New Microsoft Surface Headphones 2 - Matte Black

Great headphones, comfortable and easy to use the knobs on the side for volume. Noise cancellation is great and you can easily turn to the level to what you want. The biggest reason I bought these was for conference calls while working from home. My wife works night and they are great for her not having to her my meetings. Microphone on calls is great, no complaints on clarity. The headphones do go on mute easily. I find myself bumping it when I stretch. Also I find the tactile touch be activated randomly and pausing music when I do not want it too. My only other comment is the announcement of battery life, not complaining about the actual battery life. Headphones last over a full day of work worth of meeting. It is just when I put them on, I get a random numbers of hours left announcement which is usually double of what it actually is. Over all great headphones with 3 little annoying features. I would buy again.

Got these because the sound quality is good and the noise cancellation is good, but mainly for the looks. These headphones have such a nice design and feel great to hold. They're comfortable and media control is so easy with the dials and touch sensitive sides. The auto play/pause when taking headphones off works well and as expected. Sound is great ones you change the EQ settings. Stock settings arent very good. Noise cancellation is great but only problem is that you cant turn it off. I find that i dont want noise cancellation most of the time and i have it at the lowest setting possible because any lower and it turns on ambient sound mode which sounds weird and its kinda useless as it doesnt work very well. I usually just have one ear not covered if i want to hear someone. Anyways these headphones are great.

To put this review into context, I am not an audiophile and the only thing I can compare it to are the AirPods Pro that I’ve been using since they came out. I was using the AirPods Pro every single day at work and commute so I wanted a pair of noise canceling headphones to use only at work not to burn out my AirPods Pro too quickly. Cons: - disappointed by the sound out of the box. I got it close to the sound I’m used to by giving it a gentle V EQ with the app (using the "classical" EQ, and bumping slightly the lows and low mids to match the other side). I got a better sound too forcing my iMac to use Aptx, but still I feel that my AirPods Pro have more headroom, punch and definition. However I got used to the difference after a few hours of use - noise candelation: i feel it does a better job that the AirPods Pro reducing constant and low sounds, However it is worse for very high sounds. Without music, I can hear the mouse clicks around me just like without ANC, which is disappointing for a product tailored for open office use. The transparency mode is also not as "true" as the AirPods Pro and the ambiant sound boost is just horrible. - comfort: I get a little pain on the top of my head after an hour of use or so - other defaults: multi pairing doesn’t work for me. I get cracking and disconnecting sounds whenever I play something in the same time with my phone. There seems to be digital cracking sounds whenever I adjust the noise canceling levels. Pros: - the dials and the design. These are the real pros but the reason why I got them at the first place. I’m a designer myself and I appreciate when companies make minimal, well thought out and very intuitive products. And that sold it to me. - the price: with all these cons, I’m happy that Microsoft reduced the price of these. It makes much more sense, even though I would have preferred keeping the original price while fixing these problems for a second generation. To conclude: I bought these headphones mainly for their design and controls. And these headphones are great for the price. I would only consider selling them if the rumored new Apple headphones have amazing sound, noise cancelation and comfort. If not, I’ll be more than happy to keep using them at work.

Sound quality is good. Comfortable to wear. Comes wireless with option to use audio cable. Intuitive design with the rotating bezels and touch control. The battery charge lasts a long time.

Sounds amazing, is lightweight and comfortable, and the noise cancelation is much better than the previous model. If there is an issue with connectivity, check if your phone's name is long or has special characters. For some reason they didn't connect when my phone name was long.

My requirements for a bluetooth headset for work purposes were a lot more hard to meet than I thought they would be: 1. Straight bluetooth (ie., no dongle) 2. Mic Mute on-board the headset itself. 3. Multipoint (ideally, 3 connections inclusive of phone and both a Mac and Windows laptop), with an ability to manually switch. I'd tried a variety of cheaper bluetooth headsets, as well as the Sony WH-1000MX4, and Bose 700s. The Sony didn't have a mute, on-bard, and the Bose doesn't switch or work well across multiple devices without the dongle (which Bose themselves say is often required). These headphones knock it out of the park. I absolutely would recommend these for anyone in my similar situation. While you can't manually switch the inputs, it does a good job of auto-detect switching across OS X (MacBook Pro 2020), and MS Surface Book 3.. The rest of the controls are easy. The mute button is a bit buggy at times but generally works great. They don't sound as great or have as great noise cancellation as the Bose, but it's serviceably good and I use them every day. No dongle required. The battery life is great, and unlike both the Bose and the Sony these will charge as you use them. This was unexpected and a great feature. When you add the much better price point of this headset over the Bose and Sony, it's not even a question. Again, I absolutely recommend.

I was interested in getting a pair of bluetooth headphones, mainly for when I'm travelling but also for everyday use around the house. I've never had a pair of active noise-canceling ones before and that's not a feature I would say was very important to me going into this, but I figured if I'm shelling out I might as well try out the tech. I looked at a good number of contenders, and eventually narrowed it down to these versus the Sony XM3s or XM4s. People seem to generally think the Sonys sound better and have superior battery life, but the dealbreaker for me was the widespread reports of the XM3s wonking out in cold weather conditions (I live in Alaska). It's possible they've fixed that on the XM4s, but I didn't really want to chance it. Also, the touch controls on the Sonys seemed a little troublesome to me. Anyway, I caught these Surface Headphones for a little cheaper on Prime Day, and decided to give them a shot. The quick shot on this for those just looking for a verdict is that I've had a mostly pleasant experience with them from day one. The headphones came almost fully charged, which is always a nice, if minor touch. They also come with their own carrying case, which has an internal mesh pocket for also carrying some cables. And speaking of cables, the headphones come with a USB-C cable and a 3.5mm cable with a mic built-in. This is important because even though these headphones have a mic for hands-free, the mic is disabled during wired usage. These are, in my opinion, comfortable headphones. The cushioning is not as large and thick as on my Status Audio CB-1s, but I don't feel any fatigue wearing them. The headphones have a nice but significant heft to them, and look unassuming and reasonably elegant. They DO NOT fold up completely for portability, but the inclusion of a carrying case helps me overlook this. The controls are simple. For buttons, you have a power button and a dedicated mic mute button, which I appreciate. Then you have control dials. You can rotate the outer ring of each of the cans to control volume and noise-canceling. This is also simple, which I like. And then finally, the flat area on each side of the headphones is a basic touch surface for play/pause, forward/back, and the voice assistant (like Cortana or maybe Siri). This is where I have run into issues. You tap once to play/pause, twice and thrice for forward and back, respectively, and hold for the voice assistant. The single tap and hold gestures work fine, but the double and especially triple tap gestures have been pretty unreliable for me, such that I've stopped using them entirely. What often happens is it ends up recognizing a triple tap as some mixture of a single and double tap instead. The headphones also talk to you. When you turn them on, the first thing you get is a notification on how much battery is remaining. It also tells you when it connects to a device, using a text-to-speech engine. It also tells you when you hit the minimum or max on noise-canceling levels, which is nice because it serves as a reminder for which direction to turn the dial when you want to lower or increase noise-canceling. Also of note, the headphones automatically pause when you take them off, and resume when you put them back on. This is a nice feature I suppose, but I think it would be nice if you could disable it. Other features… It has an accompanying app, for Windows, Android, and iOS. The app lets you rename the headphones and remotely set noise-cancelling, and on Windows it is also how you set up some additional features for Office that I'm not very familiar with. Probably the most important thing the apps let you do though is update the firmware and customize the equalizer. It would be great if you could also customize the touch gestures via the apps, like change single-tap to forward or something like that. But you can't. Also on Android, the app floats a constant notification while the headphones are connected. That's a little annoying and redundant, so I forcibly disabled that notification via the system notification settings. There have been no negative effects from this, from what I can tell. The headphones can be used passively over a 3.5mm cable, with or without battery life. In this scenario, they become just like any other pair of detachable over-ear headphones; you cannot use the active-noise canceling, and the Bluetooth radio shuts off (in fact, you have to reboot the headphones to use them normally after connecting a cable). The volume dial still works, though. These headphones use multipoint, and to good effect. You can connect to multiple devices at the same time, and the headphones switch between them without a hitch. For example, I use these with my laptop and my phone. I can listen to a podcast on my phone, pause there, then open up a video on my laptop and the headphones will automatically switch to outputting from my laptop. It's really good. Call quality with the mic seems good. I tested it briefly on a Discord call and everyone gave the thumbs up that they could hear me perfectly clearly, even in comparison to a dedicated boom mic that I usually use. As for noise cancelling… as I said at the beginning of the review, these are my first ANC headphones, so I don't really have a point of comparison. But I will say, I'm impressed by the concept itself. I can see these being killer on an airplane, and when I realized that I then felt a lot of shame for killing my ears turning up the volume with standard earbuds. I look forward to the next time I get to fly with these headphones, whenever that will be. Otherwise, the two big use cases I've had instead are vacuuming and dish cleaning. These will effectively cancel out the noise from both, allowing me to listen to stuff from my phone or computer, and at a reasonable volume too. I'm super into that. The ambient noise amplification, by contrast, is a bit uneven/unnatural sounding, though. Somehow that doesn't surprise me, but if I want ambient noise I kinda just end up removing the headphones a lot of the time. Obviously these are headphones, and headphones are supposed to sound good. Well sadly, this isn't really the review you'll want to be reading for an in-depth opinion on sound quality. I'm not an audiophile, and the things I listen to most with these (audiobooks, podcasts) are inherently not that high on bitrate anyway. I think these headphones sound great, and that's about the most I can say on the matter. The headphones are rated to last 20hrs on a charge, which is already less than a lot of other competitors, namely the well-known Sony XM4s. But in my experience you're more likely to get ~17hrs. It's not terrible, but I hope they do better in their next iteration. All in all, these are easy to use, reasonably stylish headphones that tick most boxes for me. They could use some improvements here and there, like in customizing the controls and in battery life, but I enjoy using them and feel good about my purchase. Edit 5/31/2021 Knocking a star off of these. They have an issue I've encountered recently where they often disconnect from my devices, unprompted, and go back into pairing mode. I'm not sure what's causing it, but it happens frequently enough to annoy me. Edit 8/21/2021 The disconnecting issue seems to have disappeared, but I have another issue. These SURFACE headphones made by MICROSOFT, the WINDOWS company hitch in audio constantly when playing anything from my SURFACE computer, also made by MICROSOFT, the WINDOWS company. They work flawlessly with my phone, but I can't get them to play anything reliably from my Surface Book, even though they connect just fine.

I had the original headphones and loved them and then they broke. I ended up replacing them with Beats 3 headphones. They were ok I guess but they kept not connecting correctly to my Teams meetings. I decided to get the Surface headphones again since I loved them so much and the noise canceling was soooo much better. I would recommend these to anyone in an office setting that needs to cut out noise. The sound is clear and noise canceling is fantastic. Works great with Teams meetings and calls. It switches seamlessly between my phone and computer as well

Had them for two years. The control scheme is so far and away better than any other headphones I’ve ever worn. Still work fine even with dust and rain hitting them.

If you like a bassy sound, then this is not the pair of headphones for you. But if you prefer clear mids to high, then these are definitely worth considering! Comfortable, good battery life and multi device pairing with intuitive scroll wheels for volume and noise-cancelling controls are a dream to use. Built quality is good as well, Microsoft knows how to make good lifestyle devices. Overall, close alternative to the Sony’s 1000-xm3(looking to try out the new xm4) if you’re in the market for something different. Audiophiles may not like the sound quality but honestly, for everyone who is using their mobile listening to Spotify/iTunes/YT, these are more than decent to do the job..

Definitivamente hay que optar por estos equipos de alta gama para conseguir los resultados esperados, Los probé por par de semanas en llamadas de trabajo de Teams y con Meet. Su conexión por bluetooth es excelente, ya que tengo dañado el puerto del cable, se conecta al laptop y a mi iphone de manera paralela y puedes atender una llamada en ambos equipos. Mi Laptop es surface y funcionan muy bien. Ahora voy a pedir el Microsoft Surface USB Link ya que con este componente eleva a un nivel mas alto, certificado el uso de los audifonos con 365 y teams. Espero que les ayude el comentario. Con respecto al paquete llego sellado y nuevo al 100% y llego al otro dia. Se ve que tienen el inventario en Mex. Saludos.

It is great to make calls and have all these virtual meetings. You can switch connections between phone and PC. But I will not rank it high in sound quality in music listening. The App for IPhone also has issues. It is very slow and keeps on freezing.

Product is good, but apparently Singapore MS support does not support it. After it broke, there is no way to repair it without shipping it back to a pickup location in the USA. Might as well state no warranty