Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H100 review – Subtle luxury

Danish audio company Bang & Olufsen has been in the business for a whole century, so you could say they have a good amount of experience crafting high-end audio equipment. The brand’s latest flagship wireless headphones, the Beoplay H100, are exactly that.

They are far from what one might call ‘affordable’ — at R37,000 that’s not a word in this company’s mantra. Its cheapest product is a R7,000 60W portable speaker. Instead, the company focuses on delivering finely crafted, high-quality products with longevity in mind. That’s evident by their five-year warranty and modular design.

As with other B&O products, these cans have been designed to make repairs simpler, so you won’t need to chuck the whole headset away if a driver stops working or the internal battery dies. They should also benefit from software updates which help to keep them up to date with industry advancements and new tech that B&O develops, more on that later.

What you get for the money

R37,000 can go a long way; a few months’ rent, food for half a year, or a really (really) nice set of headphones. These particular headphones are a combination of aluminium, titanium, lambskin leather, cowhide leather, something B&O calls ‘toughened glass’, and some premium fabric. When combined in just the right way, the result is one of the most premium-looking and feeling headphones to grace our ears.

Before you even get to the headphones, you’ll have to take them out of their leather travel pouch. As travelling with headphones goes, we’d usually prefer a hard carry case, especially when it needs to protect something this valuable. But we came to like the leather pouch.

It looks suitably fashionable, is easy to pack in your carry-on, and puts the H100 into a fully powered-off state that reduces its power consumption to just 0.002W allowing it to retain its charge for “more than a year”. Why you’d buy headphones like this and leave them in a case for a year is beyond us, but they can do it nonetheless and we hope other headphone makers copy this feature.

Every other aspect of their design and build quality is equally premium. The lambskin earcups are as soft as you’d expect and the headband is designed to distribute the cans’ 375g weight over more of your head. The result? Comfortable headphones we had no trouble wearing the whole day, and then some more when we got home. Their clamping force was a little too tight for our liking initially but after wearing them for a day or two it relaxed to fit our noggin.

Living the premium life

Their premium design is also echoed in how they are used. Stop fiddling around for the power button, just put them on. When you take them off, they’ll enter a standby mode that see them hold their charge for a good three months outside the pouch.

Equally impressive was their battery life while in use. The B&O announcement and the H100’s product page mention an average playback time of 34 hours – that’s with active noise cancelling enabled, by the way. While not record-breaking, it remains impressive. But it got better.

A few days after we received our review unit, B&O pushed an update (ver. 1.1.1) that reportedly gave the H100s another ten hours of battery life, according to the patch notes. After an hour spent charging them to full, we put that to the test and counted around 43 hours of listening with ANC enabled. That’s a good sign that B&O will keep its promise to add other features via updates.

With the auto-stop/start, we thought the constant switch to standby mode might cause reconnection delays (you can adjust how long they’ll wait before switching ‘off’), but while their reconnection speed wasn’t seamless, it wasn’t slow enough to cause much irritation. Out of the box, they support a wireless connection with two devices and B&O says three-way multi-device support is coming via an update this year.

When you’ve got them on, there are two physical buttons, one on each earcup, two notched rotating aluminium haptic dials, and two interactive touch-sensitive ‘toughened glass’ surfaces. The functions they’ll perform can be customised in the companion app but we never felt the need to change them from the defaults because of how intuitive they are.

The controls for the left and right earcup are the same, save for the dials – the right controls volume while the left dial controls the mix of active noise cancelling and transparency so you can fine-tune how much of the outside world you want to let in.

What about performance?

Speaking of active noise cancelling and transparency, while the Beoplay H100’s ANC lands somewhere between ‘just okay’ and ‘not bad’, their transparency mode impressed us. Bang & Olufsen have used ten “studio-quality” mics in and around the H100 to facilitate what it calls ‘TrueTransparency’, so it isn’t surprising it performs well.

Some of those mics are also used for a feature B&O calls ‘EarSense’. With this feature, the headphones continuously monitor ambient noise to dynamically adjust their sound reproduction. Thankfully, this is handled subtly and doesn’t result in wild variations to what you hear.

While less impressive than its ‘TrueTransparency’, the H100’s ANC isn’t particularly bad. It will attenuate office chatter but struggles a little when presented with aeroplane engines or a nearby generator. Those sounds are lessened but not to the same degree as the wireless ANC industry leaders.

As for audio performance, the Beoplay H100 house a pair of 40mm ‘electro-dynamic’ titanium drivers. We’re not entirely sure if this is unnecessary marketing babble or a whole new driver technology. We’d wager it’s the former. But the words used to describe them aren’t as important as how they perform.

For the most part, we enjoyed our time listening to the Beoplay H100. They are a premium set of headphones and deliver a (mostly) premium sound. We found their performance in the bass and lower-mid frequencies to be very good. They have a present bass response that doesn’t dominate their sound and a clean, articulate midrange that allows many textural elements, especially in vocals, to shine through.

We were also impressed with their stereo imaging, even without spatial audio features enabled. For those who want it, they virtualise a 3D sound with audio mixed in stereo (streaming from Spotify), as well as support content optimised for Dolby Atmos, including head tracking (streaming from Apple Music).

What we didn’t particularly enjoy was their treble response. There seems to be a tonal imbalance, at least in their wireless listening mode, between the low, mid, and high frequencies where the treble could sound overly compressed – as if you’ve wrapped a speaker in a blanket.

These aren’t meant to be studio-grade reference headphones (even though they cost the same, or, in some cases, more) but we expected a little more considering the price tag. We’re aware this might not be a big deal for some prospective buyers. Many would be content with adjusting the sound through the B&O companion app but we feel B&O’s implementation falls short for the Beoplay H100.

The H100 uses the same Beosonic EQ as we saw with the Beosound A5. While it served its purpose for that portable speaker, these premium headphones deserve a better solution. In the case of our perceived tonal imbalance, we might’ve been able to remedy the issue by tweaking the treble response. Except you don’t get that much freedom here. If you want more treble, you must be content with less bass.

You also don’t get any wireless high-res codecs… yet. B&O claims LDAC support is coming with an update sometime this year. Given what we saw with improved battery life, we’ve hopefully. But that’s a possibility for the future and we can only review what we have available now. These premium headphones only support high-resolution audio over a wired connection at present.

Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H100 verdict

There’s no denying the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H100 is a premium product. Its build quality is superb and the materials used in its construction are some of the best we’ve had on our head. Similarly, using the H100 while working in the office or as a travel headphone is a suitably premium experience thanks to its intuitive controls and features.

(If more headphone makers could copy a few of them, we’d live in a better world, where forgetting to charge your headphones before a long trip is no big deal. Doesn’t that sound nice?)

Battery life is great and B&O’s active noise cancellation and transparency tech has come a long way. It can’t quite keep up with the industry champs in either case, but none of those champs look or feel as good as the H100.

Despite the tonal imbalance we experienced, we’re confident most folks will be pleased with their sound signature. More critical listeners should give them a try before committing to a purchase. Who knows, maybe B&O have already patched the issue out with another update.