Headphone News Blog

Sennheiser's MX W1s are an interesting look at some technology that might, in the future, be affordable. At the moment, though, it isn't. The MX W1s have audio quality that's about what we'd expect from a good set of wireless in-ears: not good by any stretch, but not horrible either. We suppose the MX W1s will be attractive to some, if only for the novelty factor, but we really, really recommend waiting for the price to drop. At $500, we cannot recommend buying these.

Well, we have the MX W1s in for review, but we've run into a strange issue: they don't want to recharge. At first the headphones complied with our requests, their orange "I am charging!" LEDs shining merrily. As time wore on, however, we started having more and more trouble getting them to charge. When we'd plug them in they wouldn't recognize their orange LED would flash briefly, but we couldn't get it to stay on.

Our PR contact said it's a known issue and set me up with Sennheiser's tech support line (860-434-9190 if you need it). We've left a message and are awaiting a response. We will update this blog post as we delve deeper into this mystery.

UPDATE: Apparently some of the early production units are simply broken. If you own a pair and run into a similar issue, Sennheiser will replace them for you. Just call the aforementioned support number.

We just got in a pair of Sennheiser's MX W1s, which are wireless in-ear headphones. Our super-fast initial impressions? The audio quality seems fine for a pair of in-ears, especially wireless ones (in-ears and wireless headphones, separately, often have poor audio quality compared to wired, full-sized headphones). The sound was a bit muffled/blanketed and suffered from some high-pitched noise. We didn't really notice the whine unless we listened to classical or quiet music. 

The headphones have two pieces that go into your ear: the first sits in the ear, like Apple's packaged-in headphones, and the second helps wedge the ear piece between your concha and tragus to keep it from falling out. We were very surprised to see they didn't come with any sleeves for the main in-ear piece; the result is some discomfort and very poor isolation. UPDATE: haha, we're dumb and didn't fully empty one of the boxes. They do come with one pair of sleeves for the main part and two sets for the smaller nub.

Keep an eye out for our review, which we hope to get up soon(ish).