SHURE AONIC 50 HEADPHONES

Shure’s new wireless noise cancellers are the first ‘phones ever made that support Sony’s LDAC format, and are superb performers as well.

Modern-day audiophiles will probably be surprised to learn that back in the 70s, Shure was by far and away the biggest name in the hi-fi business, not only by virtue of for many years selling the world’s most expensive phono cartridge (the V15 and its many variants), but also by virtue of selling more phono cartridges than not only every other phono cartridge manufacturer at the time, but also more than most of them put together (Shure’s US factories produced nearly 10,000,000 cartridges per year).

That was pretty good for a company that Sidney Shure kicked off as a one-man operation in the back streets of Chicago in 1925. The company was initially named

“The Shure Radio Company” because in the beginning Sidney only sold radio parts, but after Sidney’s brother Sam joined the business in 1928, the name was changed to Shure Brothers, which was, after a while, shortened to just Shure Bros. It’s now called Shure Incorporated and the brothers are long gone.

Shure was also the biggest name in the microphone business, with its SM58 being the microphone of choice for professional vocalists around the world, primarily because of its renowned “proximity effect”, which enriched the vocal qualities of any singer who used one. It’s no wonder the SM58 has continuously been the best-selling microphone in the world since the late 1960s.

The carry-case Shure supplies with the Aonic 50s is huge… and circular. Indeed it looks more like a hatbox or a cake tin than a headphone carry-case. And when I say ‘huge’, it’s 250mm in diameter, which is only a tad smaller than an LP record. Not exactly the kind of thing you’d want in your carry-on luggage… or even in your checked luggage.

Not that anyone in the world will be doing much flying for a year or so! The case is very well-made, and very sturdy, but this sturdy construction means that it weighs 368 grams, which is more than the weight of the headphones themselves, which weigh 334 grams.

I guess the upside of the size of the case is that there’s scads of room inside for storage, even after you’ve stowed the supplied USB-C charging/digital data cable and the analogue cable, which has a 2.5mm gold-plated stereo jack at one end and a 3.5mm gold-plated phono jack at the other. Both cables are 1.5 metres long.

Exactly how much extra room is there for storage? I reckon you’d get a spare phone in there, along with a couple of USB chargers, a full-sized mouse (computer or real!), and a week’s worth of underwear. Like I said, there’s a lot of room in there!

The reason for the design of the carry case is the design of the Aonic 50s themselves. They’re not really a ‘folding’ design. You can twist the two ear-cups so they’re side by side, but this just ‘flattens’ the phones to make them thinner, rather than smaller.

So although that circular carry case is 250mm in diameter, it’s only 60mm deep.

Whenever you do fold the ear-cups flat to store them, the metal ‘arm’ that connects the ear-cups to the headband hits the top edge of the plastic ear-cup casing. When you first unpack the headphones, you’ll see that to prevent the possibility of any damage that this contact might cause during shipping, Shure has provided two foam pads—one for each earpiece—that prevent the metal arms from coming into contact with the ear-cups. However, embossed into these pads is the word ‘Remove’ which suggested to me that Shure intends you to remove them for use, which is easily done because the pads just peel off. However, I’d also suggest that you should not discard these, because you’ll need to re-attach them whenever you fold the headphones and put them in their case for the self-same reason that Shure provided them in the first place. This could easily become a nuisance. Personally, rather than bother with this rigmarole I’d just accept that the ear-cups are going to get a few harmless marks after a few years’ use and have done with it.

Shure’s Aonic 50s look every bit the part of a modern pair of up-market noise-cancelling over-ear headphones. The detachable leather-and-memory-foam ear-pads are attached to robust plastic ear-cups, which in turn are connected to a leather-covered headband via those aluminium arms I mentioned earlier that articulate through 90 degrees to allow the headphones to lie flat.

It’s important to note that those detachable ear-pads are very easy to remove and re-attach, which is important because, like all ear-pads, the foam inside the pads will deteriorate after several years of use, so you’ll need to replace them.

All buyers of expensive headphones should make sure that the ‘phones they’re buying have user-replaceable ear-pads, and also factor in the cost of replacing those pads. The cost of a replacement set (SBH2350) for the Aonic 50s had yet to be announced at the time of going to press.

Each ear-cup is embossed with a very classy-looking bright metallic ‘Shure’ logo, so your fellow travellers will be in no doubt that you’re wearing a premium brand of headphones. It’s not subtle! The leather comes in two colours: black and brown. My loaner pair was brown, and it’s a particular shade I’d have to describe as ‘milk chocolate’ brown. Judging only from the photos I’ve seen, I think I’d spend my hard-earned on the black leather version.

The Shure’s left-hand ear-cup has only the 2.5mm socket you’d use if you want the ultimate sound quality enabled by a wired connection, or to connect to an in-flight entertainment system when flights finally become available, or for situations where you simply run out of battery power.

It’s the right-hand ear-cup that has all the controls, in the shape of a two buttons (up/ down) for volume control between which is a button that can be used for ‘play/pause’, ‘next track’, ‘previous track’, ‘answer/end/ decline call’ and other such features that may be available on your compatible connected device.

There’s also a three position slider switch that allows you to switch between active noise-cancelling, ‘Off’ and a mode Shure calls ‘Environment Mode’. This Environment Mode is a type of ‘transparency’ mode that uses the active noise-cancelling microphones in reverse, to feed outside noise through into the ear-cups for situations where you need to be more aware of your surroundings or when you want to have a conversation without removing the headphones.

Shure’s active noise-cancelling circuitry has two different levels to choose from: ‘normal’ and ‘max’, plus you can also adjust the intensity of the Environment mode, but this feature is not obvious because you need to use Shure’s ‘ShurePlus Play’ app to make both adjustments. This app is a free download for both Android and iOS devices.

The intensity of the Environment mode can be adjusted through ten different levels, with the maximum setting being loud enough to make the sound of your own hand-claps painfully loud, so there’s a bit of overkill here.

The final switch on the left ear-cup is for power on/off and Bluetooth pairing. It has a small LED built into it that signals pairing and battery life while a quick double press of the power button will summon a disembodied voice that tells you how much battery life is left. Since I’m speaking of battery life, there’s a USB-C socket on the left ear-cup that does double duty as both a charging and a data port. When used for charging, I found that my (admittedly brand-new) review pair of Aonic 50s went from ‘flat’ to ‘full’ in around two hours. Shure claims a battery life of around 20 hours with noise-cancelling and Bluetooth both enabled. This isn’t quite the same length of time as some of its competitors, but should be more than sufficient for most trips, particularly now that most transport modes (buses, trains, planes and automobiles) offer on-the-go USB charging facilities.

Although Shure Corporation is still wholly US-owned and operates out of headquarters in the USA—and the Shure Aonic 50 headphones are designed in the United States—Shure manufactures the Aonic 50s in mainland China. (Hello uncle Xi!)

Behind the cloth-covered inner part of each ear-pad is a 50mm dynamic driver powered by a neodymium magnet for which Shure claims a frequency response of 20Hz to 22kHz. When used in wired mode, the Aonic 50s will present your device with a load impedance of 39Ω. Efficiency is claimed as 97.5dBSPL/mW.

The Aonic 50s support Bluetooth 5.0, while Shure has also included full aptX and aptX HD support—the latter means these headphones will support wireless hi-res audio up to 32-bit/48kHz from a compatible source and with all the usual music codecs. AptX Low Latency should ensure the headphones avoid any issues with lip-sync, and that proved to be the case during my review.

In what should probably go under a separate heading as a ‘NEWSFLASH’ is the fact that Shure’s Aonic 50s are the first non-Sony headphones to support Sony’s LDAC format. This is fantastic news for all those who are using Sony devices fitted with this codec, because it means they’ll finally have a choice of headphones. That has to be sensational news!

One bit of tech the Aonic 50s don’t have is an automated form of power switching: They don’t turn off automatically when you drop them down around your neck, otherwise remove them from your ears, or put them down and fold them sideways. This means you do have to remember to turn them off if you need to conserve battery power for any reason, but on balance, I’ve found the operation of some automated systems to be rather flaky, in that they don’t always turn off when they’re supposed to. So, on balance, I’ve decided not to score Shure down for this omission.

Control of the Aonic 50s is either physical via the controls on the right ear-cup, via the ShurePlus Play app or by using a voice assistant so, unlike many competitors, there are no touch-controls. If you use Google Assistant voice control, there’s no actual audio response from Google Assistant but the high voice capture quality of the Aonic 50’s microphones ensures that your commands are acted upon every time. The quality of the microphones also means that mobile call quality is about as good as it gets from a product like this, too. The app is more than simply for control, though, it has much more to offer.

In fact, it’s fundamentally a hi-res music player, with all major file types catered for, up to a maximum 24-bit/352kHz where WAV and FLAC files are concerned. Any locally stored music can be arranged into playlists and so on, and can be run through the app’s EQ settings—there are a few presets and the facility to save quite a number of custom settings too. EQ adjustment is only available through the app—music via streaming services is delivered with the Shures’ default sonic signature.

Obviously, given its recommended retail price of $599, the Shure Aonic 50s are in a price sector where they have plenty of competition, with the most obvious being the identically priced B&W PX7 ($599), Bose 700 ($599) and Sennheiser Momentum 3 ($599), but the least obvious (because they’re only $495) would be Sony’s WH-1000XM4s, which are the successor to Sony’s WH-1000XM3s, which took out almost every award known to man (or Sony’s marketing department).

Streaming from a Sony Xperia 5 via Tidal, I found that the Shure Aonic 50s extracted the musical fundamentals from everything from Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man through The Stone Roses’ I Am The Resurrection to Kendrick Lamar’s How Much a Dollar Cost. And it really doesn’t matter if you prefer Claude Debussy or Kamasi Washington, the Aonic 50s will give you chapter and verse on either in the most natural, most expressive and most detail-packed manner possible.

I found the low frequencies to be deep, textured and alive with fine harmonic detail— they start and stop with absolute control, and modulate seamlessly into the frequency information above them. Playing Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy in 24-bit/44.1kHz hi-res the Aonic

50s delivered a lesson in bass precision, with tight bass thwacks and precise, snappy clicks. Thanks to the Shures’ appetite for detail, I could pinpoint every element of the track.

Across the midrange, the Shures demonstrated their complete command of timbre and, again they delivered the finest of details: Marvin Gaye’s vocal was as characterful via the Aonic 50s as I have ever heard it.

As for the highest frequencies in the audio band, which is a region where even some of the highest-priced headphones are found wanting, the Shure Aonic 50s delivered an impeccable balance between attack, substance and brilliance. There was ample drive and shine to the treble, with not even a hint of hardness or grittiness.

The Aonic 50s have no problem dealing with broad-stroke dynamic shifts, just as they have no difficulty with low-level second-order dynamics. The sound-stage they describe is spacious, wide and coherently laid out, with more than enough elbow-room for individual elements to stand securely on even the busiest of stages.

When I shifted from Bluetooth to connection via the PLAY app there was a mild but definite increase in positivity and insight. Comparing a locally stored 16-bit/44.1kHz file of Can’s Moonshake to the Tidal-via-Bluetooth-derived equivalent shows how effective the app is as a music player—the sound is more open, more loaded with fine detail and more straightforwardly musical.

When I switched noise-cancelling in at the ‘normal’ level I was able to achieve effective cancellation in most environments without the dreaded ‘vacuum effect’ and ‘sucking out’ of the sound that you can get from the noise-cancelling tech of some other brands, but at the ‘Max’ noise-cancelling setting, things took a turn for the worse. The noise cancelling ability increased dramatically, but the knock-on effect was that I could hear more hiss caused by the noise-cancelling circuitry doing its thing.

Having the ANC at ‘Max’ also dramatically shifted the sonic balance of the headphones. The whole soundscape sounded thicker and more claustrophobic. There’s an extra layer of weight and solidity, but these come at the sacrifice of clarity. You might benefit from using the maximum ANC setting in particularly noisy environments, but I preferred the noise-cancelling at its standard setting.

There are two further ways to listen to the Shures—via the provided minijack-to-microjack cable, and via USB-C, when plugged into a computer. Switching to direct cable playback is quite a shift up in quality—the slight sibilance on vocals disappears entirely, and the soundstage is solidified with significantly better clarity for individual instruments; you couldn’t fail to pick the improvement in A–B switching, noting that the improvement will vary according to the quality of Bluetooth with which you are streaming and the DAC of the device to which you are cabled.

You can play via cable without turning on the headphones, but if you do you can also use the ANC and talk-through modes. Invoking ANC on the cable removes some warmth from the tonal balance, but will give fine results as the connection of choice for in-flight entertainment.

For USB-C playback the Shures must be powered up to appear as a playback device, which I could address from my Mac at anything from 16-bit/44.1kHz up to 32-bit/352kHz. ANC can again be used, with a similar slight thinning in sound, but the non-ANC USB playback delivered the absolute height of the Shures’ sonic abilities, which speaks well to Shure’s

DAC and audio circuits, and is highly recommended, though take care with volume, as USB playback disables the volume controls on the headphones. Your only limitation here is the 1.8-metre length of cable, though that’s ideal for use with a laptop as your music source.

The Shure Aonic 50s sound great! They’re balanced but they’re not undemonstrative. They’re subtle but they’re not understated. They’re energetic but they’re not aggressive. And they can turn their hand to pretty-much any kind of music you care to mention and do a great job no matter how you’re delivering it—wirelessly or wired.

If you’re looking for a pair of great-sounding wireless noise-cancelling headphones without a steep learning curve and with a famous audio pedigree, you should definitely audition the Shure Aonic 50s. And if your device has LDAC on board, you should most definitely audition the Shure Aonic 50s!

William Heffernan-Fanning