Audeze Penrose Wireless  Headphones Review

The Audeze Penrose have a very similar look to the Audeze Mobius with a sleek black frame and blue detailing on the ear cups. They have a removable boom microphone, which helps them look a little more casual. Note that the Xbox-compatible variant have yellow detailing, to set the two apart.

The Audeze Penrose are comfortable. Their headband and ear cups have nice padding that feels good on the skin. They're also lighter than the Audeze Maxwell Wireless too, which makes them comfortable enough for long gaming sessions. The ear cups also have a good range of motion. However, they do clamp quite tightly on your ears, which can feel a little tight, especially if you have a large head or big ears.

The Audeze Penrose have decent controls. All the controls are found on the left ear cup. There's a power button that allows you to play, pause, answer, and end calls with a single click. A double click enters Bluetooth pairing mode. A three-second long press powers them on or rejects a call, while a five-second long press powers the headphones off. Also, there's a multi-function button, and pressing it once allows you to cycle through wireless, Bluetooth, and AUX connections with voice prompts to let you know which one you've selected. A long press also allows you to enter wireless dongle pairing. There are also infinite volume and microphone wheels as well as a mic-mute switch. However, the controls aren't very intuitive, and entering pairing mode can take a couple of tries. Both the volume and mic wheels feel the same and lack clear demarcation between levels, and it could be hard to tell them apart when you're wearing them.

The Audeze Penrose have poor breathability. The faux leather padding traps in heat and doesn't allow for adequate airflow. You may sweat a bit more wearing them if you're listening to audio for long periods. However, you may feel discomfort sooner if you wear them while doing physical exercise.

These headphones aren't very portable. They have a bulky over-ear design which takes up a lot of space and their ear cups can't swivel to lay flat to help reduce their footprint. They also don't come with a carrying case.

Unlike the Audeze Mobius, these headphones don't come with a case to help protect them while you're on-the-go.

The Audeze Penrose have a good build quality. They're mostly made of plastic, which feels durable and sturdy. They also have faux leather padding on the ear cups and headband. The boom microphone can also be detached when not in use. Overall, they feel like they should be able to withstand a few drops or bumps without taking too much damage.

The Audeze Penrose are fairly stable headphones. They have a high clamping force but can move around your head, even with slight motions. While they should stay put during a long gaming session, they can fall off your head during more intense physical exercise.

• Audeze Penrose headphones
• 1/8" TRRS cable
• USB-C to USB-C charging cable
• USB-C to USB-A charging cable
• Manuals

The Audeze Penrose have a neutral although dark sound profile. Vocals and lead instruments sound mostly clear and present. However, sibilants like cymbals can sound dull. Luckily, if you prefer a different sound, their companion software offers customizable audio presets that can be customized via a 10-band EQ.

During our tests, we could hear a crackling and buzzing noise coming from the left driver without any audio playing. The right driver also would make a whopping noise when we tested the bass range. While it could just be our model that does this, there have been some users that have also experienced noise coming from one of their drivers.

These headphones have decent frequency response consistency. Their bass response doesn't deviate too much, even if you have glasses or thick hair, which can break the ear cups' seal against your ears. However, treble delivery can deliver depending on how the headphones fit and their positioning on your head.

The Audeze Penrose have great bass accuracy. It's underemphasized across the range, but it's still a very flat response. Although mixes may lack boom, punch, and thump, you can tweak their sound to add more of a bass-heavy sound via their companion software.

The Audeze Penrose have outstanding mid accuracy. It's quite neutral and flat across the range, resulting in an accurate, clear, and detailed reproduction of vocals and lead instruments.

The treble accuracy of the Audeze Penrose is disappointing. It's underemphasized, so vocals and lead instruments sound veiled while sibilants such as cymbals are dull.

The peaks and dips performance is good. The left driver delivers extra thump, while the right driver lacks rumble. There's also a peak in the high-mids, so vocals and lead instruments sound honky and harsh while a dip in the low-treble veils the upper harmonics of these notes. Another large peak in the mid-treble makes sibilants sound piercing.

The Audeze Penrose have a great imaging performance. The entire group delay response is well within the audibility threshold, resulting in tight bass and transparent treble reproduction. Our test unit's L/R drivers are also extremely well-matched in amplitude and frequency response, which results in the accurate placement and localization of objects (such as voices, instruments, and video game effects). However, there's a bit of mismatch in phase response, so there may be some inaccuracies in the stereo image at certain frequencies. That said, these results are only valid for our unit, and your experience may vary.

The Audeze Penrose have a disappointing passive soundstage. These headphones have a closed-back design, so their soundstage is perceived as small, closed-off, and slightly unnatural. It also feels like it's coming from inside your head, rather than from speakers out in front of you.

Unlike the Audeze Mobius, they don't have a built-in virtual soundstage feature. However, you can still use any spatial audio system with them, so long as it's software-based and doesn't rely on the headphones to process audio.

The Audeze Penrose have a sub-par weighted harmonic distortion performance. There's distortion in the treble range at moderate listening levels. It also jumps at a higher volume, so the audio may not sound clear. That said, distortion can be hard to hear with real-life content.

These are the settings used to test these headphones, therefore our results are only valid when using these settings.

The Audeze Penrose have poor noise isolation. They don't block out any bass-range noise like bus or plane engines. They also struggle to cut down mid-range noise such as ambient chatter. However, they can cut out a significant amount of high-pitched noise such as the hum of an AC unit.

The leakage performance is alright. If you listen to audio at a high volume, people around you can hear part of it, even in a noisier environment like an office.

The recording quality of the Audeze Penrose's boom mic is good. Your voice should sound clear, full-bodied, and natural, although a little veiled.

The boom microphone's noise handling performance is amazing. It can separate your voice from ambient noise, even in loud environments like a busy street.

The Audeze Penrose have a good battery performance. They're advertised to last around 15 hours but we measured slightly over 13 hours. To help conserve battery life, they have an auto-off timer and you can still receive audio while they're charging. They have an LED light to let you know their status while they're charging too.

During our testing, we noticed that our headphones were fully charged via the AudezeHQ app. However, their LED light still flashed red instead of turning green. We currently don't know if this issue is limited to our model unit.

The AudezeHQ is a decent app. It has five presets which you can customize using their 10-band EQ. There's also a mic volume level, a game/chat mixer, and you can turn the mic's sidetone on and off.

Update 09/21/2021: We've changed Multi-Device Pairing from 'No' to 'Bluetooth + Console/Non-BT Wireless' as these headphones can connect to a PS4 or PS5 console and a Bluetooth device at the same time. We could confirm this by connecting the headphones' dongle to our PlayStation consoles and pressing the Audeze's Bluetooth pairing button to connect it to our phone. Once paired to both devices, you can hear the menu sounds from the PlayStation while also simultaneously hearing audio playing from your phone. As a result, we have updated our review, and the scoring of this box has changed.

The Audeze Penrose have great Bluetooth connectivity. They don't support NFC pairing, and you won't be able to pair them with more than one Bluetooth device at a time. However, you can connect them to compatible consoles via their wireless dongle and, at the same time, connect them via Bluetooth on devices such as your smartphone. These headphones also have low audio latency on Android and iOS devices, which is great if you stream video. However, their latency on PC is very high, meaning that you may experience audio lag. That said, different apps and devices seem to compensate for latency differently, so your experiences may vary.

The Audeze Penrose have excellent non-Bluetooth wireless connectivity when using their USB dongle. They have low latency, so you shouldn't experience too much of a delay between your audio and video.

Some users have reported that they experience audio clipping or disconnection from their audio, even when they're close to the USB dongle. While we didn't notice this during testing, if you experienced this issue, please let us know in the discussion section below.

These headphones come with a detachable 1/8" TRRS cable. They also come with a USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to USB-A cable that you can only use for charging the headphones.

You can plug the headphones' 1/8" TRRS cable directly into your Xbox One or Xbox Series X console's controller for full audio and microphone compatibility.

The Audeze Penrose come with a wireless USB dongle that offers full audio and microphone support when used with a PC, PS4, or PS5 console.