Marshall Monitor Bluetooth Headphones - Black

Product Information

Marshall Monitor Bluetooth's ergonomic over-ear construction delivers superior noise isolation without the bulk, staying light on your ears through hours of listening.

The feature full headphones sport spatial audio, which is absent from the Monitor II ANC, and AAC and LDAC Bluetooth codecs.

The lack of balance in the Marshall Monitors isn't enough to impact many genres, but it does mean if you’re a fan of instrumental and classical titles you won’t hear these songs at their absolute best.

The headphones are really well articulated, as the suspension tilts 180 degrees around the vertical axis and about 130 degrees around the horizontal axis.

The brand’s latest noise-cancelling headphones, the Marshall Monitor II ANCs, bring these worlds together in a neat over-ear package, in an update to its first-ever wireless headphones, which launched in 2017.

Whispers of strings permeate the soundscape, all the while powerful horns blare and intermingle - dancing from one character's theme to the next, and not a moment is missed. For our battery tests, we make sure to keep the headphones at a constant output of 75dB and then leave music playing constantly on loop until the headphones eventually die. In all honesty - it's particularly difficult to criticise the Marshall Monitor II headphones - yes there are small issues that can be noted - a shortish headphone cable, a somewhat weak microphone, some noticeable leakage and noise cancellation issues at higher volumes, and perhaps some minor discomfort after wearing them for hours at an end - but there are very few headphones available that aren't without any issues of their own. As previously touched upon, should you find yourself on an awkward work day where you've simply not charged the Monitor IIs for some time - you can simply plug in your coiled cable and carry on listening to your jams (at the cost of its Active Noise Cancelling and on-headphones controls) - a simple feature that simply cannot be praised enough. Ultimately, though, it’s the slightly below-par noise cancelling that undermines these headphones’ charge to the top.Bass, bass, bass - for many while looking for headphones - a hard-hitting beat is their first-and-foremost priority. There was some slight pressure on the crown of my head after about two hours of wearing the headphones, but it wasn’t anything that required me to take it off. The headphones definitely add some bass to the mix where it doesn't necessarily exist, but not in such a dramatic fashion that things sound overly bass-heavy. She did find the sound more balanced when I set the Marshalls to the Rock mode, but still complained that they couldn’t match the spaciousness she heard with the NADs and, to a lesser extent, with the DALIs. The display of third-party trademarks and trade names on this site does not necessarily indicate any affiliation or the endorsement of PCMag.

A quick scan of the headphones shows that besides the brand’s usual guitar-amp-inspired styling, there’s nothing outwardly unusual about the Monitor II A.

We’d have liked the soundstage to feel wider – they don’t exactly feel closed off, but some tracks demand more space to let the instrumentation ‘breathe’. This built-in splitter functionality is a nice way to make up for the fact that the headphones don’t have multiple-device connection via Bluetooth. The Monitor II ANC are the classic black headphones with the white logo script on the outer earpieces, the Mid ANC have the gold logo script. While the unique ergonomic construction means no matter how hard and heavy the music, they will rest lightly on your head for the perfect fit. Being a self-proclaimed audiophile and enjoying a whole range of eclectic, frankly bizarre music from a spectrum of odd niches - I can safely say I've truly put the Monitor II through its paces, and so our question remains - how did it do?