It’s all very well buying a pair of cans that support hi-res audio, but if your phone isn’t equally skilled you might as well have just stuffed all those banknotes into your ears and set them on fire. Enter the Sennheiser HDB 630.
To ensure you can hear the HDB 630 at their very best, Sennheiser has put a dongle in the box that enables 24-bit/96kHz hi-res streaming over aptX Adaptive, so any phone, tablet or laptop with a USB-C port can feel the benefit.
With the noise-cancelling turned on and audio quality pumped to the max the battery will last as long as 45 hours (or 60 hours if you’re willing to lower the bitrate and eschew the ANC), but if they conk out you can just remove the dongle and use the bundled USB-C cable to plug them straight in to keep on listening. Alternatively, a quick 10-minute charge is enough to put seven hours back on the battery clock.
If you’re picky about how your headphones sound, Sennheiser’s Smart Control Plus app offers a five-band equaliser for basic tweaking, but there’s also a Parametric Equaliser for hardcore audiophiles that really want to fine-tune things. One particularly neat trick is the A/B comparison feature, which should make it easier to hear how your tinkering affects the audio.
Sennheiser reckons only 16% of smartphones properly support hi-res audio, so there’s clearly a need for this kind of thing. It just depends whether you’re willing to fork out the $500/£400 required for a new pair of headphones to get it.
