Sennheiser HDB 630 review: Actual audiophile quality – without the wires

Sennheiser has always insisted its 600 range of headphones represents the audiophile choice and the most effective way of getting ‘the true sound’ for vaguely affordable outlay among the best wired headphones.

Which is why it’s mildly surprising to find a pair of wireless headphones enter the 600 series. Until now the cord has remained uncut, and the company already has a fairly credible wireless over-ear noise-cancelling option in the shape of its Momentum 4 model.

So which is it? Has Sennheiser worked out a way to combine audiophile performance with wireless convenience, or has it undermined the decades spent establishing its 600 range as the discerning and uncompromised choice?

Price & Availability

The Sennheiser HDB 630 have been on sale since October 2025, and in the United Kingdom these headphones are priced at £399. In the United States the going rate is $499. While in Australia you’ll have to part with AU$899 or thereabouts to secure a pair.

Apple. Beats. Bose. Bowers & Wilkins. Dali. I’m only a fraction of the way through the alphabet and yet there’s already a line-up of very credible price-comparable alternatives these Sennheiser are going to have to compete with...

Features & What's New?

It is, as you know, unusual to find a genuine point of difference where the feature-set of a pair of wireless over-ear headphones is concerned. Ordinarily the specification of rival designs is simply a list of variations on a theme.

The Sennheiser HDB 630, though, are supplied with a little USB-C Bluetooth dongle called BTD 700. Attach it to any source player, even an iPhone, and you can unlock compatibility with properly worthwhile Bluetooth codecs like aptX HD and aptX Adaptive, rather than be restricted to the AAC codec that iOS devices inexplicably consider adequate. It’s a very thoughtful touch.

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Truly high-resolution listening is available, too, provided you hard-wire your headphones to an appropriate source. Sennheiser provides USB-C to 3.5mm / 2.5mm cables of 1.2m length in the hard case that the HDB 630 travel in – connections for each are on the left earcup, and each can facilitate 24bit/96kHz data transfer.

That USB-C slot is also used to charge the battery, of course – and the HDB 630 offer a humungous 60 hours between charges with active noise-cancelling (ANC) on, provided you're not caning the volume.

No matter how you decide to get your audio information on board, it’s delivered to your ears by a pair of 42mm dynamic drivers. Sennheiser suggests they can serve up a frequency response of 6Hz - 40kHz when using a hard-wired connection or aptX Adaptive Bluetooth connectivity, and 6Hz - 22kHz in all other circumstances.

Performance

Yes, it can be done. You can have full-on ‘audiophile’ credentials from a pair of headphones connected wirelessly to a source of music.

Whether or not the HDB 630 are the first headphones to achieve it, or even the most affordable to achieve it, is debatable – but what’s for definite is that the sound these headphones deliver makes them fully worthy of a place in the venerable Sennheiser 600 range.

For my money, they sound best with EQ settings left well alone and the ‘crossfeed’ setting discussed in the ‘usability’ section set to ‘low’. Heard this way, there’s really very little to take issue with – the HDB 630 are an accomplished and involving listen.

The tonal balance is almost startlingly correct. Any heat or any hint of chill in a recording will have come from the recording itself or the source player – the Sennheiser is absolutely neutral in this respect.

Similarly, any discrepancies in the frequency response are not the HDB 630’s doing – they give out exactly what they’re given and, all things being equal, they move from the very bottom of the frequency range to the very top without over- or understating any part of it.

And at every stage, the Sennheiser reveal a colossal amount of detail, both broad and fine. They can extract even the most fleeting events in a recording, and give them an appropriate amount of weighting.

They are analytical, for sure, but that’s not the be-all and end-all where the HDB 630 is concerned. Their attention to detail is not an end in itself, but rather just another tool they use in order to ensure you’re getting as complete and as accurate a sonic picture as possible.

At the bottom of the frequency range, ‘detail retrieval’ combines with a remarkable amount of low-frequency control to produce sure-footed rhythmic expression.

The Sennheiser attend to the attack and decay of individual bass sounds fanatically, and while their ‘audiophile’ credentials mean they don’t have quite the low-end presence you might initially be expecting, they hit respectably hard and with real alacrity.

If it comes to a choice between ‘punch’ and ‘shove’ at the bottom end, I know which I prefer – and the HDB 630 punch like the world’s greatest middleweight.

The midrange is eloquent, and the character and attitude of voices is described just as readily as tone and timbre. The top of the frequency range is controlled just as carefully as every other area, and there’s the sort of substance to treble sounds that prevents ‘toppy’ becoming ‘hard’ or ‘edgy’.

Dynamic headroom is considerable, and the HDB 630 is more than capable of kicking right off if the recording demands it. These headphones can create a large and plausible soundstage, control it well, and give every participant the sort of elbow-room they need to express themselves.

That remains true even if ‘crossfeed’ is engaged. Allowing a little of the left channel’s information into the right channel and vice versa doesn’t do any harm whatsoever in this respect.

The active noise-cancellation (ANC) is strong, if a notch or two down from ‘class-leading’ (or ‘Bose’, as it’s otherwise known).

All but the loudest, bassiest external sounds are diminished to the point that it’s possible to sit on a moving bus wearing the HDB 630 and not have to suffer either engine- or passenger-drone. And call quality, thanks to the four-mic array, is solidly intelligible at both ends of a conversation.

Or, at least, it is if you’re not using the BTD 700 dongle. Most of the time it functions perfectly – and who doesn’t want to make an iPhone actually sound like a half-decent source of music?

But, on occasion, it can interfere with call quality, or the sound of the headphones when music resumes after a call is terminated. A quick reset cures these minor ills – but in a perfect world it wouldn’t be necessary to re-pair the headphones to continue enjoying their sound.

Design & Usability

When Sennheiser launched its Momentum 3 wireless noise-cancelling over-ear headphones back in 2019, it was the first time in a very long time that ‘design’ was an overt part of a pair of the company’s headphones.

Despite being pretty well received, it’s apparent that Sennheiser gave itself a bit of a scare – every pair of its headphones since then has not been ‘designed’ so much as they’ve been ‘constructed’. And the HDB 630 is no exception.

There’s absolutely no issue with the quality of construction (it’s basically flawless) or the use of materials (mostly pleather, aluminium and plastic), you understand. It's just, well, rather humdrum in look and feel.

At 311g the HDB 630 aren’t the heaviest around, and their careful hanger arrangement and clamping force means they’re far from uncomfortable.

Next to a pair of Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3, for instance, they don’t look anything like as premium a proposition despite being fractionally more expensive.

Where tactility is concerned, too, the Sennheiser are really nothing to write home about. Unless you value ‘understatement’ to the point of fetishisation, these headphones look anonymous.

When it comes to usability, though, Sennheiser’s crisis of confidence is nowhere to be found. The HDB 630 have an absolute stack of performance-focused functionality by the standards of wireless over-ear headphones, and accessing it via the new Smart Control Plus app couldn’t be any simpler.

Options for personalising sound, for instance, are extensive. As well as a selection of nine EQ presets – ranging from ‘neutral’ and ‘podcast’ to ‘jazz’ and hip-hop’ and a ‘bass boost’ control – it’s possible to create some custom EQ settings using either a five-band equaliser or a parametric EQ.

This PEQ gives you granular control over numerous user-specified bands of the frequency range, along with the ability to adjust master gain digital signal intensity from -12dB for each one and to specify the kind of EQ filter type (from a choice of three) each band should employ. Inveterate tweakers will love it.

A ‘crossfeed’ feature allows you to blend the left and right channel information to create an effect that’s more like listening to a pair of speakers than to a pair of headphones. ‘Sound zones’ allows you to create the perfect settings for a specific scenario or location and then easily switch between them, too.

And where ANC is concerned, you’ve a choice of three settings – Adaptive, Custom (which has a sliding 0-100 scale of transparency), or Off. Anti-Wind Noise can be set to Auto or Max, and the amount of transparency available during calls can also be specified.

What you don’t get in this nice new control app is any playback control – this is all covered off by touch controls on the right earcup. Here you can adjust volume, operate play/pause and next track/previous track, and fast-forward or rewind. Telephony and Transparency adjustment is also available.

These controls are on something of a hair-trigger, though, so it’s easier to get bigger adjustments in volume than you were after, or to inadvertently pause music playback, than it really should be.

Sennheiser HDB 630 review: Verdict

It comes to something when you can produce a pair of wireless headphones that sound as good as anything in the price bracket, yet come away with four rather than five stars.

But that’s how cutthroat the market in wireless over-ear noise-cancelling headphones is right now. The best headphones out there aim to deliver it all, from ANC to comfort.

But if you deem those features as secondary to out-and-out sound quality, then you need to hear the Sennheiser HDB 630 without delay. These are the real deal when it comes to accurate audiophile sound quality – without the wires.

Also consider

Sticking, as I have done, to the early part of the alphabet, I’d suggest the most obvious alternatives to the Sennheiser HDB 630 come from Bose, in the form of its QuietComfort Ultra Headphones and from the Px7 S3 from Bowers & Wilkins.

The former are light, comfortable, sound very acceptable indeed and hands-down offer the best noise-cancelling available in a pair of over-ear headphones at anything like this money. The latter, meanwhile, are hardly uncomfortable or heavy – and they are presented as a more up-market product than the Sennheiser while having what is comparable (although not especially similar) sound quality.