How to save battery playtime

Small adjustments to how you use your headphones can add hours to a single charge. Here are the most effective changes, ranked by impact, so you can make the most of every charge.

Volume is the single biggest drain on your battery, and its effect is not linear. Raising the volume from 50% to 100% causes an exponential increase in power draw, which can cut your playtime by more than half.

The dynamic range of a track (the difference between its loudest and quietest moments) also affects consumption if the volume setting stays unchanged throughout.

To get the most out of a charge, lower your volume and consider disabling normalisation features in your streaming app.

Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) uses the headphones' microphones and digital signal processor (DSP) to measure background noise and block out unwanted sound. The incoming signals are phase-inverted and combined with the original audio signals, causing them to cancel each other out and creating a sense of isolation.

Transparency mode works in the opposite way. The microphones and DSP pass external sounds through rather than blocking them out, amplifying and matching what your headphones passively filter by covering your ears.

Both features draw processing power from the battery. Disabling either one when it is not needed is one of the most effective ways to extend your playtime.

Soundstage Spatial Audio uses digital signal processing to create the perception of a wider, more immersive sound environment. Because it requires continuous processing power, it uses around 20% more battery than listening without it.

Disabling it when you do not need the spatial effect is a straightforward way to extend your session.

Choosing a more energy-efficient codec can add up to 20% more playtime, though it usually means some reduction in audio quality.

A coder-decoder (codec) compresses audio at the source device and decompresses it at your headphones, making wireless Bluetooth transfers viable. Common codecs include SBC, AAC, LC3, and LDAC. LDAC enables the highest transfer rate and the best audio quality, but it also uses the most power.

Your source device typically determines which codec is active, though many devices allow you to change this manually in their settings.

The equaliser (EQ) and Adaptive Loudness both customise how audio sounds, but both require the DSP to do extra work. Adaptive Loudness uses the headphones' microphones to monitor surrounding sounds and adjusts the audio in real time, using equalisation to target specific frequencies, signal-strength adjustments to manage volume, and compression to alter the dynamic character of the sound.

If you listen without a custom EQ curve and with Adaptive Loudness off, the DSP has less to process, and your battery lasts a little longer.

Phone calls use more battery than listening to music. During a call, your headphones are not only receiving audio but also transmitting it back to your source device. This puts the DSP into a high-performance state, managing multiple systems at once, including advanced microphone filtering and noise-cancellation techniques to ensure clear call quality.

Talk time and playtime is measured differently, so rated playtime figures do not apply to calls. Talk time is typically noticeably shorter than listening time.

The figures below are intended to inform rather than discourage, but it is worth knowing that temperature has a real effect on lithium-ion battery performance. Cold temporarily reduces capacity, and heat causes permanent ageing over time.

Below 15 °C (59 °F), battery capacity may decrease as it gets colder. Above 45 °C (95 °F), the battery's self-discharge rate increases and long-term health is at risk.

Never charge your device in freezing temperatures, and avoid storing it either fully drained or fully charged for extended periods.