CES is typically where Audio-Technica comes to announce a boat load of new headphones, and it did just that this year. However, there is one pair of headphones that really stands out at CES this year from Audio-Technica, and that’s the ATH-ANC300TW.
These are truly wireless headphones that also offer up active noise cancellation. Something that we’ve only seen in a couple of other truly wireless headphones so far.
Active Noise Cancellation is in, great battery life is out
When you have earbuds that this small, adding in more features usually comes at the expense of battery life. And that’s exactly what has happened with the ATH-ANC300TW.
Active Noise Cancellation is included in the ATH-ANC300TW, but that means that battery life won’t be incredible. Though, given the fact that it does have active noise cancellation, it is pretty decent battery life. We’re looking at about 4.5 hour of continuous playback on a single charge. Not insane, but pretty good with ANC included.
Other truly wireless earbuds are around six to seven hours of battery life. Now if you turn off ANC, you can likely get closer to that number too.
The noise cancelling on the ATH-ANC300TW work by analyzing the ambient noise with the built-in microphones. That creates inverse soundwaves of those noises and mixes them with the audio signal from your device. Audio-Technica positioned one of the mics at a unique horizontal orientation, within the sound chamber. This allows them to get an “ideal balance of ambient noise reduction and audio performance.”
There is also support for Bluetooth 5.0, allowing for better battery life on the earbuds and whichever device is connected to them, as well as a better connection. There’s also support for aptX and AAC for streaming audio. Finally, there is also Qualcomm’s TrueWireless Stereo Plus included.
Audio-Technica isn’t just some new name in the world of headphones. It’s been making headphones for years and has made some of the most popular headphones among audiophiles in recent memory, like the ATH-M50X. So it’s very likely that these earbuds are going to sound really good and also provide some great active noise cancellation.
Pricing & Availability
According to Audio-Technica, the ATH-ANC300TW truly wireless earbuds are going to be available this Spring, and come in at a price of $249.
That is a pretty hefty price for truly wireless earbuds, but not the highest price we’ve seen. Given the feature-set here and audio quality, that is actually a pretty good price. And mighty competitive for Audio-Technica. It’s also quite rare for a company to announce pricing and availability at CES, so it’s good to see that the Audio-Technica ATH-ANC300TW are coming out fairly soon.