Ideally, I’d Tell You the Audeze Maxwell 2 is Perfect. Ideally… So, it’s February 2026, and the Audeze Maxwell 2 has finally landed on my desk. If you’ve been hanging around the audiophile or gaming subreddits lately, you know the hype train for this thing left the station at Mach speeds about six months ago. The original Maxwell was, frankly, the king. It was the headset that made us all look at our plastic, RGB-lit gaming cans and go, “Oh, so that’s what music is supposed to sound like.”

Naturally, the expectations for the sequel were sky-high. We wanted lighter. We wanted simultaneous Bluetooth mixing. We wanted active noise cancellation (ANC).

Well, I’ve been living with the Maxwell 2 for a bit now, and I have some good news and some… let’s call it “heavy” news.

The Sound: Holy Moly

Let’s start with the stuff Audeze is actually good at: making things sound expensive.

The Maxwell 2 is still rocking those massive 90mm planar magnetic drivers. If you’ve never used “planars” before, let me explain. Most headsets use dynamic drivers (basically tiny cones that push air). Planars use a flat diaphragm suspended in a magnetic field. It moves faster than you can blink. The result? You hear everything…

I’m talking about hearing the friction of a finger sliding down a guitar string, or exactly where that sniper is reloading in Counter-Strike. It’s almost unfair.

The big new trick this time around is something Audeze calls SLAM (Symmetric Linear Acoustic Modulator). Sounds like a wrestling move, right? Basically, it’s a venting system that manages air pressure behind the driver.

Here’s the thing, though: this has caused a bit of a stir. Some folks are saying the bass feels “weaker” than the Gen 1. Honestly? It’s not weaker; it’s just cleaner. Consumer headsets usually give you a big, muddy mid-bass hump that feels like a warm hug. The Maxwell 2 gives you sub-bass that punches you in the gut and runs away before you know what hit you. It’s tight. It’s textured. But if you want your skull to rattle from muddy explosions, you might actually miss the seal of the old ones.

The Weight: A Workout for Your Neck

Okay, we need to talk about the elephant in the room. Or rather, the elephant on my head.

The original Maxwell was heavy (490g). The Maxwell 2? It’s 560 grams.

I’m not kidding. That is over half a kilogram of aluminum and magnets strapped to your dome.

Audeze tried to fix this with a new suspension headband. It’s wider, it’s ventilated, and it definitely distributes the hotspot better than that flimsy strap on the Gen 1. But gravity is still a law of physics we haven’t figured out how to patch yet.

If you have a “noodle neck”—and hey, no judgment, we sit at computers all day—you are going to feel this after an hour. I honestly don’t notice it much because I’m used to wearing heavy Hi-Fi gear, but my partner put them on and immediately asked if I was training for F1 racing. It’s a tank. A beautiful, industrial tank, but a tank nonetheless.

The Features (and the Bugs)

This is where things get a little weird.

You’d think for $329 (or $349 if you need the Xbox license), you’d get every feature under the sun. But Audeze is still being stubborn about simultaneous audio.

You know how on the SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro you can play on your PS5 and listen to a podcast on your phone at the same time? You can’t do that here. The Maxwell 2 has Bluetooth 5.3, but it’s an “either/or” situation. If you get a call, it cuts your game audio. For a headset in 2026, that feels like a missed layup.

And then there’s the mic. On paper, it’s a beast. They doubled the bandwidth to 48kHz, so you sound super crisp. But there’s a gremlin in the machine.

A lot of us early adopters are running into a “robotic” sidetone bug. You turn on sidetone to hear yourself, and suddenly you sound like a Dalek. The fix? You have to physically unplug the boom mic and plug it back in while the headset is on. Every. Single. Time.

Audeze says a firmware fix is coming, but man, that is annoying for a premium product on launch week.

So, Should You Buy It?

Here’s the verdict: If you already own the original Maxwell and it’s still working? Keep it. Seriously. The Gen 1 is lighter, the bass is punchier (if less refined), and you can probably find it on sale now that the new one is out. You aren’t missing enough to justify dropping another $300+.

However.

If you don’t have a good headset, and you care about audio quality more than literally anything else—more than comfort, more than fancy features, more than your bank account balance—this is it. The Maxwell 2 sounds better than anything else on the gaming aisle. It sounds better than headphones twice its price that don’t even have a mic.

Just make sure you’ve been doing your neck exercises.

Oh, and one last thing—if you’re dying for Active Noise Cancellation, maybe hold onto your wallet for a few months. Rumor has it an ANC version with silver accents is dropping in Q1. But for now, the Maxwell 2 is a flawed, heavy, beautiful sounding beast. And I kind of love it.

Overall Rating 5 out of 5