We’re Now Scoring Wireless Headphones (and One of Them Already Hit 10/10)

Earbuds tend to hog the wireless audio repair conversation, mostly because they keep handing us 0/10 scores like party favors. But over/on-ear headphones have been quietly accumulating their own catalog of repair sins: glued-in batteries, soldered charge ports, integrated headband cushions, and “just buy a new pair” warranty responses when the cushions wear through after a year.

Today, after months of teardowns, whiteboard scribble sessions, repairability discussions, and rubric fine-tuning, we’re excited to add wireless headphones to our growing list of scorable hardware categories. It joins smartphones, tablets, laptops, wireless earbuds, e-readers, smartwatches, mini PCs, and handheld game consoles in our scoring lineup. Fourteen popular headphones have gone through the new scorecard already, and the spread of results tells an interesting story.

How we prep a device category for formal scoring

Adding a new category to our repairability index isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. We’ve spent months establishing repair priorities for over-ear wireless headphones, how to weigh them, and how to handle the edge cases that show up once you actually start tearing things down.

Make no mistake, headphones are a different beast from their tinier in-ear siblings; we can’t just copy our own homework. The repair priorities shift: ear cushions and headband cushions are the most commonly replaced components by a wide margin, so quick swaps with minimal tools are non-negotiable for a high score. Batteries, which are consumables of a different flavor, follow close behind. Next up, the charge port—a wear item—and finally the drivers themselves, without which all these would amount to little more than decorative earmuffs. 

Documentation and spare parts availability remain as important as ever, though, and can make or break the whole repair story for devices of all kinds. What’s a repair without a part, or a guide for carrying it out successfully?

With all that in mind, our process for developing a new scorecard goes like this: draft a rubric around the repair priorities, run a representative cross-section of devices through it, and then analyze how well the resulting scores match our gut feel after spending real hands-on time with each device. After fine-tuning the rubric, we re-run the scores and analyze everything again, iterating over and over until our scorecard captures the repair experience as accurately as possible.

Today we’re proud to publish the results. The new rubric builds on the scoring framework we use for every other device category, tuned to the specific repair realities of headphones. The fourteen pairs of headphones in this initial batch are the ones we used to stress-test the rubric, and they’re the first to the printing presses with formal scores attached.

As always, there are winners and losers. If a manufacturer makes the cushions clip in or twist off, gives you a battery with a standard connector, and publishes a guide, they’re already well on their way to a respectable score. It doesn’t seem complicated. But many of the headphones we evaluated never got that far, and only one pair managed to get pretty much everything right.

The podium

The Fairphone Fairbuds XL scored a 10/10, the only headphones in our initial group to do so. Tool-free battery replacement, a fully modular headband (the cushion, support structure, and crossover cable can each be swapped independently), USB-C connectors that enable awesome modularity, and Fairphone’s signature commitment to publishing useful documentation and selling real parts push these headphones to the top of our “would recommend” list.

The compromises are minor: the charge port lives behind a weatherproofing seal that may be tricky to restore, and the drivers come as full earcup modules rather than discrete pieces. So there’s still a little room to improve, but nothing worth withholding a full point over. On any sensible repairability scorecard, these stand head and ears above their competition.

The Sony WH-1000XM6 earned a respectable 6/10, a meaningful bump over the rest of the WH-1000 lineage. Sony moved the charge port to its own little modular daughterboard, housed the battery in a screwed-down protective shell instead of entombing it in adhesive, and made the drivers and headband individually replaceable. With top-notch ANC and virtually no adhesive hampering common repairs, the hardware story is genuinely good. The frustration: no manuals, no parts, and one finicky connector that turns reassembly into a frustrating puzzle. With a better repair ecosystem, Sony could net an 8/10 here, and we’d have fewer reservations about recommending these otherwise very repairable headphones to our friends and family. 

Bang & Olufsen’s Beoplay HX also landed at 6/10, riding the strength of its slick bayonet-mount ear cushions and a clip-in headband cushion that B&O actually walks you through replacing on video. Sealed drivers and a soldered USB-C port drag the score down. As with Sony, the addition of spare parts and more how-to content would earn B&O’s offering a much more enthusiastic thumbs-up.

The middle of the pack

The Marshall Monitor III (5/10) and Sennheiser Momentum 4 (5/10) both turn in solid showings on the cushions and batteries, then lose ground on soldered charge ports and soldered driver wiring. Marshall deserves credit for offering at least some repair guidance and for using connectors instead of soldered wires on the drivers themselves. Meanwhile, the JBL Tune 770NC (5/10) deserves a shoutout for repair-friendly spring-contact drivers in a sub-$100 product. More of this, please.

The Apple AirPods Max and the new AirPods Max 2 both land at 4/10, thanks almost entirely to the genuinely best-in-class magnetic ear cushions and the SIM-tool-removable mesh canopy. The interior is a mixed bag: adhesive blocks easy entry, but the drivers use repair-friendly spring contacts; it uses proprietary fasteners, but the charge port is modular; the battery is buried, but screwed in place … we could go on. It doesn’t help that Apple has yet to support this nearly-six-year-old design with anything beyond ear cushion replacements.

A note on the original Max in particular: we previously awarded these a 6/10 using a much less sophisticated scoring rubric, and today’s update drops it to a data-driven 4/10 (matching the new Max 2). It’s the same hardware, but the new scoring rubric is more comprehensive and a little less forgiving of Apple’s missteps (lack of repair parts beyond ear cushions, no service documentation, and a battery buried where hardly anyone will have the courage to extract it). Revising scores can create confusion, so we don’t undertake this lightly, but we want to give you a number that reflects today’s reality. Apple, for its part, had six years to improve the situation and chose to sit still while the competition charged ahead.

The Sony WH-CH720N (4/10) and JBL Tune 520BT (4/10) round out this tier with the usual story: easily accessed ear cushions and battery, but soldered everything else. Both Sony and JBL have work to do when it comes to supplying repair documentation and replacement parts, too.

Participation awards

The Beats Solo 4, Beats Studio Pro, Anker Soundcore Q20i, and Skullcandy Crusher ANC 2 all scored 2/10. The pattern is depressingly consistent: glued or soldered batteries, soldered charge ports, hot glue smeared over whatever connections aren’t soldered, headband cushions that require destruction to remove, and zero repair documentation.

Apple’s stewardship of the Beats brand has produced headphones with repairability that’s disappointingly closer to that of the original, unredeemable AirPods than its own AirPods Max. Anker and Skullcandy, meanwhile, are seemingly endeavoring to copy the Beats formula: charging premium-adjacent prices for headphones that’ll sooner end up hitting the trash bin than the repair bench.

After wading through the nightmarescape of earbud repairability, we’re pleased that our headphone candidates bottomed out here. A 0/10 score is still certainly possible, but thankfully all our test subjects featured at least one minor positive. That might be an accessible battery or removable ear cushions—either way, it means 2/10 is the current floor. To our product designer friends, please, if you’re reading this … don’t try for any lower.

What about Active Noise Cancellation?

ANC poses a unique challenge to repairable headphone design. Active noise cancellation microphones are often calibrated to the acoustics of each earcup once everything is sealed up at the factory. Opening them back up for a repair will likely compromise ANC performance.

So, even on some of the better-scoring designs in this group, you may not get full ANC performance after certain repairs. A truly repair-friendly design would keep the seals safely outside the most common repair paths, so a routine fix like a battery change leaves the factory ANC calibration intact (as it does on the Fairbuds XL). We’d like to see more manufacturers take up this challenge.

If wishes were fixes

Two problems showed up across most of the models we tested. First, wireless headphone USB-C ports are almost always integrated with the main board. This isn’t surprising, especially from a price and complexity standpoint, but it’s a crippling point of failure. Until wireless headphones start charging wirelessly, this port is going to be a continuous source of wear. It shouldn’t be paired with an expensive main board that requires a full teardown to extract. The solution is a port on a smaller, cheaper, more accessible board as seen in Sony’s XM6.

Second, category-wide, manufacturers aren’t doing a great job publishing repair content or selling parts for headphones. Even the ones with genuinely good hardware (Sony, looking at you) leave fixers entirely on their own. Marshall and Fairphone are the only two in this group offering meaningful repair guidance. 

Both of these issues are solvable. If prioritized early on, modular charge ports don’t cost much. And to any OEMs who are struggling with how to deploy repair manuals and replacement parts—call us! More repairable headphones means easier rework, less waste, new revenue streams, more customization options, and a better experience for everyone.

We’ll keep adding headphones to the scorecard as new models come across the teardown table. If you’ve got a pair you’d like to see scored, let us know! And if you’re shopping right now, you know where to start: the Fairbuds XL sets the bar. Everyone else has homework to do.