Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2 review: the UK verdict on the £629 headphones for grown-ups

The Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2 is not trying to win an argument with your Sony or your Bose. It is trying to win a different one entirely: whether a pair of wireless headphones can feel like an object worth owning rather than a gadget worth replacing. At £629 it charges a premium for that ambition, and after reading through the January 2026 verdicts — including The Luxe Review’s 8 January assessment — I think the more honest way to judge these is not “are they better than the £299 pack leaders” but “are they special enough to justify sitting two tiers above them”.

That distinction matters, because on a spec sheet the S2 looks like a modest revision. It is the successor to the 2022 Px8, and Bowers & Wilkins has resisted the urge to reinvent it. What you are paying for is refinement of an already-expensive idea — and whether that lands depends entirely on what you want from a £600 pair of headphones. I have spent the run-up to this verdict cross-reading the January reviews against B&W’s own UK spec sheet, and the picture that emerges is a narrower, more interesting recommendation than the star rating alone suggests.

Thirty quid more than the original — here’s where it went

Let’s deal with the money first, because there is a small trap in the naming. The original Px8 launched at £599. The S2 arrives at £629 on Bowers & Wilkins’ own UK store, a £30 step up. That is not a lot in absolute terms, but it does push the S2 further from the mainstream flagships and deeper into a price bracket where buyers are entitled to be fussy. It also lands squarely between two reference points UK shoppers already know: the £299-to-£399 tier where the Sony and Bose class leaders live, and the near-four-figure statement pieces like the Mark Levinson No. 5909. The Px8 S2 wants to be judged against the latter’s ambition on a fraction of the outlay.

The headline hardware change is a redesigned 40mm Carbon Cone driver, which B&W claims improves bass response and lowers distortion. There are eight microphones in total — four handling active noise cancellation, two dedicated to voice calls, and two monitoring the drivers themselves. Connectivity runs to Bluetooth 5.3 with aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless, plus AAC and SBC, and there’s USB-C for wired audio when you want to sidestep Bluetooth altogether. The finishes tell you exactly who this is for: Onyx Black, Warm Stone, and a Midnight Blue Metallic variant, all wrapped in leather and aluminium rather than the moulded plastic you find lower down the market.

The sound is the argument

Here is where the S2 earns its keep, and where I’d point anyone hesitating over the price. The reviews that matter treat these as a music-first proposition, not a commuter accessory that happens to play audio. Macworld’s review frames the carbon-cone drivers as the point of the whole exercise, and that framing is right: if you buy the Px8 S2 for its noise cancelling, you have bought the wrong headphones. The consensus across the January coverage is that the S2 presents detail and separation in a way the mass-market flagships flatten out — the sort of difference that only announces itself when you sit down with a properly recorded album rather than a compressed playlist on the bus.

Buy the Px8 S2 for how they make a well-recorded album sound in a quiet room, and the £629 starts to make sense. Buy them to survive a Northern line commute, and you’re overpaying for aluminium.

That is the sharpest way I can put it. These are headphones for grown-ups in the most literal sense — people whose listening happens deliberately, in a study or a lounge or on a long train seat, rather than snatched between meetings. The materials, the weight, the way they present detail: it is all pitched at someone who wants their headphones to feel like the Zeppelin-grade design object B&W keeps promising across its range.

Comfort and the weight of good materials

There is a trade-off buried in that finish, and it’s worth being straight about. Leather and cast-aluminium arms feel wonderful in the hand and look the part on your head, but they weigh more than the foam-and-plastic construction of a Sony WH-1000XM6 or a Bose QuietComfort Ultra. The Px8 line has always run a firmer clamp than its plusher rivals, and the S2 does not rewrite that character. For a two-hour listening session at a desk it is a non-issue; for a nine-hour transatlantic flight it is the kind of thing you notice by hour six. If your headphones live on your head all day, that firmness is a real factor to weigh — and one more reason the S2 suits deliberate listening over all-day wear. The upside of the same materials is durability: this is a pair you can see lasting several years and being worth re-padding rather than replacing, which quietly softens the £629 over a typical ownership span.

Calls, codec and the app

The eight-microphone array does more than feed the ANC. Two mics are dedicated to voice, and call clarity is one of the areas B&W has genuinely tightened generation on generation — useful if these double as your work-from-home headset. The aptX Lossless support is the more interesting line item, but it comes with a caveat UK buyers should understand before they get excited: lossless streaming over Bluetooth needs a source device that supports it, which in practice means a recent Snapdragon Sound Android phone. iPhone owners and older handsets will fall back to AAC, so a chunk of the codec headline simply won’t apply to them — plug in over USB-C if you want the cleanest signal on Apple hardware. The Bowers & Wilkins Music app handles firmware, a five-band EQ and the ANC modes; it’s tidier than it used to be, though still not as feature-dense as Sony’s or Bose’s companion software. None of that changes the verdict, but at this price the details are the whole point.

The noise cancelling is the catch

And now the part that would give me pause. Across the January coverage, the ANC is the recurring soft spot. Trusted Reviews notes that the noise cancellation feels close to the original Px8 rather than a meaningful leap — the eight-microphone array sounds impressive on paper, but the real-world hush is not what pulls ahead of the field here. If you are cross-shopping purely on how effectively a pair of headphones deletes an open-plan office or an aircraft cabin, the S2 is not where the money goes.

This is the honest fault line in the S2’s pitch, and it is why I would steer the noise-first crowd elsewhere. Anyone whose primary need is silence in a busy office should read our roundup of the best noise cancelling headphones for open-plan offices before committing, and anyone weighing the outright class leaders should look at where the Bose QuietComfort Ultra and Sony WH-1000XM6 sit in 2026. Those are the headphones that win the ANC contest. The Px8 S2 is playing a different game, and it is important to know that going in.

Battery: the number and the caveat

Bowers & Wilkins quotes 30 hours of playback with ANC switched on, plus a fast-charge claim of seven hours from a 15-minute top-up. That is competitive rather than class-leading, and there is a caveat worth flagging: Trusted Reviews’ own testing landed nearer 25 hours than the quoted 30. That gap won’t sink the purchase — 25 hours still comfortably clears a working week of evening listening — but at this price I’d rather set expectations honestly than parrot the box figure. Treat 30 hours as the ceiling, not the floor. The 15-minute quick charge is the number I’d lean on in practice: seven hours from a coffee-break top-up is the difference between a flat pair and a full evening, and it’s the sort of real-world figure that matters more than a headline endurance total you’ll rarely test.

So who is the £629 actually for?

I’ll plant my flag. The Px8 S2 is a genuinely good pair of headphones sold to a specific person, and the mistake would be judging it as a general-purpose flagship. If your buying question is “which £600 headphones cancel the most noise and do the most tricks”, this is not your answer, and I’d send you back to the mainstream leaders without hesitation.

But if your question is “which pair feels like it belongs in a house where the furniture was chosen with care, and rewards a proper listening session with sound to match its materials” — then the £30 premium over the old Px8 buys a driver upgrade and a level of finish the cheaper flagships simply don’t attempt. That is a narrow recommendation, and I mean it to be narrow. The Px8 S2 is not the headphone for everyone with £629 to spend. It is the headphone for the person who already knew, before reading a single review, that they wanted the Bowers & Wilkins on their head and not the plastic alternative — and who needs only to be told the sound has kept its side of the bargain. It has. The rest is knowing which buyer you are.