The world's most popular headphones are getting an overdue refresh. Apple on Tuesday took the wraps off the Beats Solo Pro, the first major redesign of the on-ear pair since Apple acquired Beats Electronics back in 2014. Based on our first try of the Pro variant, the wait was worth it.
"Not one electrical or mechanical component in these headphones exists in prior Beats headphones," Luke Wood, president of Beats, said at a press briefing in Tokyo. The Solo Pro took more than three years of development but Wood said that the end result represents "dream headphones" for all the engineers who worked on it. Unconstrained by the limits of smaller manufacturers, Beats[1] leveraged Apple's[2] scale to get primacy among suppliers, devised entirely new custom-made transducers just for the Solo Pro, and harnessed the talents of the same engineering teams that worked on the iPhone 11 Pro[3].
The side arms of the Solo Pro are now made of anodised aluminium, adding a hitherto absent touch of premium allure, sturdiness and a more consistent clamping force on the user's head. This new pair of headphones is still not the most accommodating for people with larger skulls, but comfort is improved relative to its predecessor, the Beats Solo 3. That's in large part down to the overhauled cushions: they no longer have an inner seam that can touch the ear, their surface area has been increased by 70 percent and they have 35 percent greater volume, offering more padding.
Active noise cancelling makes its debut on the Solo line with this model, and it works extremely well. "The ANC world is really big," said Wood. These new headphones expand it further by "taking ANC to a whole other...