Beats Studio Pro vs Beats Studio 3 Wireless

Beats Studio Pro

The Beats to buy

The Studio Pro succeed the popular Studio Wireless 3, bringing a number of improvements, including USB-C Audio and Spatial Audio with Dynamic Head Tracking, as well as a refined design and up to 40 hours battery life.
Beats Studio 3 Wireless

Looking outdated

The Beats Studio 3 Wireless were great flagship headphones in their day, but six years on they are due a refresh. They still offer up to 40 hours of battery life but lack things like a transparency mode, as well as more advanced microphones for top-notch ANC.

The successor to the Beats Studio 3 Wireless was a long time coming. It was almost six years after the launch of the Beats Studio 3 Wireless that the Beats Studio Pro were finally unleashed upon the world. Despite the launch of the Beats Studio Pro, it’s still possible to get your hands on a pair of Beats Studio 3 Wireless headphones, and for a significantly lower price than the Beats Studio Pro.

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We’ve gone to head to head with the Beats Studio Pro vs Apple AirPods Max to see how the top-of-the-range Beats headphones to compare to Apple’s over-ear headphones, but how to the Beats Studio Pro compare to their previous incarnation? Are they worth the upgrade if you already own some Beats 3 Studio Wireless headphones? And if you’re looking for some new over-ear headphones, is the higher price of the Beats Studio Pro worth it? Learn more as we go head-to-head with the Beats Studio 3 Wireless vs. Beats Studio Pro.

Price, availability and specs

The Beats Studio Pro were announced in July 2023 and launched a month later with a price tag of $349.99. They’re currently available for as little as $229.95 on Amazon. They’re available in four color options, including Black, Deep Brown, Navy, and Sandstone.

The Beats Studio 3 Wireless were announced in September 2017, priced at $349.95/£349.95. The Beats Studio 3 Wireless are no longer listed on the Apple or Beats websites, but you can still get your hands on them from other retailers. Currently, you can get a pair from Amazon from as little as $169. The Beats Studio 3 Wireless offer more color options, with a choice of Matt Black, Red, Blue, White, Midnight Black, Shadow Grey, and Black & Red.

	Beats Studio Pro	Beats Studio 3 Wireless
Brand	Beats	Beats
Battery Life	Up to 40 hours	22 hours (ANC on), 40 hours (ANC off)
Bluetooth	Bluetooth 5.3	Bluetooth 4.0
Noise Cancellation	ANC, Transparency modes	ANC only
Microphones	Six with ANC on, three with ANC off	Two
Colors	Black, Navy, Sandstone, Deep Brown	Matt Black, Midnight Black, Shadow Grey, Red, Black & Red White, Blue, B
Compatbility	iOS and Android	iOS and Android

Design

From a design perspective, not very much has changed at all. The Beats Studio 3 Wireless had a distinctive design that was easily recognizable, and the company seems to have wanted to preserve that, while improving the overall performance and user experience.

That means you have the same plastic frame for the headband and earcups, with vegan leather memory foam earpads and a collapsible design that makes them easy to throw into a bag. The Beats logo adorns each earcup with the signature circle design encompassing it; people will be in no doubt that you’re wearing a pair of Beats. A single button control is hidden under the ‘b’ on the left cup, while a multi-function button sits just beneath it on the right. Five LEDs also appear underneath this button, for an at-a-glance idea of how much battery you have remaining.

In the Beats Studio Pro, these LEDs will also light up to display which EQ profile you have selected when in wired mode, which we’ll get on to later in the article. These LEDs will also flash when in pairing mode on both headphones.

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The earcup material has been reconfigured and improved in the Beats Studio Pro, but we already found the Beats Studio 3 Wireless earcups comfortable enough to wear for several hours. The only issue with both sets of earcups is that they can get a little warm in hot weather. Who knew that ears could get so sweaty?

The color palette has taken a decidedly more neutral approach in the Beats Studio Pro; whether that’s a good thing will come down to personal preference. If you’re more of a fan of brighter and bolder colors, you’ll want to look to the Studio 3 Wireless instead.

Features

The Beats Studio Pro offer some new features that the Beats Studio 3 Wireless don’t have, bringing them in line with the competition on the market.

There’s improved noise cancellation, with a transparency mode that doesn’t exist on the Beats Studio 3 Wireless. The ANC on board the Studio 3 Wireless is not as good as what’s on offer from the Studio Pro, thanks to an older, lower-quality microphone setup.

With six microphones on board the Beats Studio Prol, the ANC is more intelligent, adapting better to noisy situations as they arise, with the inclusion of playback correction to iron out any artifacts introduced by the noise cancelling process.

Read our review

Beats Studio 3 Wireless: Smart sounding, ultra long-lasting headphones

Beats Studio 3 Wireless are 2017’s flagship Beats over-ears, packing a familiar design and Apple’s W1 chip.

The Beats Studio 3 Wireless do offer adaptive noise cancellation through the Pure ANC engine, and at the time, we deemed it to offer good performance. However, the technology has moved on in the intervening years, and the Studio Pro headphones are the better of the two when it comes to ANC.

Another new feature in the Beats Studio Pro is the support for Spatial Audio with Dynamic Head Tracking when paired with an iOS device. Any headphones can play Dolby Atmos tracks as they don’t need any special hardware, but Dynamic Head Tracking is a feature that needs the right sensors on board to make it work.

The Beats Studio Pro have the required sensors, whereas the Beats Studio 3 Wireless do not. By using a built-in inertial measurement unit that consists of a gyroscope and accelerometer to understand where your head is positioned in relation to your iPhone or iPad, the Studio Pro can adjust the positioning of sounds in real time based on the direction your head is facing. The aim is to deliver a more authentically immersive experience with whatever you’re watching or listening to.

To further improve this experience, the Beats Studio Pro can carry out a scan of your ears to create a personalized spatial audio profile, optimizing the experience by better understanding the shape of your ear anatomy. The Beats Studio 3 Wireless don’t offer this.

Perhaps one of the most significant advancements is the Beats’ ability to bring Android phones under their wing with a more native experience. With the W1 chip on board, the Beats Studio 3 Wireless felt more like a pair of headphones aimed at Apple users, whereas the second-generation Beats Proprietary Platform in the Beats Studio Pro aims to deliver a very similar experience no matter what device you pair them with. That means you get Apple’s One-Touch Pairing and Google’s Fast Pair, for easy pairing out of the box, and both Find My and Find My Device, should you ever misplace them.

There are a few platform-specific features that slightly tip the Beats Studio Pro headphones in Apple’s favor, including automatic over-the-air updates (Android users will need to download an app) and integrated Siri capabilities, but these headphones still feel like they can appeal to all with their main functionality.

Performance

Tech never stands still. You would expect the performance gains over six years to be significant, and this is the case. Beats itself has described the sound quality as “significantly improved” compared with its predecessors.

Part of the reason for this improvement is the introduction of a new 40mm custom driver that gives a balanced sound profile, and a focus on clarity, with 80% less distortion, even at volume. In our review of the Beats Studio 3 Wireless, we noted that there was a definite lean towards the lower register, and although not overwhelming, a bass bias was still certainly there. The Beats Studio Pro flip this on its head, dialing down the bass and letting the higher frequencies cut through. It results in a punchy top end and crisp vocals. The less-prominent bass may not be to everyone’s taste, but it makes the Beats Studio Pro superior as a pair of reference headphones.

The original headphones had a focus on wireless connectivity, so much so that the word ‘wireless’ was shoehorned into the slightly unwieldy name of the Beats Studio 3 Wireless. The did include a 3.5mm analog input, however, for a wired connection.

One of the biggest differences in the newer model is that the Beats Studio Pro offer USB-C support, with both uplink and downlink connectivity. You can use a USB-C cable for a wired connection, and thanks to the EU, if you own one of the latest models of iPhone, you won’t need to mess with any adapters, either. There’s also a USB-C-to-3.5mm cable included in the box, so you can connect to an audio player or a really, really old iPhone.

Thanks to the built-in digital-to-analog converter (or DAC) in the Beats Studio Pro, they can play back lossless audio at up to 24-bit/48kHz when wired. When using a wired connection, you can access a choice of three EQ-optimized sound profiles, which you can cycle through using the multi-function button.

Battery life

Battery life has been slightly improved in the Studio Pro, offering 24 hours with ANC and 40 hours without it, compared with 22 hours with ANC for the Beats Studio 3 Wireless, and 40 hours with ANC off.

The Fast Fuel fast-charging technology does give a little more this time around if you find yourself caught short. You’ll get four hours of playback with ANC off after 10 minutes Fast Fuel charging with the Beats Studio Pro, compared with three hours on the Beats Studio 3 Wireless.

As you’d expect, the Beats Studio Pro charge via USB-C, while the older Beats Studio 3 Wireless charge using MicroUSB. Both sets of headphones take around two hours to go from empty to full.

Beats Studio 3 Wireless vs. Beats Studio Pro: Which should you buy?

While the Beats Studio 3 Wireless were superb headphones in their day, the industry has moved on significantly in six years. The inclusions in the Beats Studio Pro show that, and are, without a doubt, the headphones to buy of the two, when looking at things from a performance perspective.

Beats Studio Pro

$230 $350 Save $120

The Studio Pro succeed the popular Studio Wireless 3, bringing a number of improvements, including USB-C Audio and Spatial Audio with Dynamic Head Tracking, as well as a refined design and up to 40 hours battery life.

However, the Beats Studio 3 Wireless are still available at a significant discount. Considering the battery life is still decent, if you can find them a good price, it can still make them a worthwhile buy. Just be aware that the performance in both sound quality and noise cancellation won’t compare to the Beats Studio Pro, and you’ll miss out on some features you might expect in 2024, like transparency mode.