Shure Aonic 50, A Comprehensive Review of the Premium Wireless Noise-Cancelling Headphones
by Samuel Kalenga on Oct 02, 2024
Shure may not be a household name, but the audio industry giant is usually top-of-mind where wireless headphones are concerned, particularly in regard to premium wired and wireless models aimed at discerning audiophiles. Mixing technical prowess and build quality with remarkable audio purity, Shure’s new Aonic 50 wireless noise-cancelling headphones continue that trend, promising professional-grade sound in a package that matches premium cost with premium quality.
In this comprehensive review, we’ll be looking at the Shure Aonic 50’s design, examining what makes these headphones sound the way they do and how well they function as they should, considering the features that it touts and whether or not this expensive set is worth your hard-earned money.
Design and Comfort: A Symphony of Style and Functionality
The Aonic 50 headphones succeed by managing to look good and feel good The Shure Aonic 50 is over-ear, with a sleek, modern look. This headphone is available in two colourways: black (SBH2350 BK) and brown (SBH2350 BR). Aesthetics back the product as a standout, easy-to-own high-end product. The Aonic 50 is just over half a pound, which feels lightweight and comfortable on your head for as long as you need to listen, as frequently as you need to listen, whether for daily driving, long-haul, or walks around the house.
This is no leatherette shell on your ears. These earcups are plush memory foam that holds the ‘cans’ there for as long as you stay engaged. This sound cushion feels great on your ears, even for long listening sessions. The headband matches in padding, distributing weight around the top of your head to help resist fatigue, and clamps gently, with the right amount of give to the band to stay on your head when you move with some vigour. The Aonic 50 is neatly and tightly put together: it feels heavy, but the overall weight seems to blend the set of components together. This is a well-constructed, but light set.
The Aonic 50 may be a winner by looking good and feeling good, but there is more to the design than that. There are cool finishes, along with obvious and well-thought-out controls. These controls cluster on the left earcup for easy reach to the volume and next-track buttons there, and there are additional controls surrounding the mic, on the right earphone, for noise cancellation and transparency mode.
The mics feature a collapsible boomerang design that folds inside the earcups, along with swivels at right angles to the collapsing boom arm. Overall, the outside features of these ‘cans’ confer a lot of coolness to the user. You can roll the earcups with an easy-to-operate anodised aluminium twist and swivel, allowing the foam ear cups to fold flat. The headphones collapse in on themselves for easier storage and carrying.
Sound Quality: A Feast for the Ears
Great sound quality is the selling point of the Aonic 50 headphones. Shure has packed these with large (40 mm) powerful dynamic drivers with carefully tuned diaphragms to deliver rich, full, detailed, chaotic musical majesty to your auditory senses. Be it the deep rumbles of bass that underpin and anchor the sound, be it the rattling percussion and airy cymbal crashes of popular music, or be it the sparkling highs of vocalists in pop music or which bring the nuances of classical music to life, the headphones deliver frequencies across a wide, balanced spectrum with high detail.
In listening tests, the Aonic 50 continuously impressed me with its wide dynamic range – it could reproduce whispers and quiet moments of music just as faithfully as it could booming crescendos, bridging the gap between quiet and loud to give you a true sensation of ‘there’. The soundstage is airy and expansive, with plenty of room for individual instruments, larger groups of instruments and vocals to breathe and shine, offering plenty of depth and realism. With audio engineering of a very high quality, the Aonic 50 lets you listen like you’ve never listened before.
You might have listened to your favourite albums (both pop and classical) to death but it’s likely that you’ve never truly listened to them. Now, with astounding clarity and detail (free from the typical fog-of-war-like sonic distortions that come from less sophisticated active noise-cancelling headphones), your favourite albums sound even better on Shure’s Aonic 50 headphones. The same can be said of podcasts and audiobooks as Shure’s big, dynamic new headphones let you hear sounds that you’ve likely never noticed before.
Fans of audiobooks tend to be astute listeners and in my testing, the Aonic 50 delivered a clear sense of voices and dialogue in a particular delightful way. This audiophile quality headphone demonstrates a sonic signature that is famously ‘balanced’ or ‘neutral’ in headphone parlance, which means it eschews bass or treble boosting that might otherwise unnaturally enhance the ‘highs’ or ‘lows’ of music. This quality demonstrates what headphone ‘nerds’ are always on about, namely, getting out of the way and allowing the sound of the music to flow through the headphones to your ears.
Noise Cancellation: A World of Silence
Noise cancellation is the other focus of Shure’s investment in the Aonic 50, and the results are impressive. The company has developed a sophisticated — and complex — hybrid system that provides excellent noise cancellation, helping to segregate you from the world around you. The subjective effect of this system is that of a very quiet environment (although unfortunately the objectively higher noise floor limits by how much).
This is achieved using a combination of feedforward microphones and feedback microphones, which are strategically placed and designed toanted external sounds and generate an antiphase signal that actively cancels out these sounds and, thereby, reduces the ambient noise floor. Shure claims that the Aonic 50 effectively reduces ambient noise byels, which is a noticeable reduction in noise levels. This will certainly help you to enjoy your music in noisy environments such as city streets, busy airports or bustling cafés from which you might otherwise be distract be isolated from your surroundings the volume of your music, but also by disabling the noise cancellation using the NC/Ambient button so you can hear your surroundings without having to take your headphones off.
Notice the mic that aids in activating Transparency Mode It will be obvious from the diagram of the Aonic 50’s overall design that the feature we just encountered (momentary disabling of the noise cancellation to hear your surroundings) involves an ‘ambient noise’ processing mode, and a second press of the NC/Ambient button will enable that mode, which helps you to hear what’s going on around you (although it doesn’t also disable the music playback when noise cancellation is momentarily cancelled).
Connectivity and Features: Seamless Integration
They can sync via Bluetooth 5.0 to a wide range of other devices like your phone, tablet, laptop and so on and will remain connected stably. The Aonic 50 also works with the aptX HD codec, so you’ll receive the highest possible audio resolution wirelessly. The set supports multipoint connectivity, which means you can line up two devices at once, such as your smartphone and your laptop, and switch between them without having to reconnect manually.
The Aonic 50 comes with a microphone that is provided to enable you to make high-quality calls. Now, don’t be mistaken and think that they’re only good for listening to music, and not for making or receiving calls – many headphones these days are a compromise. For the Aonic 50 though, everyone at Shure has been working towards making them the best possible all-rounders who also excel at making calls. So, now you know that the Shure Aonic 50 headphones deliver great sound and have great connectivity, but that’s not all.
