly loud — though your hearing health may take a battering if abused.

The headphones play wonderfully with whatever genre we throw at them. Kicking off with the effervescent '90s dance vibes of Peggy Gou’s Back to One, the pounding beat, pulsing stabs and reverb-laden vocal all find space to breathe and harmony in the presentation. There’s bounce and playfulness here, letting the tapestry of dance influences and eras be fully expressed.

For something crunchier, we’re off to Era Vulgaris era Queens of the Stone Age and Sick, Sick, Sick, with its pummelling baseline and snarling guitars. T

here’s a real growl to the low end here, and spiky riffs that can turn to mush on lesser headphones. But here everything has knife-like sharpness where it should, and rich bottom where needed. Josh Homme’s Californian drawl sits comfortably at the fore too, not lost in the battling instrumentation.

At the opposite end of the scale, a Shortlist test-track go-to with Judee Sill and The Kiss, perhaps the most delicate 4-and-a-half minutes of piano and vocal ever committed to tape.

The warmth of the double tracked vocal takes on an ethereal quality through the Bowers cans, and once the strings start to swell, the full emotional dynamism of the track is beautifully presented.

No notes, as they say. These are sublime headphones.

3. Near-silent noise cancelling and crisp call quality

If you want to block out the world, the Px7 S3 does an admirable job of keeping external sound out. There’s good passive noise cancelling for starters, but the new eight-microphone configuration and noise-aware algorithms do the heavy lifting with excellent active noise-cancelling performance.

The positioning of the mics, both forward and rear-facing, ensure the headphones have a smart idea of the sounds coming from all around you, and can react in kind to counteract them.

It all comes together for great hands-free call quality, too. B&W’s ‘ADI Pure Voice’ processing technology can identify voices amidst background noise, and push those to the fore to let your dulcet tones be heard clearly by any call recipient.

4. Smart wear-sensor pausing

One super-useful feature of the Px7 S3 is the accuracy of its wear sensor. Hidden in each cup is a sensor that can spot the proximity of your ears, and cleverly pause music when you take the headphones off, hitting play when you replace them.

Bowers & Wilkins aren’t the first brand to include the feature, but this is the most responsive and accurate implementation we’ve seen so far. And, if for whatever reason it’s a little too trigger happy with that pause feature, you can tweak the sensitivity in the accompanying Bowers & Wilkins app.

5. Long-lasting battery life

You’ll get 30 hours of battery life from a single charge of the Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 headphones, letting you easily go a few days of solid use before having to reach for the charging cable.

A short 15 minute charging session also gives you seven hours of playback, keeping the music alive even when top-up time is short.

It’s good, but note it’s not class leading — the marathon battery life of the Marshall Monitor III A.N.C, for instance, extends to 70 hours with ANC on and a wild 100 hours with it switched off. But the Px7 S3 is keeping pace with the majority of its rivals here, and that quick charge feature will really help in a pinch.

6. E.Q-equipped app — and ‘coming-soon’ features

The accompanying Bowers & Wilkins Music app is a useful stop for tinkering with the details of the presentation from the headphones. Here you can tweak power saving features, the sensitivity of the auto-pausing wear sensor, and change whether or not the left-can action button triggers your device’s voice assistant or cycles through noise cancelling modes.

You can also funnel your streaming services of choice into its ‘Library’ function, making a one-stop shop for finding your favourite tunes — though we’ll expect most listeners will stick to their favoured service’s interface.

What is really excellent though, and shows the mastery of the dynamics in the B&W cans, is the E.Q controller. Dialling up or down frequencies to your taste, you can create drastically different sound profiles, to the point where you can even have fun making impromptu remixes on the fly.

There’s more to come via software updates for the cans, too. Support for Auracast, allowing one source to beam to dozens of wireless audio devices at once, will be at a later date, as well Bluetooth LE alongside the LC3 codec for low-energy, hi-res playback.

Bowers & Wilkins will also be taking its first stab at spatial audio — the virtual surround sound style that makes music feel as though it’s coming from all around you. It’s not ready for testing yet so the jury’s out on how that will sound, but sees Bowers adding a much-requested feature to its repertoire.

Verdict

The Px7 S3 headphones knock it out of the park. Handling everything from thumping dance tracks to delicate vocal melodies with breathtaking clarity and detail, they’re a surprisingly thorough improvement on their already-excellent predecessors.

Add to that the top-notch noise cancellation, incredibly responsive wear sensors, and a seriously comfortable design, and you've got a pair of headphones that will do justice to your most cherished musical moments.

In fact, Bowers & Wilkins has also made a rod for its own back — despite the praise here, this isn’t B&W’s top-tier model. That’s reserved for the Px8 line — with a new Px8 S2 model expected to land later this year, according to B&W itself.

How it intends to top the Px7 S3 will be fascinating to see — and those that can’t wait (or afford) the incoming more-premium Bowers headphones can rest assured the Px7 S3 delivers on all fronts.

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