Beats Solo 3 Wireless
⚡ ALL INFORMATION CLICK HERE 👈🏻👈🏻👈🏻
Beats Solo 3 Wireless
At Future, we have many other great brands you might like - are you happy for us to contact you with news and offers from our other brands?
We also work with some great partners - are you happy for us to email you from time to time on behalf of these partners?
For
Full-bodied, bold sound
Clear, clean midrange
Excellent battery life and range
Against
Lacks subtlety and detail
Fit is too tight
No Lightning connector
We check over 130 million products every day for the best prices
Bowers & Wilkins P7 Wireless headphones review
2017 Audi R8 Spyder B&O Sound System hands-on review
Libratone Q Adapt wireless on-ear and Lightning in-ear headphones - first look - IFA 2016
Wireless noise-cancelling headphones - Bose QuietComfort 35 vs Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 Wireless
Naim Mu-so Qb wireless speaker review
Best noise-cancelling headphones £250+, Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 Wireless
We check over 130 million products every day for the best prices
Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands
Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors
The best of What Hi-Fi? in your inbox
We’d love to stay in touch, sign up for the What Hi-Fi? team to contact you with great news, content and offers.
Thank you for signing up to What Hi-Fi?. You will receive a confirmation email shortly.
There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again.
The Solo 3 Wireless boast impressive wireless technology, but lack the detail and subtlety we expect from headphones at this price
The Beats Solo 3 Wireless feel like they’re having something of an identity crisis.
On the one hand, they’re among the few pairs of headphones to sport Apple’s W1 chip, joining other Beats models and Apple’s older AirPods (the AirPods 2 sport the newer H1 chip), meaning they work particularly well with the latest iPhones.
On the other, they ship with just a 3.5mm audio cable – no Lightning cable in sight .
It’s an odd decision. Of course, making the Beats Solo 3 Wireless attractive to everyone is of prime importance to Apple and Beats , and the W1 chip can benefit other handsets too.
But the lack of an option for a direct physical connection with the phone these cans work best with is puzzling to say the least.
Apple believes that the future is wireless, and these headphones show the potential to make it happen.
The new W1 chip offers huge improvements to the cable-free experience (more on that later), and that alone could well make these Solo 3s worth a look.
Not much has changed in the looks department since the Beats Solo 2 Wireless.
Unashamedly plastic, they’re available in the same five colours as the iPhone 7 – both shiny and matte black, silver, gold and our rose gold review sample – as well as white and purple.
The arms fold down to make them more portable in their included carry case and their plastic construction helps keep them lightweight.
They have an on-ear fit, with a faux leather material on the earpads and headband cushion. The white colour on all but the black design has a tendency to get a little grubby, and they’re still a little tight fitting for our liking.
They may well loosen up over time, but during testing, we found we needed to give our ears regular breaks during longer listening sessions.
Controls are once again placed on the left hand earcup – press down the Beats logo to control playback or activate Siri, with volume controls to the top and bottom.
They work well enough, but make quite a clunking sound in your ear when using them.
Of course the headline feature of these cans is the W1 chip, and it offers a number of benefits, especially to iPhone users, but some that Android phones can take advantage of too.
For iOS users, there’s a seamless link with your iPhone. Turn the headphones on and your iPhone will ask if you want to connect.
Android users will have to spend a little longer following the regular Bluetooth pairing procedure, but they will at least get to share two of the bigger improvements the W1 chip has to offer.
The biggest of those is battery life. At 40 hours, the Solo 3 Wireless’s battery life is nothing short of outstanding, and quite simply unheard of in current wireless headphones.
Thanks to better battery management by the W1 chip, it’s a huge jump from the 12 hours on Beats’ previous model.
It should see you cable-free for up to a full week before needing a recharge. It’s hugely convenient and a big step forward, plus there’s Fast Fuel charging tech on board to get you three hours of playback from five minutes of charge too.
There’s also newfound range on offer here, thanks to the inclusion of Class 1 Bluetooth (instead of Class 2 found in the Beats Solo 2 Wireless, and many other wireless cans).
On paper, this ups the range you can move from your source from 10m to 100m, though this will of course depend on your environment.
Certainly, these Solo 3s are able to get much further away from our phone – and through several doors – before the music begins to break up, compared to many rivals, which tend to be around the standard 10m, with a clear line of sight.
Despite these game-changing improvements to the wireless experience, the Solo 3s remain the same proposition as the Solo 2 Wireless. And that’s a shame.
It’s not that the sound is bad – these are much better than the Beats headphones of years ago – but for all they give us in full-bodied sound and enthusiasm, they miss out in subtlety and refinement.
Play Can’t Go Wrong by Wiley and the Beats are in their element. The aggressive bassline that forms a large focus of the instrumental is rich and weighty, with the sharp, snappy vocal delivered with attack and authority.
There’s no doubt that the low end is bolder and more forward than the rest of the frequency range, but it’s not as unwieldy as some Beats naysayers would have you believe.
We’d just like it slightly tighter and more insightful for a more refined sound – you get power here, but not much nuance.
Indeed that’s often the case across the board. These play to their strengths by going big on excitement, throwing themselves enthusiastically behind any piece of music, and doing a good job rhythmically.
Pop, hip hop and dance tracks sound pretty good, but listen closer and you’ll notice they aren’t capable of digging much below the surface.
Play something a little more stripped back, like Alicia Keys’ Holy War , and though vocals sound clear and direct, they’re not hugely expressive or detailed.
The accompanying guitar instrumental sounds a little flat too, lacking the dynamic talent to pick out the peaks and troughs in a guitar strum with conviction, and failing to signpost tempo changes between verses and chorus properly.
The overall performance isn’t as explicit or engaging as we’d like. For long listens, it’s not just the fit we find tiresome, but the sound too.
It’s also worth mentioning that these headphones go pretty loud, but aren’t the most isolating. Push the volume much past half way and you’re going to start annoying anyone sitting close by.
The Beats Solo 3 Wireless headphone are a tale of two halves. On the one hand, they’re pushing the boundaries of wireless headphones technology further than we’ve seen before.
On the other, their sound is crucially lacking in the detail and subtlety we expect from headphones at this price. They’re further troubled by talented competition.
However, if the extra battery life, range and close compatibility with the iPhone interests you, the Solo 3 Wireless are well worth a look – particularly if you’re just looking for good-time headphones to pass the time on the way to work or school, and especially if you see them at a decent discount from their original £250 / $299 RRP.
Best audiophile headphones 2021: ultimate high-end headphones
Best headphones with a mic for voice and video calls 2021
Sign up below to get the latest from What Hi-Fi?, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!
Thank you for signing up to What Hi-Fi?. You will receive a verification email shortly.
There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again.
What Hi-Fi? is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site .
©
Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury,
Bath
BA1 1UA. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number 2008885.
Beats Solo 3 Wireless Headphones - Black - Apple
Beats Solo 3 Wireless review | What Hi-Fi?
Beats Solo 3 Wireless review | TechRadar
Beats Solo 3 2019 Wireless Review - RTINGS.com
Beats Solo 3 Wireless review | 60 facts and highlights
At Future, we have many other great brands you might like - are you happy for us to contact you with news and offers from our other brands?
We also work with some great partners - are you happy for us to email you from time to time on behalf of these partners?
For
Excellent wireless stability
Good Bluetooth-phone interaction
Energetic, punchy sound
Against
Firm headband pressure
Lack of fidelity for the price
We check over 130 million products every day for the best prices
Xiaomi Mi 11 | Everything you need to know
Galaxy S21 | Everything you need to know
Galaxy S21 Ultra | Everything you need to know
IPhone 12 Pro | Everything you need to know in 1 minute
AirPods Max | Everything you need to know in 1 minute
PS5 | Everything you need to know in 1 minute
We check over 130 million products every day for the best prices
The best AirPods Pro sales and deals in March 2021
New Sonos speaker: everything we know about the rumored Sonos Move follow-up
Best WordPress themes for portfolios in 2021
Contact me with news and offers from other Future brands
Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors
The best of TechRadar in your inbox
We’d love to stay in touch, sign up for the TechRadar team to contact you with great news, content and offers.
Thank you for signing up to TechRadar. You will receive a confirmation email shortly.
There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again.
By
xAndrew Wiliams
November 20, 2019
Smart wireless headphones that make some real techy improvements, but the sound unfortunately lags behind.
These Beats headphones were the first fruits of Apple's deal to buy the Beats brand – in terms of actual products at least – and the review below represents our initial thoughts when the headphones first appeared in 2016.
When Apple bought the Beats brand, it was only a matter of time before that Cupertino mobile know-how would be baked into Dr Dre's personal audio line. The Solo 3 wireless are the first obvious fruits of that partnership in terms of products, taking an existing Beat Audio line and giving them a sprinkle of Apple's magic dust.
The Beats Solo 3 Wireless were the first fruits of Apple's deal to buy the Beats brand – in terms of actual products at least – and the review below represents our initial thoughts when the headphones first appeared in 2016.
At first glance, the Solo 3 Wireless don't look all that different to their predecessors the Solo 2, Apple takeover or not. It's only under further inspection to the internal specs that the improvements become more obvious – Apple's expertise in mobile engineering sees connectivity stabilized and battery life improve.
However, the traditional issues with audio quality are back with the Beats Solo 3 Wireless. If you're not a total Beats brand loyalist, you'll likely find that for a few more notes the Bose QuietComfort 35 , with their noise cancelling smarts, added comfort and superior sound performance, could be a better fit for your needs.
The Beats Solo 3 Wireless don't usher in a dramatic design refresh from the outside, which to be fair is a sensible move on Apple's part.
Beats headphones remain among the most recognizable in the world, and these days it's the Beats Solo we see out and about the most. In 2014 Beats smoothed-out the lines of the set with the Solo 2 for a less aggressive appearance, and while the glossy finish of our pair has a loud and adolescent edge to it, reports you need to be under 25 to pull these off are exaggerated.
You just have to make sure you buy the right color. Apple sent us the glossy black version, but there are also matte black, glossy white, silver, gold, rose gold, violet and red to choose from... so quite the color palette.
All Beats headphones used to feature brash bright red “B” logos on them, but they now come color-matched to whatever shade you pick. The Sennheiser Momentum On-ear and Bose pairs look more grown-up, but the last couple of generations have tried to make the Beats Solo style more palatable for a wider audience.
The Beats Solo 3 Wireless build is much the same as ever, though, and it may make some of you look at the price a little suspiciously. Most of the frame is plastic, with only the fold-up hinge and the skeleton of the headband made of metal for, extra strength.
The pads are synthetic leather-topped foam, and the fake leather really isn't all that convincing either. Synthetic stuff can look almost indistinguishable from the real thing these days, but this is very clearly plastic-based.
Beats headband padding on the Beats Solo 3 Wireless doesn’t seem luxurious either, but this time it has a definite purpose.
The Beats Solo 3 Wireless use squidgy rubber for the part that sits on your head, spreading the pressure well and creating a much higher-friction hold than conventional headband padding. The idea is you'll be able to wear these headphones while out jogging without them gradually working their way off your head.
It’s not just the headband that makes this possible, though. The Beats Solo 3 Wireless also have a fairly firm grip on your cranium, which initially doesn’t feel that comfortable compared to a set of over-ear headphones.
If you wear glasses with chunky stems, you’ll likely find that after a few hours you start to feel a bit of gnawing discomfort in your ear cartilage. However, this is a problem of runner-ready on-ear headphones in general, rather than specific to the Beats Solo 3 Wireless. In this specific class, the headphones are actually fairly comfy too, thanks to ear cups that shift to fit your head’s contours in order to spread out the pressure as evenly as possible.
Wear chunky glasses and want a wireless pair you can wear for six hours at a time without any discomfort? Check out the Bose QuietComfort 35 before buying these is our recommendation.
Other external bits of the Beats Solo 3 Wireless worth checking out include the 3.5mm input on the left cup, for use when the battery is dead, and the fold-up design. You get a carry pouch in the box, and it's a good idea to use it if you pick a glossy version – that finish will show off scratches like they're newly-caught Pokémon.
There are also some hidden controls on the right ear cup: the Beats logo acts as a play/pause button and the ring above/below alters volume. A mic hidden in the ear cup lets you take calls too, but the Beats Solo 3 Wireless don't have active noise cancellation, a feature now fairly common in higher-end wireless headphones .
Whereas active noise cancelation monitors ambient noise and adds inverse frequencies of that noise to the drivers' output to cancel it out, the Solo 3 Wireless instead use pure passive isolation, where the pads simply block out sound. While not as effective at cutting out the low-end hum of a city, it works well enough here for use on noisy public transport.
The external hardware of these headphones is pretty solid, but there are two sides to the meaty insides of the Beats Solo 3 Wireless. One is excellent, the other just passable.
The Beats Solo 3's strong point is the tech that goes into its wireless capabilities. Apple credits its W1 wireless chip for the headphones' excellent up-to 40 hours battery, but the exact specs are – as usual for Apple – rather opaque.
We're very happy for wireless sets like this to last around 20 hours, and the former Beats Solo 2 last 12 hours between charges, so this is a huge improvement. It means most people should be able to get two weeks' use before charging rather than just one. Wireless charging is super-quick too: Apple claims you get 3 hours of playback from a 5 minute charge.
You can check the charge level using the 5-pip LED indicator on the right cup.
They use a micro USB cable, although there's no way to directly connect this to, and charge the headphones from, an iPhone Lightning port. Apple wants to sell us the Solo 3 Wireless as a Bluetooth headphone revelation, but when used wired they actually feel more at home with an Android phone.
What's actually even more useful than ultra-long battery life is the reliability of the wireless signal. We didn't hear a single burble, blip or cut-out once during testing, and we've mostly been using Android phones rather than the iPhones that are "officially supported" by this pair.
The slightly cheaper, larger Sony MDR-100ABN also have excellent wireless stability though, so Apple doesn’t exactly have a trademark on these wireless chops.
Their interaction with iOS devices is – for now – unique. Where the Beats Solo 2 Wireless are really just like any other pair of Bluetooth headphones, the Solo 3 Wireless pop-ups in iOS more like a Wi-Fi speaker. It appears as specific source, so doesn't have to be treated like just another wireless accessory.
There's clearly something clever going on in the Apple W1 chip. And if you use an Android, you can use the Solo Wireless 3 like any Bluetooth pair, although as there's no NFC or aptX, they make quite a basic setup.
The sound of the Beats Solo 3 Wireless is less impressive than the tech, and roundly similar to that of the Beats Solo 2. Before we get into any criticism, it's worth noting that these last two generations of Beats Solo headphones are still far better than those of the early years of Beats.
An approach of just making the bass sound big and fat, which tends to cloud the sound, has been altered. Now the aim seems to be to make the Beats Solo 3 Wireless sound like a hi-fi system with a subwoofer attached.
There's bonus bass here, but for the most part it's centered around fairly low frequencies. This results in aggressive and punchy-sounding kick drum beats without the resonant boom that so often turns big bass into bad bass.
The Beats Solo 3 Wireless sound is lively and energetic, fitting the Beats brand image well. The pounding bass beat of Simian Mobile Disco's Sleep Deprivation sounds suitably juggernaut-like through this pair, with much less unwanted boom than the earliest Solo headphones.
However, for a pair this pricey, the mid-range sound quite flat, lacking dynamics. A slight lack of finesse in the sort of frequencies where mids and treble meet can also cause some hard edges to certain vocals, depending on the singer's register (for example, Randy's Newman’s gravelly croon can sound a bit hard). It's not enough to make you wince, or to tire out your ears in an hour, but at this price we have a right to be picky.
Listening to the Solo 3 Wireless next to the Audio Technica ATH-MSR7 and Sennheiser Momentum 2.0, the Beats pair lacks a certain sort of detail that separates decent headphones from great ones. It's not classic audio bore treble detail that's missing, but spatial detail.
Where the ATH-MSR7 can deliver a very 3D-like take on fairly complicated arrangements, the Solo 3 Wireless approach is much more crude and rudimentary, almost pudding-like. In Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill, say, the rolling bass tom bed becomes a muddling influence that makes the track sound messy.
If you're not listening closely, the powerful bass is enough to divert your attention from these sorts of effects, but it also actually compounds the problem, upsetting arrangements and at times even making lead vocals sound almost like incidental parts of a mix when left to compete with a strong bass line.
It's a classic example of a headphone you might hear described as "good for dance music", but all that really means is that it's one of the few genres that tends not to expose the pair's significant audio flaws.
The Beats Solo 3 Wireless ace their wireless tech, with very solid Bluetooth, good range and class-leading battery life – there's a huge difference here compared with often-flaky cheap Bluetooth sets. The new way they interact with iPhones should also make Google think about how Android talks to Bluetooth accessories in the future.
Their bass response is sure to be a crowd-pleaser too. It's not meant to be neutral or accurate, but by providing meaty thuds without major boominess, the Solo 3 Wireless do what a Beats headphone should.
The range of colors available also good, going from bolder shades that skew younger to plain matte finishes that won't look out of place on anyone's head.
We hear no major sound quality improvements over the Beats Solo 2. Limited dynamics and a lack of spatial detail may leave you unimpressed if you're not blown away by the stomach-punching low-end.
There's also a strange dichotomy going on here. The Solo 3 Wireless are meant to be next-gen wireless headphones for iPhones, but their wired connection won’t plug in directly to an iPhone without using the 3.5mm adapter, and they charge using microUSB rather than Lightning. This is good for Android owners, but not so good for those who have gone all-in with Apple.
Not everyone will get on with the Beats Solo 3 Wireless fit either. While they are comfortable for a pair of fairly firm on-ear headphones, glasses-wearers in particular should know what they're in for: potential discomfort after a while.
The Beats Solo 3 Wireless make huge improvements in some areas, and change little in others. Top on its list of achievements are class-leading battery life and wireless stability on-par with the very best, regardless of whether you use an Android or an iPhone.
They also interact a little differently with iOS devices than older Bluetooth headphones, which is a neat change, particularly when iPhones don’t allow pairing using NFC.
Other elements are less impressive, though. Some issues are very minor, like the use of unconvincing leatherette in a headphone set this pricey.
It's the sound that matters most though, and it's not at the level of the best at the price. While the bass is punchy and the Solo 3 Wireless have plenty of energy, the flat mid-range leaves them less sophisticated and involving than some cheaper sets, particularly if you actually listen to music rather than treating it as an incidental soundtrack to your life.
By Mackenzie Frazier March 02, 2021
By Mackenzie Frazier March 02, 2021
Sign up to get breaking news, reviews, opinion, analysis and more, plus the hottest tech deals!
Thank you for signing up to TechRadar. You will receive a verification email shortly.
There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again.
TechRadar is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site .
©
Future US, Inc. 11 West 42nd Street, 15th Floor,
New York,
NY 10036.
