KEF’s pedigree as a loudspeaker manufacturer is unquestionable, but has this helped them produce a pair of wireless headphones capable of going toe-to-toe with the very best?

It's worth noting that you can also use these as wired headphones which means you can hook these headphones up to a DAC, and there is another option on how to use them when the battery is depleted.They’re certainly a crisp-sounding pair of headphones. There’s a decent amount of space around instruments and vocals. Detail levels are fine for the money, and tonally they’re pretty well-balanced with no end of the frequency spectrum favoured over the other. Low frequencies are lean and agile, which you’d think would help deliver a dynamic, lively sound… The way any piece of audio equipment sounds is ultimately a judgement call. Someone (or some group of people) has decided on the ‘voice’ a pair of headphones (for instance) is going to have, and then fingers are crossed as to whether or not it finds favour. In the case of the KEF Mu7, it’s not difficult to picture the wish-list: five minutes inside these headphones and words like ‘judicious’, ‘precise’ and ‘mature’ all start to muscle their way to the front of the mind… What this is all about and how the KEF Mu7 Wireless Headphones actually perform in practice is what we want to find out with a detailed test. KEF has been in the headphone business for years

Each earcup has a couple of cutaways near the top that act as mic openings. The right earcup also has a smaller mic opening towards the bottom, and there’s also a little LED down here too - it lets you know what’s what regarding charging, pairing, power status and so on. The KEF Mu7 Wireless Headphones use 40 mm full-range drivers, which the manufacturer claims were specially developed and elaborately tuned for this new headphone model. Once again, the declared aim was to reproduce every detail of the music and to do so as faithfully as possible. Smart Active Noise Cancellation TechnologyKEF made a remarkable decision a year ago to collaborate with industrial designer Ross Lovegrove, who has gone on to shape many aspects of the company’s product range, including its latest model, the KEF Mu7 Wireless Headphones. I get the strong impression reviewers and consumer alike have become so used to the bass-heavy (or at least bass-front) and feature laden offerings that seem to have saturated the market that we have come to expect a very specific basket of things from headphones and have actually forgotten how to look - and listen - a little deeper. Obviously, too, appreciation is in the ear of the beholder. Do I like my KEFs? Yes. Might someone else? No. That's up to them. But for what it's worth, in my opinion, they are better than this review suggests.Could I ask. Vocals were crisp and clear in all my listens. Romy sounded like she was sitting in the same room as me when I listened to Mid Air, with Stuart Price's production sounding as it should - impeccable.

They got the deep rumbling of the ICE well under control, but overall the driving noise was still easy to hear despite the combination of passive and active insulation. So in relative terms the KEF push rather than punch, and don’t create quite the sense of momentum or rhythmic positivity that other, more assertive, designs can achieve. And when you realise the Mu7 aren’t the most dynamic headphones around when it comes to putting appreciable distance between ‘quite quiet’ and ‘extremely loud’ is concerned, it becomes apparent the KEF can sound slightly undemonstrative and matter-of-fact when compared to their most capable price-appropriate rivals. KEF really has nailed the details in the KEF Mu7 's audio, with the sound clarity up there with the best headphones we have tried. All of the products that Ross Lovegrove designed together with KEF’s designers are characterised by flowing, sculptural forms, and it is these forms that are naturally found in the new KEF Mu7 Wireless Headphones. The declared aim was to design an over-ear headphone that appears slim first and foremost, but is also characterised by a refined, elegant design. There’s a small LED on the case which blinks when the battery is low, but it’s not that obvious against the glossy plastics and it also doesn’t give any real indication of just how much charge is left. We were caught out when our buds needed charging, only to find the case was also running on empty.Compared to headphones like the WH-1000XM5 from Sony (here is our test) or Apple's AirPod Max (here is our test), the KEF Mu7 are comparatively restrained.