The Microsoft wireless over-the-ear Surface headphones was announced last month at Microsoft’s Surface hardware event and its up for pre-order stating today.
The Surface Headphones look and feel nothing like a Zune, but Microsoft’s attention to detail is still intact. The company didn’t just plop out a set of headphones for a quick buck; it spent several years meticulously designing them. Juha Kuosmanen, Microsoft’s senior director of Experiences & Devices Program Management, says “the company’s initial goal was to make a good pair of headphones for Skype”. It broadened its horizon during development and now thinks its cans are at least comparable to some of the best wireless headphones you can buy, complete with a voice assistant (Microsoft’s Cortana, of course) and active noise cancellation.
On the Surface the design shows the headset is undeniably a Surface hardware. It share the same gray color scheme as the Surface Book, Surface Laptop, and Surface Studio. The band and cups are are covered in a premium soft-touch plastic. Plastic usually indicates a step backward in durability and build quality, but they still feel sturdy and should be able to handle a few drops. There’s also metal where it’s needed. The twistable hangars connecting the cups to the band are aluminum, and there’s also metal inside the headband.
Featuring a 3.5-inch earcups with a memory foam padding which has enough cushion for glasses and it’s leather-like material. compare to most competitors the microsoft Surface headphone cannot completely be folded up into a ball like which makes it not too compatible for traveling.
The Surface headphone comes with a Surface Dial enhancing both earcups to have a dial on their outer edge that’s pleasant and intuitive to turn. The right dial controls volume and the left adjusts the level of active noise cancellation. Most headphones have a button or clicker to turn noise cancelling on or off. Microsoft lets you subtly adjust between 13 different levels, ranging from a Bose-like max to a level so low it actually boosts ambient sound enough to hear someone talking to you.
Microsoft’s noise cancelling tech succeeds at silencing most of the chit-chat and table banging you might hear in an office or café, and it can drown out street noise pretty well. It also embedded with ambient sound boost which serves its purpose.
The Surface Headphones uses Cortana to communicate with the phone. Installing Cortana on your phone is also necessary to talk directly to a voice assistant. It does a lot of the same tasks as Alexa and Google Assistant. If you forego the Cortana app and have a relatively new Android phone, you can long press the touch button on the side of either earcup and use it with another assistant. 
The Surface Headphones do sound fantastic with noise cancellation on or off, and that’s an impressive accomplishment. The 40mm drivers in each earcup pump out balanced sound with enough bass to get you dancing when the right track hits.
Finally, The surface headphone comes with an avarage battery life. It’s about 15 hours (50 hours if you use the included 3.5mm cord), which is lower than many top wireless headphones, though most of them don’t have always-available assistants ready to answer at any time. Most of them also don’t tell you precisely how many hours you have left before scrambling to a power outlet. These do. Every time you put them on, a Cortana-like voice tells you precisely how long you’ve got, which helped me at least feel adequately warned when they eventually died. Charging was also fast thanks to USB-C.
