Northwave Anthem Pro

The tuning is the whole story

Northwave's last two flagships had the same problem: a bass shelf pushed about 6 dB above neutral, presumably because that is what sells in a noisy store. The Anthem Pro drops that to roughly 2 dB, which is close enough to the Harman target that most people will describe it as 'clear' without knowing why.

The effect on real music is immediate. Kick drums stop smearing into bass lines. Acoustic guitar sits where it should instead of hiding behind a wall of low-mid warmth. The 3-6 kHz region is very slightly recessed, which softens sibilance on poorly mastered pop without dulling cymbals.

If you actually want the old sound, the app has a bass boost preset that will give it back to you. Everyone else should leave the EQ alone. This is a rare set of consumer headphones where the default is the best option in the menu.

Cancellation that doesn't fight you

We ran the Anthem Pro against pink noise at 75 dB and against a recorded cabin-drone loop. Broadband attenuation landed at about 32 dB, which is roughly 3 dB better than the outgoing model and a hair ahead of the Kestrel Halo we tested in June.

Numbers only matter so much. What separates good ANC from great ANC is the pressure sensation, that feeling of having descended 400 metres in a lift, and Northwave has clearly spent engineering time on it. Two colleagues who normally cannot tolerate ANC for more than twenty minutes wore these for a full flight.

Transparency mode is merely fine. Voices come through clearly enough to order a coffee, but there is an audible hiss in quiet rooms and a slight metallic edge to your own voice. It is a step behind the class leaders and about two steps behind simply taking them off.

They are the first pair under $400 I would happily master a mix on, which is not a sentence I expected to write about Northwave.

Build quality you can actually repair

The hinge is the part that breaks on every pair of headphones you have ever owned, and Northwave has reinforced it with a stamped steel insert. It creaks slightly when you fold them, which is unnerving, but three weeks of deliberately careless bag-stuffing produced no play in the joint.

Earpads are replaceable and sold separately for $29, in three materials. That is a small thing that quietly doubles the useful life of the product, and it is the single most consumer-friendly decision on this spec sheet.

At 268 g they are not light, but the clamping force is well judged and the weight is distributed across a wide headband rather than concentrated on the crown. Four-hour sessions were comfortable. Eight-hour sessions were not, but nothing in this category is.

The app is the weak link

Northwave Connect crashed on us four times in three weeks, twice while mid-firmware-update, which is exactly when you do not want an app to crash. The headphones survived both, but recovering required a hard reset that is documented nowhere in the box.

The interface itself is cluttered with things nobody asked for: an ambient soundscape generator, a hearing test that produces an EQ curve indistinguishable from the default, and a social feed. Meanwhile there is still no way to remap the physical buttons.

Multipoint works, in the sense that two devices can be connected at once, but the moment a call arrives on the phone the laptop connection drops entirely and does not come back until you reconnect manually. Competitors solved this two years ago.

Should you buy them

Yes, if you care more about how music sounds than about how the accompanying software feels. There is nothing else at this price with this combination of neutral tuning, class-leading cancellation and replaceable parts, and the sound quality gap over the $250 tier is genuinely audible rather than a spec-sheet artefact.

No, if you live in multipoint, or if a flaky app is the kind of thing that will annoy you every single day. The Kestrel Halo is 15 percent worse at everything and about 60 percent less irritating to operate.

We are scoring the hardware, which is excellent, against software that is not. If Northwave ships a stable app in the next six months this becomes a 9. Today it is an 8.4.