If you care as much about what your audio gear looks like as you do about how it sounds, then Bang & Olufsen’s new Beoplay H100 headphones are probably for you… provided you have a big bag of money to spend on headphones.
The B&O Beoplay H100 headphones are the latest cans from the luxury Danish audio company and are set to improve on the company’s previous high-end models, the Beoplay H95.
Made of gold?
The Beoplay H100 aren’t quite made of gold but they aren’t too far away from it either. Though the lambskin leather earpads are undoubtedly soft, they’re sure to make environmentalist-types convulse with empathy. Elsewhere, you’ll find aluminium, knitted cloth, and scratch-resistant glass over the ear cups’ touch-sensitive parts. The colour options sound just as luxurious with Infinite Black, Hourglass Sand, and the slightly more exclusive Sunset Apricot to choose from.
These headphones are apparently inspired by B&O’s equally ludicrously-priced Beolab 90 speakers. They use 40mm Titanium drivers that B&O say deliver “sound clarity and dynamic performance that you normally only hear on high-end loudspeakers.”
Sounds like gold?
Expected premium headphone features show up with the H100 supporting Dolby Atmos with head tracking and high-resolution audio up to 96kHz/24-bit. It also supports what B&O call EarSense which supposedly monitors how the headphones fit on your head and adjusts their sound profile in real time.
Bang & Olufsen is marketing the Beoplay H100 as a travel headphone so we’re not surprised to find they feature active noise cancelling. B&O claims to have doubled ANC performance over the H95 with 10 ambient microphones listening and cancelling out the world around you when enabled. The company also says the H100 have the best transparency mode they’ve made to date, calling it TrueTransparency. We’ll be the judge of that.
Battery life is claimed to be around 34 hours with ANC enabled which isn’t bad but it is still a few hours less than the ‘cheaper’ Beoplay H95. Like Apple’s flagship headphones, the H100 features a low-power mode when they’re out of their carry case but not worn that B&O says can last up to 90 days. They’ll turn completely off when in the included fancy leather case.
Like B&O’s recent speakers, the company has designed the Beoplay H100 headphones with longevity in mind. They are supposed to be easier for technicians to work on and should offer better upgradability over their lifespan. The five-year warranty should go a long way to help with that and when you’re paying this much for headphones, we can understand why it’s a big deal for the brand.
Local preorders for the B&O Beoplay H100 headphones are set to open this week for R37,000.
