Microsoft Surface Headphones are almost great

When

Microsoft

introduced its new $350 (£330) Surface Headphones alongside its fall 2018

Surface PC

Bose

and

sony

, which also cost around $350?

Prior to the official launch of the Surface Headphones, I got a glimpse of them at Microsoft's Product Development Labs in Redmond, WA, and was very impressed. The first thing that became clear, and that Microsoft wanted me to understand, was that this wasn't some hastily organized project where Microsoft slapped its brand on headphones it dug up from a partner in China.

Surface Headphones were designed in-house over three years by a

large team of designers and engineers

. And in case I didn't already know, Microsoft has a world-class industrial design facility and plenty of labs to test products as it builds and refines them. You can see some of these facilities in the video we shot (above), others I was able to visit but were not allowed to film.

Microsoft Surface Headphones from every angle

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There's some debate over the attractiveness of Microsoft Surface Headphones, with some people liking their looks and others not so much (I fall somewhere in the middle). However, for the most part, they're what you'd expect from premium noise-canceling headphones.

For starters, they are very comfortable to wear. The ear pads are plush and the headband fits nicely on your head without putting too much pressure on it. They weigh 290 grams (10.2 ounces), which doesn't make them as light as the

Bose QuietComfort 35 II

Tony Gonzalez doesn't know how to wear a headset https://t.co/5nZf9AzyNS

— Brandon Velaski Mon Aug 19 01:05:20 +0000 2019

(234 grams) or the

(254grams), but they didn't weigh me down and seemed solidly built.

Composed in

One of the headphone's main features is a built-in dial in each ear cup. You twist the ring on the right earbud to adjust the volume and the left one to adjust the amount of noise canceling you want. The dial turns smoothly - a lot of design work has gone into it - and there are technically 13 levels or "points" of noise cancellation. (Microsoft has some experience with watch faces, having created the

Surface Dial

for the

Surface Studio PC

a few years ago.)

There are touch controls on the earcups - the touch area is about the size of a quarter - that let you pause and play your music, answer and end calls with just a touch, and skip tracks forward (two taps) and backward (three taps). I found the touch controls to work well and were responsive without being overly sensitive. It's also worth mentioning that when you take the headphones off, your music will automatically pause and resume playing when you put the headphones back on.

Enlarge image

The headphones charge via USB-C and have a quick charge function.

David Carnoy/CNET

You can max out the noise cancellation to drown out the outside world or call it back to the point of letting ambient sound into the headphones, letting you, for example, talk to a flight attendant on a plane without removing your headphones. Noise cancellation seemed quite effective - close to the same level as Bose and Sony.

Microsoft says the headset has eight microphones, including four beamforming mics (two on each earcup) that not only help with clear audio on calls, but in issuing voice commands using the assistant. Microsoft Cortana digital voicemail

. Cortana is always on, so all you have to do is say "Hey, Cortana" to issue a voice command. Typically, you need to press a button to activate the voice assistant on your headphones, whether it's Alexa or Google Assistant. But this hands-free mode is similar to the experience you get with voice-activated Wi-Fi speakers, such as

Amazon Echo

.