Some people are sneakerheads. Others are car nuts, gym rats, or adrenaline junkies. At no point in my life have I been an audiophile. In middle school, I bought into the marketing hype and bought the Beats mixr, and later I bought a pair of 50cent’s headphones. After all, middle school wasn’t a time for finding new and unique products, it was for fitting in. As I started chasing value, my go-to earbuds became OnePlus’ Bullets V2 (before OEMs had courage) and the OnePlus Bullets Wireless. Spending $350 on a pair of headphones sounded insane, but I was willing to try any product that the Surface team puts their name on. So I bought the Surface Headphones.

The Good

From an aesthetics standpoint, I think the Headphones are top-notch. I’m a big fan of the grey-and-silver color combo, though looks are subjective. Again, I’m not an audiophile – but these sound great. I can’t say that I understand what the phrases “the mids are punchy” or “the highs are crisp” mean, but I doubt that any casual listener will have qualms – whether the casual listener is someone who’d pay $350 for headphones is for later discussion.

The Headphones really shine in the control scheme. Turning the earcups into touch-sensitive areas and flanking them with rotating dials is such an obvious move that I wonder why no one else has done this before. Most other headphones that I’ve seen have no function to the outside of the earcup, and so they cover it up with a logo. Sony seems to be catching on, and lets you swipe on the earcup for various tasks. But we’re already used to adjusting volume knobs (hence the phrase “turn the volume down”), and I’d hate to swipe 5 times just to adjust the volume to where I want it when one fluid motion could do the same thing.

With wireless headphones, you shouldn’t need to use your phone to skip a song or adjust the volume. If you have to use a voice assistant, it probably would have been faster to just pull out your phone in the first place. In-line controls are often difficult to find, and it’s easy to hit the wrong button since they’re sized for six-year-olds. The Headphones’ control scheme is far superior along all of these dimensions – the controls are right on your ears, so you always know where they are, and they’re large enough that you can’t fat-finger the wrong command. Using Cortana/your phone’s voice assistant is completely optional.

Even better, Microsoft copied a page straight from Apple and enable an auto-pause feature – take the headphones off, and they’ll pause your music (after a roughly two second delay); put them back on and the music is going again. Overall, the control scheme makes the Headphones feel auto-magic; it prevents them from becoming another gadget to worry about.

As smart as the control scheme is, most of the value for me personally comes from the noise cancellation. It’s wonderful – my roommate could be playing Diablo III, and I wouldn’t even know. No matter where I am, the Headphones provide a means of focus, and no other product that I’ve tried so far has been able to give me that. On the flip side, the option to amplify background noise is pretty smart. There are times when we want to listen to music and socialize, but those around me don’t want to listen to the Man of Steel soundtrack on repeat. Amplifying other people’s conversations is probably a bit intrusive, but it’s a guilty pleasure. I don’t fully understand the merits of having 13 different levels, however. I’ve never been in a situation where I wanted background noise halfway-tuned out; from my experience so far I’ve either wanted everything blocked out or amplified. Still, thanks to the ease of just twisting a dial, I can’t say that it really irks me.

Other niceties: these charge via USB-C, not a connector from years ago. In the carrying case, Microsoft includes a print-out showing exactly what a tap or a hold will do. When you turn on the headphones, they tell you (1) which devices you’re connected to, and (2) a rough estimate of your battery, in hours (as opposed to some meaningless percentage). These are all relatively minor things, but they make sure that the headphones don’t get in your way.

Needs Improvement

As a minor complaint, I find the case a bit large. The Headphones don’t fold, which makes carrying them a bit less convenient. Furthermore, the earcups swivel the wrong way – when I take off my headphones, I want to able to swivel the earcups so that the earcups are flat against my shoulders.

The Bad

If you wear glasses, I cannot recommend these. When I don’t wear glasses, the Headphones are comfortable, the noise cancellation works great, and the music sounds wonderful. When I want to actually see more than three feet away, none of that applies. Normally, the earcups can provide a seal between your ears and the outside world so that all you can hear is coming from the speakers; glasses interfere with the formation of that seal, which means that background noise gets in and the music gets noticeably distorted. Worse, the earcups continue pushing against your ears and glasses, so my glasses are pushed away from their normal position and my head starts to hurt after just half an hour.

I think there’s a relatively easy solution: shape the earcup differently. I think that cutting out a small slit where most people have their glasses would reduce the pressure that the headphones exert on the frame, and thus alleviate the fit and comfort issues that pop up. Alternatively, make the foam much softer around where glasses would sit. Regardless of the solution chosen, earcups would be ideally swappable so that you could pop out the normal earcups and put in the glasses-compatible ones when you need to wear glasses. If anyone can pull this off, it’s definitely Microsoft – they’ve found a way to remove the entire bottom half of a laptop, so I can’t imagine removing an earcup would be all that difficult.

Competition and Value

As a quick caveat, since I haven’t really spent much of my time or effort looking into the competition or using it, I’m going to skip over how the Headphones compare to similar products in terms of function. Nevertheless, form is certainly a strong point with these, and as biased as I am, I think the Headphones look better than the competition.

As to what exactly the competition is, I think the Headphones’ price bracket makes it clear that Microsoft wants to go against both products from more mainstream brands (e.g. Beats Studio 3) and the more enthusiast-focused ones (e.g. Bose’s QuietComfort 35 II, or Sony’s WH-1000XM3) in the over-ear-headphones-with-noise-cancellation space. Given that almost all of the competition is priced at $350, Microsoft went with the logical pricetag, one that invites comparisons between products.

On the flip side, from the point of view of a casual listener, $350 seems incomprehensible to spend on headphones. I was chatting with a friend about how amazing the Headphones were, and he was with me up until the price. For $350, he noted that he could get a nice keyboard ($100), a mouse ($50), speakers ($150), cables ($25), and a basic pair of earbuds ($25) – and he’s right. A $350 price point is pretty much a non-starter for casual listeners.

But I’m keeping the Surface Headphones. While I think the OnePlus Bullets Wireless sound just as great (I’m not an audiophile) for literally a fifth of the price, and I don’t feel bad about working out in those or getting them dirty, the Surface Headphones’ noise-reduction offers me the ability to focus, whenever and wherever I’d want to. My vision is good enough that I can get by without glasses. Similar products exist at a similar price point, but none offer the same combination of control, style, and performance that Microsoft offers.