Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S2e

This is a loudspeaker company’s headphone, and the tuning gives it away immediately. The bass is restrained where most of this category inflates it, the midrange sits forward, and reviewers who spend time with it tend to describe it as easy to listen to for hours rather than impressive in the first minute. That is a genuine preference and not everyone shares it. Plenty of buyers try these expecting excitement and find them polite.

Cancellation is good and clearly not the point. Against the two pairs that lead this category it gives up ground on low-frequency drone, and the gap is audible rather than theoretical on a plane. What it does hold is a quiet noise floor — the electronics do not hiss the way cheaper implementations do when there is nothing to cancel.

The app is thin on purpose and it is still too thin. Two tone sliders instead of a curve, cancellation modes rather than levels, and a streaming front end that most owners open once and never again. If you are the kind of listener who fixes a tuning you dislike, you cannot fix much here.

Everything you touch is better than the class. Real cast metal in the arms, woven fabric on the outside of the cups, memory foam pads that hold their shape, and physical buttons instead of a touch panel — which matters in winter, and matters again every time a touch-controlled rival pauses your music because you adjusted the fit. The quick-action button can be assigned to cycle cancellation or to the voice assistant.

The e in the name is a mid-cycle refresh: new drivers and revised DSP inside the same shell as the previous model. That has two consequences worth knowing. Reviews of the older version describe a different-sounding headphone, so read the model name carefully. And B&W has since replaced this generation at the top of the line, which means shelf availability now depends on which colors are left rather than on demand.

It does not fold. The cups rotate flat and the case is a wide, flat clamshell, so this ends up among the bulkier options in a bag despite not being the heaviest. For a pair that lives on a desk that is nothing. For a weekly commuter it is the thing that decides whether you keep carrying them.