I forgot to charge these for almost a month. Not on purpose. I put them on my desk after a Sunday mixing session, used them for a couple of hours a day every weekday after that, and only thought about the battery when I noticed I had never plugged them in. That has not happened to me with any other Bluetooth headphone, and it is the cleanest one-sentence argument for buying these.
The sound is the same M50x sound that has been in every project studio I have visited for the last decade. Slightly polite in the upper-mids, conservative on the treble, no smile-curve bass bump, which means a kick drum sits where you put it instead of where the headphones wish it was. I mixed a short demo on these and then checked it on my monitors, and the translation was close enough that I did not have to redo the bass. That is genuinely useful and not something I can say about most wireless headphones at any price.
The other thing I appreciated, almost by accident, is that they double as a real wired studio monitor. I plugged the 3.5mm cable into my interface to take a tracking pass, and the sound was identical to the wireless path. No DSP, no battery required, no compromise. Most wireless studio-adjacent headphones treat the cable as an emergency option. Audio-Technica treats it as a first-class input, and if you actually record at home, that matters.
LDAC support is here, and AAC, and multipoint that pairs to my laptop and phone at the same time. The omission is aptX, which means if you are on a Pixel or a recent Android flagship you are working a little harder than you would on a Sony. Google Fast Pair works. The companion app is fine. I have not bothered to EQ them because the default is what I want.
The real catch is the one Audio-Technica is not hiding: there is no noise cancellation. On a quiet train I do not miss it. On a transatlantic flight I would. The clamping force is also tighter than I like — I wear glasses, and after about three hours the arms of the frames start to ache against the side of my head. The pads also build up heat faster than I expected for a passive design, which is the price of the strong seal that gives you the bass response in the first place. And one quiet annoyance: the inline controls stop working the moment you plug in a cable.
At $199 these are doing something different from the Sony XM5 or the Sennheiser Momentum 4. They are not trying to be your everywhere headphone. They are trying to be your sounds-correct, lasts-forever headphone, and they succeed at both. If you already own the wired M50x and miss the cable in your life maybe two days a week, this is the obvious upgrade. If you have never owned the M50x and you want something to wear on the bus while reading the news, get a pair with ANC.
Verdict: Buy these if you make music or take sound seriously and you want a wireless pair that does not lie to you. Skip them if you commute somewhere loud.