There’s a new big pair of noise cancelling headphones on the way, as Sennheiser readies version four of the Momentum with a staggering 60 hours of battery life.
Headphone battery life is improving all the time, but a new pair from Sennheiser looks to take battery life to a new level, while delivering some solid sound cred, as well. It’s so good, it might just survive your next holiday on one charge, and we’re not talking just the flight, but possibly the entire vacation.
The latest pair builds on what we heard earlier in the year in the Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 3, but pops up in the over-ear headphone equivalent, the Momentum. Not a truly wireless earphone variety, the Momentum Wireless is Sennheiser’s large headphone range, and in the latest model, the Momentum 4 Wireless, the approach isn’t just on a big pair, but a big battery life, too.
A 42mm headphone driver is used here inside a large pair of over-ears, using what is clearly a circumaural design and some deep cushions to provide a big pair you can wear, working over Bluetooth and supporting what Sennheiser says is Adaptive Noise Cancellation.
There’s support for Sennheiser’s Smart Control app, offering both an equaliser and a sound personalisation feature to tweak the sound to your liking, while two sets of beamforming microphones will handle voice pick-up in calls, plus talking to a phone’s smart assistant.
While a big comfy design and big sound are likely the features that will grab you upon first glance, the Momentum 4 Wireless looks to really impress with battery life, offering up to a staggering 60 hours of active use, with 10 minutes of charge getting six hours of life.
That’s more than any other pair of ANC headphones we’ve tested so far, beating the roughly 30 hours from its obvious competitor in the Sony WH-1000XM5, and clearly beating the 20 hours from Apple’s AirPods Max.
To put that 60 hours into perspective, the world’s longest flight right now is just shut of 19 hours, running from New York to Singapore. To exhaust the 60 hours on offer from the Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless, you’d have to take roughly three of those flights, or more likely, fly the 8 hours from Sydney to Singapore and then travel on to New York (19), come back the same way (8+19+19+8=54), and still have a good six hours of extra time to listen to tunes in the airport lounge waiting.
That’s not too shabby, and it even comes with an airplane adaptor, something that’s beginning to go missing in noise cancelling headphone packages.
Like other pairs of high-end headphones, Sennheiser’s Momentum 4 Wireless won’t necessarily be inexpensive, set to cost $549.95 when they launch in Australia in late-August, landing locally from August 23. There’s no news yet on whether they’ll support head-tracking or spatial sound, but we’ll look to reviewing these as quickly as possible and let you know.
