Maxwell is built on an all-new premium chassis including aluminum yokes and a spring steel headband for durability. Play in comfort, all day, all night with the deluxe contoured earpads and replaceable suspension strap. Shut out the world around you with class-leading passive noise reduction from the reinforced dual-chamber earcups. Jazz, slow musical genres, vocalists in general, all that sort of thing feels great and engaging on this Maxwell but without ever being fatiguing. I’ve wanted this in a cheaper planar for over a decade.

Powered by Audeze’s latest 90mm planar magnetic drivers, with over 3X the driver area of leading competitors, Maxwell delivers powerful bass and pinpoint precision. Audeze drivers are trusted by leading recording and game studios worldwide, and feature patented technologies including Uniforce™ voice coils, Fluxor™ magnets, and Fazor™ waveguides. Experience class-leading high-resolution audio up to 24-bit/96kHz over Wireless or USB.

Design

The scurrying of the spiders around the next upcoming corner literally sent shivers up my spine. Flying my Night Dancer Broom under moonlight with the Maxwells on allowed for a sense of immersion I never experienced in my living room before. The wind was blowing my hair, the 360 degree-ness of what you can hear and just how every detail can be heard as well as felt, made a fantasy game about witches and wizards into a quasi hyper-realistic experience. In not so emotional terms: I don’t think we need a huge cut of metal for the headband unless you want to toss your headphones against the wall when someone is using an aimbot on your server. I see the excellent headband and solid metal frame as a detriment to the experience that could be cut down on weight with a different material. I wonder how these would sound fully open? In my opinion, the treble needs to breathe a bit more, and make the FPS pinpointing in shooters online feel a bit more natural than it portrays it.

Thank goodness Audeze opted for a nice dark gray finish, although I do wish it had done a better job with that coat of paint. Sadly, the paint on the aluminum band and yoke is easily scratched off. If you so much as accidentally brush the headset against a hard surface like a wall, that nice finish will come off. This, on top of its size and weight, makes me think this does not belong anywhere else outside of your gaming space – despite the fact that the mic is removable, and it comes with Bluetooth connectivity for mobile devices. We've added a comparison between these headphones and the Logitech G PRO X 2 LIGHTSPEED Wireless in Comfort.This contrasts with our original test results, which were performed three times using Reaper software, resulting in our final averaged results of 85 ms via non-Bluetooth wireless and 43 ms via wired USB. These three measurements were among the high side of our testing and aren't representative of their typical latency. As a result, we updated the measurements in our review to be more representative. People used to complain about the poor range of the wireless signal for the Penrose. Let’s just say the Maxwell has eliminatedany lingering issues here. If my eyes were good enough, I am pretty sure I could play my Playstation from my neighbours house and the sound would still be lossless. The connection is 100% stable via dongle or bluetooth. With capabilities for Bluetooth 5.3 as well as LE Audio, LC3plus, LDAC codecs, it all but guarantees these headphones are going to be viable for years to come. Mic: 10/10 I made it through enough of The Callisto Protocol to confirm that the Maxwell’s crisp, detailed audio and passive noise isolation is much too impressive for me to be playing horror games with. Directional sound is excellent — even without spatial audio — in games like Fortnite and Overwatch 2, especially on the headset’s “competition” EQ preset (there’s a “footsteps” EQ preset as well, but the highs are a little too high for me). The Maxwell doesn’t include spatial audio in its PC app, but it does support Sony’s 3D audio on PS5. Both headphones there offered excellent pinpoint accuracy and you can easily tell where sounds are coming from so that you can lead the target.