Sennheiser momentum true wireless 3 review: Stellar controls and superior sound – if only they were comfier

Sign up to our free weekly newsletter for insider tips and product reviews from our shopping experts

Sign up for our free IndyBest email

Please enter a valid email address

Please enter a valid email address

SIGN UP

I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy

It’s been a couple of years since Sennheiser’s flagship momentum true wireless 2 earbuds first hit the market. Despite that lengthy gap, the buds have consistently held a place on our list of the best wireless earbuds money can buy, so we were intrigued to find out if they could be topped.

While the momentum 2 was a pretty big generational step-up, adding active noise cancellation (ANC) to the company’s rather lacklustre first-generation model, there isn’t a massive technological leap when it comes to the premium momentum true wireless 3. But don’t take that to mean the third-generation buds aren’t any good.

Sennheiser has essentially tightened everything up, making small but significant tweaks.

What you’re getting is an even more refined listening experience when it comes to its third-generation pair of wireless earbuds.

The question is: with so many true wireless earbuds out there right now, are these a worthy purchase?

Read more:

We’ve been testing these earbuds for a week now, prancing around with them plugged into our lugholes. The sound quality was obviously important, so we tried them out on different genres of music, podcasts and audiobooks, testing the equaliser and presets at the same time.   

We’ve also tested the adaptive active noise cancellation and transparency modes, looked at how well they fit in our ears, how easy they are to control, the battery life and the overall design.

There’s always been a luxury feel to Sennheiser’s momentum true wireless earbuds, and the third-generation buds feel just as premium. Like their predecessor, the latest buds sit in a rectangular tweed-covered charging case, which now supports wireless charging. Oddly, the USB-C charging slot has been moved to the front of the case, making it a lot more noticeable than it was previously. It’s a strange design choice, and it feels a little unnatural having to lift open the lid in reverse when you’ve got it plugged into a wall socket. 

When you take the neatly fitting buds out from the charging case slots, you’ll notice that there’s been a complete redesign. The rounded look of the momentum true wireless 2s has gone; instead, the buds look more like the Sennheiser CX plus earbuds, featuring a more rectangular design with a pleasing matte finish in black, grey or white. The traditionally overstated shiny Sennheiser logo emblazoned on each bud is less noticeable. The change in shape makes them smaller – by 16 per cent, in fact, though they might not look it from the outset. They also look significantly more discreet in the ear, which is always a bonus, but they do still protrude somewhat.

They’re also pretty customisable in terms of fit. Nice little additions to these buds are a set of stabiliser fins in three different sizes inside the box and a set of four different-sized ear tips. If you plan on going running with these planted into your lugholes, it’s worth fitting on one of the stabilisers. They don’t stick out like the fins on the Beats fit pro. Think of them like a little bump that wraps around the edge of each earbud. You’ll need to play around with these to get the best and tightest fit for your ears because our ears aren’t all built the same, but doing so should mean they stay plugged in.

That said, we didn’t massively get on with the feel of these in our ears. Just like the cheaper Sennheiser CX plus true wireless, which has a similar design, they’re not super comfortable for long periods of use. There’s just a little too much pressure on the fossa, even when we swapped out and tried different fins and ear tips. We don’t tend to get on with more square-shaped buds, but we’ve heard others praise the comfort, so your mileage may vary here. Just on a design level, though, they look sleek and modern, with no ugly stems as with the AirPods pro.

This is where the momentum true wireless 3 earbuds really shine. We adore the touch controls on the Sennheiser momentum true wireless 3. It’s rare to find a pair of wireless earbuds that allow you to increase and decrease the volume without having to take your phone out of your pocket or talk to your voice assistant, but it’s all integrated so elegantly without skimping on the other controls, such as track skipping, activating ANC, transparency mode and so on. Other brands should take note.

It’s all accessible via one tap, two or three, and long presses. You’ve also got auto-pause in-ear detection, so your music will pause automatically if you take an earbud out. They work with just one earbud in, so there’s no issue if you want to use one without the other.  

You can customise the controls in the Sennheiser Smart Control app, which you’ll need to download to get the most out of your earbuds. It’s where the majority of the tinkering takes place. Here you’ll find an equaliser and two neat features called Sound Zones and Sound Check. Sound Zones lets you set up locations where specific noice cancellation and EQ settings activate. Imagine ANC automatically turning on when you’re at the gym or a particular train station, for example. Sound Check is basically an EQ personalisation tool. Tell the app how you like your music to sound, and Sennheiser will personalise it just the way you like. Annoyingly, you’ll need to create a Sennheiser account to use Sound Check.

Then we’ve got the new adaptive ANC, which boosts or lowers the amount of noise cancellation based on the sound around you. It was pretty effective, blocking out a significant amount of the low and mid frequencies. We noticed our ears getting slightly more congested when a noisy train sped past our home and then subsided when it was quiet again. Some people might hate this because you can’t manually control the level of noise cancellation, but we didn’t find it problematic.

The transparency mode could have used a little bit of work – there’s still a pretty harsh hiss in the background, so it kind of sounds like you’ve got a permanent fan blowing in your ear. It doesn’t let in a load of ambient sound, so you might end up taking one earbud out either way when trying to hear a train announcement.

The momentum true wireless 3 supports AAC, SBC, AptX and now also the latest AptX Adaptive Bluetooth codec. If you don’t know what that jumble of letters means, different codecs provide better sound quality and less latency. AptX Adaptive, for instance, is designed for low-latency video streaming and gaming on Android devices, providing high-res audio.

The big omission is the lack of one-tap pairing and multipoint connectivity, which basically lets you switch between devices whenever it notices that audio is being fed through one of them. A Sennheiser spokesperson told us that the latter would be released in a future firmware update, however.

Speaking of music, how do these things sound? Absolutely stellar. The momentum true wireless 2 already sounded pretty fantastic, and the third-gen earbuds sound just as good. That’s no surprise, considering they’re powered by the same 7mm dynamic drivers pegged up by the True Response transducer. It’s a clean, clutter-free experience that’s mighty enjoyable.

The soundstage is just as wide as its predecessor, with a surprising almost 3D-like surround sound quality to our tunes. Listening to electronic artist Emancipator’s Soon It Will Be Cold Enough to Build Fires really shows off the height of our music, while our playlist of percussive tracks, such as Explorations in Space and Time, really showed off how these earbuds were able to push sound around our head.

The buds can handle really complex tracks with lots of different elements in the mix from artists such as Animal Collective and Grimes. The bass still comes across noticeably thumpy, the mids remain crisp and clear and the highs still detailed, especially in the Station Eleven soundtrack. You won’t be disappointed by how these sound, and if you really want them to, they can get incredibly loud.

While Sennheiser says that the momentum true wireless 3 uses a three-microphone setup on each earbud to improve call quality, they’re still not great when it comes to making and taking calls. We sounded like we were in a faraway cave with some slight muffling of our voice. It did do a pretty good job of blocking out ambient chitter-chatter, though.

These earbuds are also IPX4 splash resistant, so intense workouts in the gym should be fine, just not a dunk or a swim in the loo. There’s no change in battery life here compared to the momentum true wireless 2. You still get seven hours of playtime on one single charge – that’s about the industry standard for premium buds these days. The case holds roughly 28 hours of battery life. A 10-minute charge will give you another hour and, of course, these now have wireless charging, so you can have them always charging at your desk if you so please.

While these aren’t a huge upgrade on the momentum true wireless 2, these are a splendid set of earbuds. You rarely ever see a flagship product go down in price and add new features like wireless charging, AptX Adaptive support and better noise cancellation, but you do when it comes to the momentum true wireless 3. They sound fantastic and the controls are super slick; it’s just a shame they didn’t feel as comfortable in the ear as we would have liked.