Why You Can Trust CNET Grab the Beats Solo Pro for $230, the lowest price we've ever seen
These on-ear headphones have active noise cancellation, Apple's H1 chip and superb sound.
If you're shopping for new headphones, you owe it to yourself to get a pair with active noise canceling. The days of headphones without ANC are over -- you wouldn't buy a black-and-white TV or a car without automatic windows, would you? You can find good noise canceling at virtually any price these days, but one of the better headphones we've recently encountered is the Beats Solo Pro. The downside? They sell for $300. But on Friday I found that the Beats Solo Pro is currently selling for $229.95 on Amazon -- move quickly, because I don't know when they're climbing back up to their more normal $250-$300 range.
Getting 23% off the Beats Solo Pro is quite a deal -- it's the lowest price I think we've ever seen on these headphones, and certainly the lowest price Amazon has ever had. When CNET reviewed the Beats Solo Pro late last year, David Carnoy was impressed with both their comfort and sound quality. The Solo Pro has a lot of comfy padding and the headband is designed to take pressure off your ears, a valuable attribute in on-ear headphones.
They have excellent ANC built in, with a one-touch transparency mode that lets you rapidly bleed in ambient sound without pausing the audio -- perfect for hearing announcements at the airport, for example, or having a brief conversation without taking the headphones off.
And the headphones really earn their usual $300 price tag. They have no power switch, turning on automatically when you unfold them from their travel configuration. There's always-on Siri support (and you can use Google Assistant if you have an Android phone). You get about 22 hours of runtime with noise canceling on (40 hours with it turned off) and there's a quick-charge mode that gives you three hours of use from a 10-minute top-off if you're in a rush to get out the door.
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