Audio-Technica makes its second jump in real wireless headphones

A year after the announcement by Audio-Technica of its first truly disappointing earbuds, the company is coming back with two unpublished attempts: the ATH-CKS5TW and the ATH-CKS3TW. This time, the life of the battery has been improved, the two pairs are now charging via USB-C and are much cheaper. The ATH-CKS5TW costs $ 149 (or £ 149 in the UK), while the ATH-CKS3TW costs $ 99 (£ 99).

Although both pairs of tips now have IPX2 splash resistance and better noise reduction, there are some differences between them that justify price disparity:

• The battery life is better with the ATH-CKS5TW: at 15 hours of the headphones themselves and at 30 others of the case. With the cheaper ATH-CKS3TW, you only get six hours with the ear buds and 24 hours with the charging case.
• The most expensive headsets have physical control buttons relative to the touch controls of the cheapest earphones. We found that the touch controls of Audio-Technica's previous headphones were "clumsy and slow"; so we hope they have been improved.
• Both pairs of headphones support AptX and SBC audio codecs, but only the most expensive ATH-CKS5TW supports AAC format.
• Surprisingly, only the cheapest voice assistants, ATH-CKS3TW, such as Siri and Google Assistant. Audio-Technica gave us several reasons for this. The main thing is that she thought voice control would "hurt" the battery life and the sound quality of the headphones, which he considered a priority with his more expensive headphones. The company also said that including a voice assistant would have taken one of the controls of the headset button, which she wanted to leave free as a power button to allow users to use these headphones without a case.
• Finally, there will probably be a difference in sound between the two atria, but it is a little harder to quantify on paper. The ATH-CKS5TW has 10mm speakers compared to 5.8mm for the ATH-CKS3TW, but we will have to listen to the earphones ourselves to see how that translates into sound quality.

We will have to try both headsets for ourselves before knowing if Audio-Technica was able to solve the problem as its first two pairs of true wireless headphones had. These included poor sound quality and bulky design for the ATH-CKR7TW and Bluetooth signal losses for the ATH-SPORT7TW. We also found that both headsets were significantly behind when we were trying to watch videos.

The ATH-CKS5TW will go on sale in September, while the cheaper ATH-CKS3TW will follow in November.