Gadgetory

you probably never thought you'd see a premium noise-cancelling headphone from Microsoft but here it is the Microsoft Surface headphone it's hitting stores this holiday season for $350 and will be available in just the color you see here Microsoft spent three years designing this headphone and I found it very comfortable to wear the ear pads are plush and the headband is nicely tapered to your head one of the headphones key features is an integrated dial in each ear cup you turn the ring on the right ear cup to adjust volume and the one on the left to adjust the amount of noise canceling you want the dial turns really smoothly and there are technically 13 levels of noise cancelling additionally the headphone has touch controls for pausing and playing your music and skipping tracks forward and back you can max out the noise canceling to muffle the outside world or dial it back to the point of letting sound around you into the headphones allowing you safe to talk to a flight attendant on a plane without taking off your headphones I thought the noise cancelling was quite effective microsoft says the headphone is equipped with eight microphones including four beamforming mics that not only help with making your voice sound clearer on calls but issuing voice commands using Microsoft's Cortana digital voice assistant Cortana is always on so all you have to do is say hey Cortana to issue a voice command there's no button press necessary which is cool as you'd expect the Microsoft Surface headphone is designed to work with Microsoft Surface notebooks but it also works just fine with other mobile Bluetooth devices including iOS and Android devices the headphone is equipped with Bluetooth 4.2 not the latest Bluetooth 5.0 but you can connect multiple devices to it and swap between them easily it also charges via USB C which is nice and has a quick charge feature I thought that headphone sounded quite good in my limited time with it according to Microsoft it's got 40 millimeter low distortion free edge drivers to be able to tweak the sound via a companion app but the default sound signature has a little bit of a presence boost in the treble along with a little bit of a bass boost to create that punchy exciting sound that's typical of a lot of today's headphones I thought the mid-range sounded clear and natural battery life is rated at 15 hours which isn't nearly as impressive as what you get with competing models however the always on Cortana feature does eat into battery life and Microsoft may come up with a way to eke out more battery life with future software upgrades ultimately it'd be better if this headphone costs a little less than competing models from Bose and so need to make it a better value but Microsoft has created a compelling premium a noise cancelling headphone that has a couple of a distinguishing features that make it a contender in the space I'm David karna for cnet.com thanks for watching