£169
sennheiser.comWE’RE IMPRESSED Wide-open
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touch- and app-control; more
comfortable than they look.
WE’D IMPROVE Don’t look
or feel the money’s-worth;
periodically spiky treble;
humdrum battery life.
THE LAST WORD As long as you
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puts your teeth on edge, there’s
really no reason not to give them
thorough consideration.VERDICT
Find great deals on Sennheiser
CX400BT at: bit.ly/t3snh4bt70 T3 OCTOBER 2020Te s te d
Sennheiser CX400BThile Sennheiser’s never in any
danger of winning the Most Stylish
award for any of its headphones,
where performance is concerned the
CX400BT have almost everything you could
realistically hope for. They have the Apple
AirPods firmly in their sights while still doing
things entirely their own way.
Because this is Sennheiser, they’re flawlessly
constructed. Though the plastics used feel (and
look) quite hard and shiny, there’s nothing that
doesn’t suggest both ‘quality’ and ‘longevity’.
And once you’ve selected the correctly sized
eartip, their twist-to-fit action means they fit
securely, stay comfortable for hours and offer
physical noise reduction beyond what the more
‘open fit’ AirPods can achieve.
However, it’s just a little disappointing to
discover there’s an all-in battery life of 20 hours
here (seven hours in the buds and another 13
held in the case). Many rival designs do better.
As far as sound quality goes, they have
nothing to learn from any similarly priced rivals
(or quite a few more expensive options, either).These ‘affordable’ true
wireless earbuds are
something of a wolf in
sheep’s clothing
Sennheiser
CX400BT
BEST BUDS
They generate an extremely wide, well defined
stage, and are as alert to the finest details as
they are the broadest strokes of a recording.
Combined with well-controlled low frequency
presence, ample dynamic headroom and
impressive sense of timing and integration, the
CX400BT are among the most capable all-
rounders this sort of money can buy.
In fact, about the only area where the praise
they deserve is qualified concerns the highest
frequencies. They are positive to the point of
overconfidence where treble is concerned,
threatening to get rather hard and rattly.
The CX400BT are pretty similar to
Sennheiser’s pricier Momentums where the user
interface is concerned – which is a good thing.
There are pretty large touch-sensitive surfaces on
each earbud for controlling playback, handling
calls or summoning voice assistants. In its ‘Smart
Control’ app, Sennheiser has one of the more
useful, clean and stable examples of EQ
adjustment you can find and some customisation
of the touch-control functions too.
Get beyond the rather functional looks (and
feel) and the CX400BT are a capable and likeable
listen. As far as soundstaging and detail retrieval
go they’re as good as anything else around, and
they have real talent where the timing and
dynamism of a recording is concerned too.W