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The Px7 S3 are Bowers & Wilkins’best noise-canceling headphonesto date and see the British brand truly compete with the major headphone players on all levels for the first time.
Indeed, these 2025 newcomers are strong competitors for best-in-class status alongside the newSony WH-1000XM6and theBose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones.
The Px7 S3 succeed the Px7 S2 launched in 2022 and bring a smattering of new features to the table, including support for aptX Lossless Bluetooth,spatial audioandAuracast, as well as performance improvements across the sound and noise-canceling boards. It’s just a shame some of those features aren’t coming to the headphones until later this year.
The Px7 S3 are also, to my eyes, the most handsome pair of wireless headphones you can buy at their $449 price – and second only to theApple AirPods Maxatanyprice. For those who prioritise style as much as substance, I cannot recommend the Px7 S3 more.
Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 specs
Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 design: beauty prize winners
Quick take: You won’t find more handsome headphones at this price.
Generally I would argue that wireless headphones are getting more expensive without necessarily looking any better. Some even look worse than their precursors of ol’ (I’m looking at you, Sony and Sennheiser). But notable exceptions are theAirPods Maxand these Px7 S3.
Bowers & Wilkins knows a thing or two about how to make good-looking hi-fi (check out itsNautilusandFormationspeakers if you don’t believe me), and that appreciation for beauty has been piped into its wireless headphones too.
Aesthetically very similar to theoriginal PX7andPx7 S2sequels, the latest iterations scream luxury – their solidly built frame is a stranger to cheap-sounding creaks, while their headband and earcups’ smart fabric finish (in your choice of Canvas White, Anthracite Black or Indigo Blue) wouldn’t look out of place on the head of a Wall Street stockbroker. They certainly show the Sony WH-1000XM6 andSennheiser Momentum 4 Wirelesshow to do minimalism in the most elegant of ways.
I do wish the hinge would allow the earcups to fold inwards like the Sonys can, though. Instead, it lets them simply swivel 180 degrees to go flat, in which position they can fit inside the fabric-wrapped hard-shell case. It is here you’ll find two 1.2m USB-C cables – one for USB-C music sources, one for 3.5mm audio devices.
Thanks to a modified arm mechanism designed to fit the headphones closer to your head, the Px7 S3 also clamp nicely around my ears – not too tight, not too loose, but a Goldilocks ‘just right’ – and the cushioning of the pleather earpads and headband is ample enough. Weighing over 10 ounces, though, they aren’t ideal to put in an all-day Wall Street stockbroker shift. A few hours of continuous use is just fine, but for 9-to-5 wear I find my 8.8-ounce Sonys more breathable for my ears and less burdensome on the top of my head.
As for the controls, I, for one, like Bowers & Wilkins’ choice to stick with physical on-cup controls rather than oft-hit-and-miss touch ones. The trio of playback buttons (pause/play and volume up and down) on the right earcup is easy to locate on the chamfer of the protruding oval badge, thanks to them handily being only a thumb space below the hinge piece. It’s the same story with the Quick Action button (an ANC mode or voice assistant shortcut) on the left earcup.
Design score: 9/10
Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 sound: competitive where it counts
Quick take: Up there with the very best.
As with any class-leading wireless headphones, the jewel in the Px7 S3’s crown is their spot-on sound quality, which is very familiarly ‘Bowers & Wilkins’ – lush, driven and wonderfully expressive.
I played everything from acoustic-led indie courtesy of Big Thief to synth-heavy melody from Gunship and piano works by Nils Frahm, and the B&Ws offered a wide, squeaky-clean window into each recording. Their most obvious talent is the amount of detail they can surface across the frequencies – bass is textured, and punchy when it needs to be; mids and vocals are clean, forthright and, when required, dynamically interesting; and highs have a sparkling prominence to them without ever entering into excessiveness.
Headphones with such analytical and precise abilities often forget to be fun, but the Px7 S3 aren’t afraid to let their hair down and burn some energy when I go through my running playlist – Toto, Farruko and Oneohtrix Point Never tracks all sound fittingly upbeat.
The Px7 S3 keep their predecessor’s USB-C audio support (an absence of theSony XM6, by the way), and with the supplied cable attached you do get a touch more refinement and tightness, at the sacrifice of less volume.
The accompanying B&W Music app allows you to fine-tune the sound through an adjustable five-band EQ, but I didn’t feel the need to tweak their tuning.
Sound score: 9/10
Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 noise-canceling: sufficiently street-wise
Quick take: Decent for most scenarios, but not benchmark-setting.
Bose has long been the king of noise-canceling headphones, and the Px7 S3’s arrival doesn’t change that. They don’t create the same intense bubble of isolation as theQuietComfort Ultra Headphonesand aren’t quite as good at blocking particularly low-frequency sounds (such as that of an industrial lorry driving past me on the street) or the highest-frequency ones (like a shrill doorbell).
Still, their sound-blocking ability certainly reduces ambient noise in a room and less extreme road noise well, allowing me to enjoy piano-led music at half volume when I walked to my local shop – which was unlistenable with ANC turned off. I didn’t need music playing over the ANC effect to drown out the neighbours’ lawnmower either.
I’ve very few complaints about Transparency mode, at that – it does a decent job of presenting the world outside of the earcups in a natural way so that you may more easily hear your surroundings when you need to. I do find it easier to have a chat through mySony XM5’s Transparency mode, though – it seems to amplify voices that little bit better.
Noise-canceling score: 7/10
Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 battery life: on-par endurance
Quick take: Competitive endurance claims that translate in real-world use.
The Px7 S3’s battery life sits in the ‘solid’ rather than ‘superb’ category. The claimed figure is 30 hours with ANC activated, and translates during my testing to a 23-to-25-hour figure when you listen to music as loudly as I tend to do (around 75%) – which is what I would’ve expected, considering manufacturer testing conditions for such battery life claims are often undertaken at a lower volume.
That makes them less durable than the real endurance runners in the category, namely the Sennheiser Momentum Wireless 4 (60 hours) and1More SonoFlow(50 hours), but on par with most at this level, including the Sony XM6.
On more than one occasion in the past couple of months have I benefited from the headphones’ fast charge function, too, which offers six to seven hours of playback from a short (B&W says 15-minute) charge.
Battery life score: 8/10
Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 features: coming soon
When Bowers & Wilkins announced its Px7 S3 in April 2025, it mentioned a few features that would come later in the year, and sadly at time of writing (August 2025) they are yet to materialize. At that time, the company also confirmed that its flagshipPx8 S2(successors to thePx8, natch) would arrive later in 2025, so I would put money on the update coming alongside their arrival, hopefully soon.
These ‘coming soon’ features are spatial audio,Bluetooth LE Audioand Auracast. B&W hasn’t shed details on how its spatial audio will be implemented – presumably with head-tracking ability and the company’s own spatial DSP processing – but we know what to expect from the other two.
LE Audio is a next-gen Bluetooth standard (it takes over the decade-old LE) that is all about improving transmission efficiency for reduced power consumption (i.e, longer battery lives) and latency, and potentially improved audio quality. A particularly notable feature in the LE Audio suite that B&W says the Px7 S3 will support is Auracast, a broadcast-style audio-sharing technology pitched to redefine public listening experiences in the near future.
Should you buy the Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3?
If you are after wireless noise-canceling headphones that both sound and look the part, the Px7 S3 nail this better than any alternative, including their biggest rival, the Sony WH-1000XM6. You’re more likely to find them at a discount in the coming months, too, due to their slightly older age.
The jury’s out on how worthwhile the spatial audio feature will turn out to be, and you may get more advanced noise-canceling from Bose’s flagships. But if spatial audio performance isn’t a deal-breaker for you anyway, and you don’t often listen to music in extremely noisy environments, there is very little that won’t satisfy you about these B&Ws.
Why not try…?
The two most tempting alternatives are theSony WH-1000XM6and the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones, and also theApple AirPods Maxif your budget can stretch an extra $100.
The Sonys are the closest competitors – similar in sound quality capability and battery life, better at noise-canceling, but certainly not as attractive. The B&Ws have USB-C listening, the Sonys can fold. It really comes down to your preference here.
I would only recommend the Boses over the B&Ws to those whose priority is noise cancellation – they don’t sound nearly as good and have a worse battery life (24 hours).
Got the cash to splash on the AirPods Max? Go for it… if you own aniPhone or iPad. Their more sophisticated sound and ANC are worth the premium, they look and feel nothing short of luxury, and their spatial audio is genuinely good.
How we tested
I spent two months living with the Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 as my everyday wireless headphones before writing this review, allowing me to properly gauge their comfort and how the battery life stacks up in real-world use.
I partnered them with Sony Xperia 10 IV,Google Pixel 6andApple iPhone 15smartphones, as well as an Astell & Kern SR25 MKII music player so that I could make use of the headphones’ aptX support. I also connected them via a USB-C cable to compare their audio quality over a wired means, too.
So far I haven’t felt the need to return to my Sony WH-1000XM5 or (much pricier!)Focal Bathyas my daily drivers.
