Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 review: a luxurious way to listen to music

Every bit the premium pair of wireless headphones, this Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 review won’t be for everyone...  because these are so expensive it won’t be for many people actually, but if you’re willing to spend this much then it will be oh-so-worth-it. 

Bang & Olufsen rule the ultra-premium headphones market and they have regularly featured in T3’s guide to the best noise-cancelling headphones. Sitting at the top of their range of over-ear headphones, the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 cost over $800 in the US and as you might expect, they absolutely scream sophistication. 

Made to celebrate 95 years of the audio company, they were ‘crafted for the ultimate listening experience’ and it’s safe to say that I enjoyed putting that statement to the test. 

In this Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 review, you can find out everything you need to know about them, but if the price tag has already put you off then I recommend taking a look at T3’s Bang & Olufsen Beoplay HX review, they’re a lot cheaper but still look and feel luxurious. 

Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 review: price and availability 

The Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 headphones certainly don’t come cheap - they’ll set you back £779 in the UK, $849 in the US and AU$1445 in Australia. Take a look at the widgets on this page to see where you can pick up a pair right now. 

Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 review: design and fit 

Sleek, elegant looking headphones, the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 are just as premium as their price tag. You can buy them in six different opulent colours including Black, Gold Tone, Chestnut, Navy, Grey Mist and Nordic Ice. 

Made mainly from aluminium with soft lambskin leather covering the ear cushions, they feel very well made, durable and they look lovely. Even the matching hard-shelled case looks luxurious, although admittedly it is quite bulky so I doubt you’ll keep it in your bag all of the time. 

Included in the box is a USB-C cable, a microfibre cleaning cloth, a 3.5mm audio cable and a flight adaptor. The case has a small pouch on the inside to neatly keep the accessories in which is very handy.

Measuring 185 x 165 x 80mm and weighing 323g, these are pretty substantial cans that sit around your whole ear. Over long periods of use, I found them to be extremely soft and comfortable but they did look quite big on me, most people won’t have that problem though. The headband was very easy to adjust as well. 

While you most likely won’t be using these for workouts or runs, I did think they’d be well suited to almost everything else, be that plane journeys, train journeys or long days in the office. 

Around each earcup, there are a few controls worth knowing about. The on/off slider doubles up as the Bluetooth control, to put it in pairing mode you hold it up until the LED flashes blue. There's also a small button on the left earcup to call upon your smartphone's voice assistant. 

To control the music, the touch panel is located on the right earcup, you tap the centre to pause/play the music, swipe forward to play the next track and swipe backwards to start the song again. And to adjust the volume, there’s a dial around the right earcup - possibly the most efficient way to adjust the volume that I have ever tried on a pair of headphones, it just makes so much sense. 

On the left-hand side, there’s another dial but this one controls the level of noise cancellation or transparency. To block out more sound you push the dial backwards, and to increase the transparency you push it forwards, you can also keep the dial central for the most neutral settings. Again, I thought this worked very well because it means you can be much more precise about how much outside noise you want or don’t want to let in. 

The Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 will give you about 38 hours of battery life with the noise cancellation switch on, but if you have it switched off, that goes up to 50 hours which is incredible. I only needed to charge them once a week.

Charging them back up again will take about 3 hours all in all, but if you were to get caught short you can use the included 3.5mm audio cable to keep listening after the battery has died. 

Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 review: performance and features

Moving on to sound quality, the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 come loaded with two customised 40mm titanium drivers with neodymium magnets and B&O's digital signal processing (DSP) engine. The result is well balanced, crisp audio -  if you’re into power ballads, classical music or podcasts in particular, then the level of clarity will be sure to win you over, but these are very versatile so will sound good whatever you tend to listen to.  

An expansive soundstage means these are able to deliver a lot in the way of precision and sound separation. Each instrument is very clearly defined without drowning one another out, whether that’s the guitar twang in Breakfast At Tiffany’s by Deep Blue Something or the assertive drums in My Generation by The Who. I could hear every vocal almost perfectly as well even with a more mumbly voice like Louis Armstrong’s in What A Wonderful World. These headphones manage to push out a very rich, clear cut experience. 

If I were to criticise the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95, on their default tuning, I thought they lacked a little in the lower frequencies so if you plan to listen to a lot of high-energy music they don’t pack as much of a punch as you might want straight out of the box. But that point becomes obsolete when you discover the manual equaliser settings in the app because you can very easily adjust it to better suit you. 

The Bang & Olufsen manual equaliser is much more straightforward to understand than elsewhere. It’s a circle that you drag a counter around to make the audio brighter, more relaxed, more energetic or warmer. I thought this form factor made it quicker to find what you want. You can also choose from a number of preset sound modes including Optimal, Commute, Clear, Workout and Podcast. 

Using the manual equaliser sometimes went wrong though, and I found that it could sometimes make the sound drop in quality. I stopped the music and then updated the firmware through the smartphone app which seemed to solve that problem.

The active noise cancellation is fantastic as well. I wandered around a very busy London train station with these on and I could barely hear any surrounding noise over my music. I loved being able to adjust how much sound gets let through using the dial as well. 

The transparency mode was also effective, although admittedly I have heard better. But still, it did a good job of letting through important noises like traffic noise and people speaking near me, without overwhelming the songs I was listening to.

Connectivity is just as good as you would expect, with Bluetooth 5.2 to thank. They stayed connected to my devices even when I wandered away from them. You also get both AAC and aptX Adaptive codec support for high-resolution audio streaming. 

Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 review: verdict 

As you’d expect from a pair of headphones that are this expensive, the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 are excellent. They’re luxurious, they sound amazing and the smartphone app gives you a good amount of control. You also get tonnes of battery life so you’ll rarely need to recharge them. 

The only real downsides are the fact that they’re crazy expensive and they're not vegan-friendly. Other than that, I don’t really have anything bad to say about them - the Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 will make you sit up and listen!

Bang & Olufsen Beoplay H95 review: also consider  

Not everyone wants to spend the same amount on their headphones as they do on their phone, in which case, you should take a look at the Sony WH-1000XM5 instead. Brand new for 2022, they’re the best pair of noise-cancelling headphones you can buy for less than $400 / £400 / AU$649. 

Also worth a look are the Bose QuietComfort 45. They’re even cheaper than Sony’s but are still considered some of the best headphones in the world thanks to the impressive noise cancelling, comfortable design, 24-hour battery life and clean, clear sound. 

All of our tests are done in a real-world environment – not in a lab. You can find out more about how we test at T3 here.