Master & Dynamic is a curious audio company in that it’s not a big-name audio brand like Sony, Bose or Apple. Likewise, it’s not exactly a favourite specialist brand for audiophiles. Instead, it’s garnered a following among the fashion-conscious. Those who want to use their personal audio gear to express themselves, so there’s almost a sense that it’s as much a fashion item as it is tech.

With the latest true wireless in-ears, the MW09, Master & Dynamic is following up on its previous models but pushing luxury materials just a notch further while also improving the sound and performance – the end result: a gorgeous pair of great-sounding earbuds.

Specs, price and availability

Master & Dynamic’s newest pair of noise-cancelling earphones are available to pre-order now but will be available to purchase from 22 November. Depending on whether you want the aluminium case or Kevlar case, it’ll set you back either $349 or $399 respectively.

Premium styling

For the most part, when you look at the wireless in-ear headphones market, you usually see some plastic case sculpted to fit somewhat comfortably in the ear. You don’t typically see brands experimenting with expensive materials, but that’s where M&D is different from many other brands.

The MW09 buds are all about style and luxury materials. The pair comes in six different colour options. There are black, white and silver options along with dark blue, green or soft gold options, but whichever you choose, you’re getting a pair of buds crafted from aluminium and sapphire crystal glass. Three of them ship with a colour-matched premium metal case, and the others ship with an even more high-end Kevlar case (at a $50 premium).

I was sent the green version, which has a soft olive-like shade and ships with the Kevlar weave case. And whichever angle I look at the buds from, the attention to detail in the fit and finish is clear to see. There are subtle polished chamfers around all edges of the metal casing, as well as a polished ring around the round sapphire crystal glass cap on the outside of the buds. It screams premium.

The shape of the buds is classic MW-series, meaning one half of the casing is square, and the other is round. It’s essentially as if a half-circle has been joined onto half a square, just like the older versions of these buds.

Each bud is equipped with buttons on one edge, with a single play/pause button on the right bud and a two-button volume rocker on the left. They’re pretty small, and I’d assumed they would be fiddly to use, but they aren’t. They protrude far enough to make them easy to find, and the click feedback is solid and not at all loose, so they’re actually pretty easy to use.

They also have sensors built in to detect when they’re in your ears so that when you remove them, the music pauses, and when you place them back in, the music resumes. It works well, pausing almost instantly.

The inside of the buds – the part that fits in the ear – is formed from a plastic material sculpted and rounded to fit many ear sizes. This combines well with the ear tips to offer a fit which is, for the most part, comfortable. In fact, the buds ship with quite a few different tip sizes. You get five options of silicone to try, as well as two different sizes of foam.

Most of the time I wore them, I used the default silicone tips that ship on the buds. I was able to wear the buds for an entire three-hour train journey without feeling that they’d fall out or need adjusting, and they didn’t create any sensitive pressure points either. The foam tips do give a bit more stability and security in the fit, though.

Perhaps the only downside of using the premium materials M&D has used is that they are inherently heavier than plastic. Still, I never found them to be heavy enough to be uncomfortable, and they only struggled to stay in my ears when I attempted to do a workout while wearing them. Still, with IPX4 splash resistance, I know they won’t be troubled too much by rain or sweat.

Future-proof and long-lasting

One of the most impressive things about the MW09 is how they’re designed to be future-proof in terms of connectivity and codec support. The buds have Bluetooth 5.4 and are built on the Snapdragon Sound platform. That means support for aptX, aptX Adaptive and aptX Lossless, and even support for Auracast, which isn’t widely available yet.

There’s no LDAC, but with aptX Lossless and Bluetooth 5.4, you’ll get really high-quality audio stream with a lag-free, reliable and responsive connection. Plus, with multi-point support, you can pair the buds to multiple devices quickly and easily switch between them.

Then there’s the battery life, which is – quite frankly – amazing. We often see buds offering something like 6-8 hours of playback on a full battery. The MW09 can go 12 hours out of the case on a full battery, and that’s with ANC switched on. If you switch ANC off, that goes up to 16 hours.

With a further 32 hours in the case, that’s a total approaching 50 hours of music listening time before having to think about plugging it into a charger or resting it on your wireless charging base.

Measuring how many hours you can actually get in real life is – unsurprisingly – not easy. Lots of things can affect it, like the quality of the stream, whether you have ANC switched on or not, or if you’re using them for calls and music or just music. Still, I can say the battery never gave me a reason to be concerned. I could listen to music for a solid 30-40 minutes and see the battery level stay in the high 90s.

On one occasion – when travelling home from London – I had the buds in my ears for the entire 3-hour train ride and for a couple of hours before I boarded, listening for over five hours in one sitting. The battery dropped from full to about 65 per cent with ANC enabled.

Sound

Sound – as always – is another big focus for Master & Dynamic, and it’s always a sound profile that’s a little different to many of its competitors. As the name of the company suggests, it’s dynamic, and the company’s own description of it being rich and warm definitely holds true.

Audio purists might not love it, but I’ve always enjoyed the big, impactful bass combined with crisp vocals and trebles. One great example of this is Madness by Muse, which has that really low, swelling bass running through the song from the beginning. The MW09 gives ample space to swell, grow, and impact the sound. It’s big and prominent, but as soon as the crisp, plucked guitar strings come in, or the subtle strumming in the mix’s background, they’re clean and precise, and they cut through the bass well.

It’s not just about being an exciting sound, though; there’s great detail and texture and stereo separation that adds a lot of space to audio tracks. Elements that are pushed to the extreme right or left in the mix are given their position to the extreme right or left in the earbuds, so it helps the music feel a bit more expansive.

As an example, there’s a song called Strange World by Boy & Bear, which pushes some high-pitch synth sounds to the extreme left, and the MW09 gives that sense of scope. Cymbal crashes are pushed to that same position, and – later on – there’s some fluttering synth pushed to the right, so you get this real feeling of the music soundstage being really wide. This same song has a bass guitar line, which is clearly the centre of the arrangement, in a central position gluing the whole piece together.

That bass – by the way – sounds exactly as I think it should. Not too crisp, not boomy and detail-less – somewhere in the middle where you feel you could be listening to an actual bass guitar pumping through a bass amp cabinet. It was a similar sense with any bass drum beats; you could almost hear the air moving around the bass drum pedal as it strikes the drum skin.

Another interesting track – as an example of enjoying the benefits of the MW09 – is a song called Pieces by Larkins. It has a big, prominent synth/bass groove and lots of other synth notes floating about the mix space from left to right to centre. It’s a spacious mix with lots of layers spread around to different positions. And even though the mix of lead instruments is big and loud, you can still clearly hear the ring of the acoustic guitar strumming, cutting through the noise.

I don’t think any audio purists would listen to it and think, ‘Oh, this is amazing sound’ because there is an element within the lower frequencies that makes those lower notes a little less clear than it could be. I wouldn’t call it distorted or noisy; it’s not lacking texture or response either; it’s just this sense of ever-so-slight fogginess. It’s hard to explain, but regardless, I genuinely loved listening to them. It’s not an audiophile, studio-clean sound, but it is marvellous.

Call quality is good this year as well. It uses the external mics combined with some AI trickery to ensure your audio is clean and clear from both sounds, effectively killing background noise to ensure that your voice is picked up and delivered to the listener.

On a similar note, the ANC built into the MW09 has three different modes to choose from, depending on how much noise you want to block out and/or let in. I pretty much used them in Max ANC mode the entire time, theoretically blocking out as much noise as they’re capable of doing. They did well at cutting out the rumbling of train engines and wheels and most other general consistent droning, but it never felt as effective as the noise-cancelling on the AirPods Pro or the noise-cancelling from the likes of Sony and Bose. It was good, but not amazing.

Verdict

It’s safe to say the MW09 won’t be for everyone. They’re not for the audio purists and probably not for those who want a no-fuss pair of lightweight earbuds. But that doesn’t mean they’re not brilliant. You’ll struggle to find many competitors shipping products as gosh-darn gorgeous as the MW09 and certainly fewer made from the same high-end materials.

Even when it comes to sound quality and EQ balance, you’ll not find many that hit the same sort of dynamic, rich and warm tones you get from Master & Dynamic’s true wireless earbuds. And even fewer earbuds that can get anywhere close to 12 hours of playback with noise cancelling enabled.

Sure, the noise-cancelling could be better, the buds could be lighter, and the sound could be a little cleaner, but the MW09 has character, matched by its future-proofed connectivity standards and wrapped in a product that’s essentially a piece of jewellery. They’re wonderful.