Yamaha YH-E700B review: Uncomfortable flagship headphones

Featured Sponsor

Store	Link	Sample Product
UK Artful Impressions	Premiere Etsy Store

in progress cage match premium travel headphones, Sony is the reigning champion. The company’s WH-1000XM3 burst onto the scene in 2018 with fantastic noise cancellation, luxurious comfort, tons of features, and great sound, and the company has never looked back. The latest models, including the WH-1000XM4 (9/10, WIRED recommends) and the new XM5 (9/10, WIRED recommends), each has improved the formula, forcing Bose, Sennheiser, and even Apple to up their game.

Within this cutthroat market, Yamaha’s new YH-E700B wireless headphones arrive underpowered. A revamp of 2020’s YH-E700A, the YH-E700B looks good and offers very good sound quality, but its features and overall performance are outclassed by others at its price, especially when it comes to its average noise cancellation. .

The YH-E700B are still solid enough office or travel headphones, and at $200 to $250, they’d be worth considering. But at their current retail price of $350, it’s hard to find a good reason to choose them over competitors who are at the top of their game.

Iconic Style, Budget Execution

The YH-E700B arrives in a package befitting its premium price. A sturdy travel case opens to reveal mottled black or tan ear cups, folded on adjustable hinges into the headphones’ fetal position. Like Sony’s WH-1000XM5, Yamaha’s new cans feature longer, more oval-shaped cups than their predecessor. That makes its travel case bulkier than my favorites, but it’s still compact enough to fit in most bags.

The strong ear cups adjust to fit on double hinges, including wand-like arms that extend down from the padded headband to the center of each cup for a distinctive touch of style. Spray flecks along the matte finish and a glossy Yamaha logo are the only other real aesthetic markers on what are otherwise rather nondescript earphones. Then again, that can be said of just about every major rival these days.

Inside each cup, you’ll find soft leatherette-covered memory foam ear cushions with long, narrow openings down the center for the 40mm drivers below. My first experience with the attack was one of confusion; my ears aren’t huge, but they are too big to fit inside the elliptical holes in the ear pads. Instead, the headphones sit in a sort of hybrid position between over-ear and over-ear, which feels rather awkward at first.

It’s this odd layout that apparently causes one of the E700B’s most notable performance issues: the completely erratic auto-pause. Like others in its class, Yamaha’s pair have built-in sensors to pause and resume audio as you remove them, but they rarely worked as advertised.

I had a few listening sessions where auto-pause worked fairly regularly, others where the sound would stop but not resume, and others where it didn’t work at all. Wondering if it was just my ears, I asked my wife to try and she got the same results. After a week or so, I did notice that if I stuck my ear to the right ear pad, the sensor would constantly pick it up, but that was more awkward than just clicking the physical multi-button to pause.

Is this a big deal in the grand scheme? Not precisely. But the inconsistency made me more and more frustrated when it failed. It’s not a problem with any of the other models I’ve tested, while Sony’s XM4 and XM5 go further, adding conveniences like Speak-to-Chat to pause sound with your voice and Quick Attention, which activates standby mode. transparency when you hold your hand over the correct cup.