Reviewed: Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless Earbuds
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Reviewed: Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless Earbuds

The Momentum True Wireless earbuds come beautifully packaged in moulded foam with an elegant travel case beside it. The case has a magnetic clamshell lid, with its interior doubling as a charging dock for the earbuds. Sennheiser claim these earbuds last up to four hours on a full charge, plus eight additional hours from a fully juiced dock. A tiny button and LED on the back indicates the earbuds’ battery life when charging, adjacent to its USB-C to USB-A charging socket.

 

These earbuds are large, finished in a classy black and silver deep-dish profile. Thankfully, their deceptive size belies their actual weight. The earbuds are light enough to remain comfortable in long listening sessions, yet substantial enough to distance itself from feeling cheap and finicky. Even when jogging, the earpieces remained snugly wedged in with little to no movement at all. With the included extra silicone in-ear fittings, getting the right fit was a walk in the park.

 

The same could be said of the initial pairing. After a brief glance at the supplied quick-start manual, I was able to pair the earbuds to my Pixel 3 almost instantaneously. While the touch controls located on the ringed metal face were sensitive, double-taps and triple-taps still required some practice and compensation for input lag.

 

Now for the most important part: sound. I’m extremely pleased to report that these earbuds’ sound reproduction is absolutely phenomenal. With their 7mm dynamic drivers, these earbuds were able to generate a surprisingly broad soundstage, handling different genres with ease. Vulfpeck’s Fugue State sounded incredibly tight, with extra-crispy snares and refined mids and highs. Bass guitar riffs and lower-mid frequencies did not coalesce into mud in Deftones’ White Pony, with similar performance for the sub-bass in Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city. An exceptional amount of clarity in these earbuds was attained without any tweaks to the graphic EQ in the mobile app.

 

One point of interest is the earbuds’ ‘Transparent Mode’, activated by tapping on the right earbud twice. Unfortunately, this mode realistically acts as a form of high-pass filter, with a small boost in the allowed frequencies. While you’re able to hear street noise with no issue at reasonable volume levels, clarity in conversations require your music to be turned down to an almost inaudible level. Furthermore, the option to leave your music playing while enabling ‘Transparent Mode’ is turned off by default, forcing you to download Sennheiser’s ‘Smart Connect’ application in order to enable it.

 

With such excellent performance in the audio department, it’s truly baffling to experience the lack of rudimentary functions these earbuds possess. For instance, the ability to swap touch controls from one earbud to the other, or the fact that you can’t manually turn these earbuds off, resulting in unnecessary battery loss when idle outside of its case. Speaking of which – if your case is out of battery, your earbuds won’t be able to disconnect and switch off even when stowed. Removing a single earbud abruptly disables playback from both earbuds, due to the proximity sensor around their edges. The battery life isn’t anything spectacular either – Apple’s Airpods allow five hours of listening on a charge, with an extra 19 stored in its case.

 

Overall, these earbuds are for the audiophile who requires premium sound everywhere they go. They’re definitely the best sounding in-ear style ‘True Wireless’ earbuds I’ve ever tried. However, with such an exorbitant price tag, it’s difficult to justify the hefty purchase just for sound quality alone. Future software updates for ‘Smart Connect’ may add the extra functionality so desperately needed for these premium earbuds, but only time will tell.

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