Over-ear headphone trio stands out from rest
Which are the best overear headphones right now? That’s a hard question to answer. In the 20 or so years we’ve been testing headphones, the number of great models to choose from has seemed only to grow year over year, which makes it tough to name a single model as the best overall. A few models do stand out from the rest of the pack, though, including the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones and the Sony WH-1000XM5.
Most of the over-ear headphones on this list are wireless Bluetooth headphones that feature active noise canceling (some but not all wireless headphones also come with a cable for wired listening). But we’ve also tested a handful of wired-only over-ear headphones for the audio purists out there looking for great sound.
When testing and evaluating over-ear headphones, we consider such factors as build quality, comfort and sound quality, as well as noise-canceling and
voice-calling performance. Below are three of CNET’s favorites.
BEST NEW NOISECANCELING HEADPHONES: BOSE QUIETCOMFORT ULTRA HEADPHONES
While Bose’s new flagship QuietComfort Ultra
Headphones may not be a huge upgrade over the company’s Noise Cancelling 700 headphones, they feature a more premium design along with Bose’s new Immersive Audio feature, which delivers some sound-quality enhancements. Along with excellent sound and great noise canceling, the
QC Ultra Headphones are also superb for making calls, with top-notch background-noise reduction. All that adds up to the best new noise-canceling headphones of 2024 and a worthy adversary to Sony’s highly rated WH-1000XM5 and Apple’s AirPods Max.
BEST NOISE-CANCELING
HEADPHONES: SONY
WH-1000XM5
When you have a product that a lot of people love, change can be risky. Such is the case for Sony’s WH-1000XM5, the fifth generation of the 1000X series headphones, which were first released in 2016 as the MDR-1000X Wireless
and have become increasingly popular as they’ve improved with each generation.
Over the years, Sony has made some tweaks to the design, but nothing as dramatic as what it’s done with the WH-1000XM5.
Other than the higher price tag, most of those changes are good, and Sony’s made some dramatic improvements with voice-calling performance as well as even better noise canceling and more refined sound.
BEST BEATS OVER-EAR HEADPHONES: BEATS
STUDIO PRO
Love ’em or hate ’em, Beats Studio headphones are among the most popular headphones of all time, launching as wired headphones back in 2008.
This is the fourth generation of them, and they carry the same list price as their predecessor and look very similar on the outside but have some big changes on the inside that make them significantly better headphones.