B&O BeoPlay E4 puts active noise cancelling in your ears

Premium in-ears with improved ANC from the top audio lifestyle brand

Duncan Bell
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B&O continues to hose us all down with premium-grade, attractive audio products, modelled by premium-grade, attractive people. Latest on the list: the BeoPlay E4, with improved active noise cancelling over its predecessor pair, the H3. 

The ANC 'suppress up to 15dB more low frequency noise than previous technology,' whatever that may mean, using dual microphones to detect unwanted ambient sounds. It's the same tech found in the £400 Beoplay H9 on-ears. 

There is a rechargeable battery unit, which perhaps isn't ideal, but B&O has managed to get it down to 5x3x1cm. It's a 330 mAh cell, giving up to 20 hours of noise cancellation. In a classic B&O touch, it now has 'a polymer surface to give it greater tactility and durability' (!)

The music remote is in even more tactile and durable, anodized aluminium. 

The earpieces are also aluminium, with a choice of memory foam tips, giving an overall weight of 50g. 

A 'Transparency Mode' lets you turn music and ANC off, so you can hwar what's going on around you – people asking, "Where did you get those from? Bet they were expensive." That sort of thing.

And those people wouldn't be a million miles from the truth, as the BeoPlay E4 will retail at £229.

Liked this? Why not check out Best noise cancelling headphones 

Duncan Bell
Duncan Bell

Duncan is the former lifestyle editor of T3 and has been writing about tech for almost 15 years. He has covered everything from smartphones to headphones, TV to AC and air fryers to the movies of James Bond and obscure anime. His current brief is everything to do with the home and kitchen, which is good because he is an excellent cook, if he says so himself. He also covers cycling and ebikes – like over-using italics, this is another passion of his. In his long and varied lifestyle-tech career he is one of the few people to have been a fitness editor despite being unfit and a cars editor for not one but two websites, despite being unable to drive. He also has about 400 vacuum cleaners, and is possibly the UK's leading expert on cordless vacuum cleaners, despite being decidedly messy. A cricket fan for over 30 years, he also recently become T3's cricket editor, writing about how to stream obscure T20 tournaments, and turning out some typically no-nonsense opinions on the world's top teams and players.

Before T3, Duncan was a music and film reviewer, worked for a magazine about gambling that employed a surprisingly large number of convicted criminals, and then a magazine called Bizarre that was essentially like a cross between Reddit and DeviantArt, before the invention of the internet. There was also a lengthy period where he essentially wrote all of T3 magazine every month for about 3 years. 

A broadcaster, raconteur and public speaker, Duncan used to be on telly loads, but an unfortunate incident put a stop to that, so he now largely contents himself with telling people, "I used to be on the TV, you know."

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