Review: Master & Dynamic MH40

Style, build quality, and sound. These are the core essentials in the new MH40, Master and Dynamic’s latest update of a classic that goes back to the New York City-based audio brand’s early days as a market disrupter in 2014.

It’s not a lavish formula for a pair of $400 wireless headphones in 2023, especially compared to models loaded with modern features like Sony’s WH-1000XM5 (9/10, WIRED Recommends). But these aren’t your average pair. With a dead-gorgeous design built from elements like anodized aluminum, lambskin, and titanium, the MH40 look and feel different than the monolithic plastic shells of most rivals. Their obstinate minimalism in the face of the current trend is almost freeing, especially since the trade-off for loads of features is brilliant sound and construction designed to last.

The MH40 skip a lot of extras, but their biggest transgression is a lack of noise canceling or transparency mode, which are all but prerequisites at this price. You can get both features in M&D’s step-up pair, the MW75 (8/10, WIRED Recommends), for $200 more. The price and lack of ANC means that the MH40 wouldn’t be my first choice for most folks, but the headphones’ sterling sound and head-turning style could be hard to pass up for those with style who don’t want noise canceling, or who simply are willing to pay for premium headphones that stand out from the crowd.

Photograph: Master & Dynamic

Pulling the MH40 from the box, you can’t help but smile. They’re just beautiful cans, especially in our review unit’s burnt-brown leather (they’re also available in four other colors, including solid black). The latticed exterior screens reflect the light like ripples on a sunlit lake. The metal chassis feels at once elegant and robust, thanks to solid base materials matched by a speckled aluminum finish.

Polished industrial posts at the sides provide smooth action and numbered settings for the ear cups as you slide them in place. Even the lambskin-cloaked pads feel classy, set on magnets for easy removal and replacement. The pads also offer one of the MH40’s best attributes: good noise isolation that kills a lot of sound around you when you add a bit of music. I can’t hear my keystrokes as I type this review, for instance. That’s a great thing for a pair that lack noise canceling.

The headphones are fairly comfortable, thanks to plenty of memory foam along the ear cups, and with their quality leather skins, they should become softer and more tailored to your head as they wear in. They aren’t as comfy as Sony’s older WH-1000XM4 or new XM5, at least not yet, but few headphones are. My biggest complaint is the dearth of padding on top, which can wear on your head after a few hours. But the MH40’s light weight (around 280 grams) keeps this mostly in check.

Pulling off the ear pads reveals the gleaming new 40-mm titanium drivers beneath, aimed at improving treble and bass response over the 2019 model—part of the justification for the new model’s $100 price rise. Unfortunately, you won’t find any sensors for auto-pause, which is one in a substantial list of premium features you’ll get in rivals in the space from Sony, Bose, Sennheiser, and plenty of others.

Instead, you’ll be relegated to (gasp) manually pausing audio from the three-button control center on the right ear cup’s exterior circlet. The rubberized keys aren’t as fancy as touch controls, nor as satisfying as the metallic beads in the discontinued MW65 (which I still own), but they are intuitive. Volume, playback, and voice-assistant commands are all easily navigable during wear, with few fumbles. Set just below the command center, the power/pairing key lets you pair up to two source devices at once for easy swapping between the two, which is a nice feature for those of us who use headphones on laptops and cell phones alike.

There are a few basic control options in the M&D Connect app. You can monitor the MH40’s respectable 30-hour battery life, turn on side tone for calls, adjust the timing for the auto-off feature, and fiddle with a few EQ presets—and that’s about it.

Absent are options like speak-to-talk or other pausing features, and of course deeper settings for features that they lack like adaptive noise canceling or transparency mode. A lot of these are conscious design choices, but I think M&D should at least include a multiband EQ. Luckily, the sound is good enough to make that last beef a minor one.

Photograph: Master & Dynamic

Maybe it’s the visual trickery of good branding, but I’ve always thought about M&D’s sound signature as a sonic representation of its headphone designs. There’s usually luxurious detail, smooth and stylized dimensionality in the soundstage, and a bright metallic edge that brings some extra vibrance and excitement to instrumental attacks.

The MH40 mostly hold to my mental impression of the brand’s sound. They offer fantastic clarity and balance, with a pulse of exuberance at the top and bottom of the frequency curve, and a sculpted cut to mid-range instruments that lets them dig especially well into crunchy guitars, taut percussion, and splashy brass.

To Master & Dynamic’s credit, there does seem to be a notable step-up in sound quality in the latest model, with plenty of rich detail to discover in your favorite tunes. It’s the kind of performance that allows you to lose yourself in the textures of instruments and the reflections of effects like reverb and echo, while also discovering subtle nuances you’ve missed in previous listens.

Cymbals ring with shimmering resonance, letting you bask in the different colors as the drummer rattles the sticks through tunes like Snarky Puppy’s “Jefe.” Bass is rich and full, without becoming overbearing. If and when it does get there, you can dampen it with the Bass Cut preset, or deepen it with Bass Boost (though each are a bit heavy-handed).

When compared directly to Sony’s WH-1000XM4, the MH40 match or outdo them across genres, seeming to add more readily discoverable details in songs like Beck’s “Paper Tiger,” where the aggressive strings almost jump through the ear pads in visceral expansion. Air’s “Alpha Beta Gaga” sends rippling metallic effects through the ether with striking accuracy. Even The Weeknd’s Starboy shines with a richly defined bass line and notable echoes in the lead vocal that bob through the stereo image in ways I’ve missed in multiple previous listens.

At times, I found the more bright sound could use a little relaxation, and I wished I could dampen some frequencies by a few decibels. The stereo image also feels a bit narrower than on some of my favorite headphones in their class, like the Sony WH-1000XM5 and Sennheiser Momentum 4. But it wasn’t something that jumped out at me, and the excellent instrumental separation lets you deeply explore the soundstage.

Headphone traditionalists will appreciate the ability to plug in directly with the MH40’s suite of accessories, which includes a USB-C cable and USB-A adapter for up to 24-bit/96-kHz resolution from supported sources, which raises their performance even further. There’s also a short but useable 3.5-mm cable that connects to the MH40’s lone USB-C port and works without power, meaning these headphones should be good to go long after the battery does.

This is a package aimed at those who care more about the look, sound, and reliability of their headphones over the long term than the advantages of modern tech or a deep toolkit of features. If that sounds like you, the MH40 are very enticing headphones with style for miles. I am sure you’d get plenty of great years of listening out of a pair.