Wave Quiet Over-Ear Headphones

Details

Over-ear headphones built around the two parts that go first. The pads pull off by hand at Rs 690 a pair, the battery comes out on four Phillips screws at Rs 890, and a detachable 3.5 mm cable is in the box so a flat battery means the music continues rather than stops. The specification cheat here is the driver diameter. 40 mm is a dimension, not a measurement, and printing it large is a way of not printing the impedance, the sensitivity or the response. Beside it sits cancelling quoted as one decibel figure with no band, which conceals that active cancelling works on engine drone and hardly at all on a voice, and battery life quoted with no volume, no codec and no statement of whether cancelling was on. So: four bands for the cancelling, two runtimes with their conditions, and the driver described by what it does.

• 40 mm dynamic driver, cellulose and biocellulose composite diaphragm, 32 ohm at 1 kHz, 100 dB SPL per mW. Response 10 Hz to 40 kHz, within plus or minus 3 dB of the target from 20 Hz to 10 kHz on an IEC 60318-7 ear simulator
• Cancelling, hybrid, measured across four bands: up to 42 dB at 100 Hz, 32 dB averaged 50 Hz to 500 Hz, 12 dB averaged 500 Hz to 2 kHz, and under 5 dB above 4 kHz. Above 2 kHz the pads do the work instead, at about 22 dB of passive attenuation
• Battery 1,300 mAh at 3.85 V nominal, which is 5.0 Wh, both figures printed. 55 hours with cancelling on at 75 dB SPL on AAC, an average draw of 91 mW. 80 hours with cancelling off at the same volume, 62 mW
• Five minutes on a 7.5 W charger puts in about 0.6 Wh, which is roughly 6 hours of listening with cancelling on. Empty to full in 90 minutes
• Codecs by name: SBC, AAC and LDAC. No aptX, because we hold no licence, and no Hi-Res sticker used in place of a codec list
• Cancelling, transparency and off are a three-position physical switch on the left cup. Not a menu, not a gesture, not an app
• Detachable 3.5 mm cable in the box. With the battery flat they still play, passively, with no cancelling
• Ear pads clip off by hand, protein leather over memory foam, Rs 690 a pair. Battery on four Phillips screws with no adhesive, Rs 890
• Steel headband core, metal hinges rated to 20,000 fold cycles, 268 g, clamping force 4.2 N measured on a 150 mm head form
• The honest trade is that active cancelling cannot do much about speech. If your problem is an office conversation rather than an aeroplane, the 22 dB the pads give you above 2 kHz is most of what you will get, and no headphone at any price changes that physics
• Firmware updates until July 2031, no account required, and an update never removes a feature
• There is no Shuunnya service-centre network. A warranty claim means sending the pair to us, with no turnaround time promised