Beats 360 Review: The Gym Headphone That Costs Audiophile Money

The Beats 360 is the first pair of headphones that lets you pull the ear cushions and the headband pad off and snap new ones on, and that single idea is doing a lot of heavy lifting at Rs 42,900.

What you get is a 294.5g over-ear pair with a custom Beats chip in each cup, Class 1 Bluetooth 5.3, nine microphones running noise cancellation and voice, and an IPX4 rating that no other headphone in this price band in India carries. Beats claims 32 hours with ANC and spatial audio switched on, and a five minute charge for an hour of playback. The cushions twist off in about five seconds and the headphones can tell which type you have fitted, then retune themselves for it.

What you do not get is a cable. There is no 3.5mm jack, and the USB-C port only charges. That makes the 360 the only pair in its Indian price bracket with no wired listening path at all, and it means no lossless playback of any kind. The cheaper Beats Studio Pro, now down to Rs 32,900 officially and selling closer to Rs 25,000 at best, has both a jack and USB-C audio with lossless. There is also no manual EQ on any platform, and AAC and SBC are the only codecs, so Android users do not get LDAC or anything like it.

So who is this for? If you want one pair that survives a gym session, a sweaty commute and a long flight, and you do not care about cables, the 360 is the only thing in this price band built for that life. If you want one pair to actually listen to music on, the Studio Pro sitting at around Rs 25,000 does more for less, but not everything that 360 does.

The short version is that this is a gym and commute headphone priced like a listening headphone, in a market where the Sony WH-1000XM6 can be had for around Rs 32,500 with a bank offer and the Bose QuietComfort Ultra 2nd Gen is sitting near Rs 31,990 on Amazon.

The 360 weighs 294.5g, which puts it between the 260g Studio Pro and the 385.6g AirPods Max 2. The headband is a curved spring arc with no wires running through it, the cups rotate flat rather than folding inward, and a woven ripstop case comes in the box. A charging cable and power adapter do not, which Apple India notes on its own product page.

Controls are physical, and that is a small win. The right cup has a volume rocker and a playback button, the left has a flush power button and an ANC cycle button. There is no touch surface to misfire when you adjust the cups, and there is no wear detection sensor, so taking them off your head does not pause anything.

The cushion system works better than it sounds on paper. Kits twist off in under five seconds, the headphones chime and flash the power LED when a cushion seats correctly, and sensors tell the audio tuning which material is on. Performance Knit ships fitted and is the breathable gym material. UltraPlush is the synthetic leather option, sold only in Black and Cloud. The practical difference is not cosmetic: Performance Knit seals looser and cancels less noise, UltraPlush seals tighter and cancels more.

Comfort is something I really liked on these. I found the clamp secure without fatigue and the cushions spread pressure without clamping at all. But one of my colleagues said they found it a little too much, so my honest reading is that it depends on head size and which cushion you have on.

For an Indian buyer the knit cushions are the right default. They are built from memory foam wrapped in a breathable diamond knit, each strand made of 36 micro-threads, and they are the reason the IPX4 rating is not just a spec sheet line. In a city where you sweat walking to the car in October, a cushion you can pull off, wash the sweat out of your life with and replace for Rs 6,900 is a more honest answer to Indian weather than a sealed leather pad that slowly flakes.

The flip side is that this is also the most comfort-dependent product Beats has made, and very few people in India can try it before buying. Apple has five stores here, in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Pune and Noida. Everyone else is ordering a Rs 42,900 pair of headphones without putting it on their head first.

Beats rebuilt the drivers for this one. Three layer diaphragms, dual neodymium magnets, a custom high dynamic range amplifier, and a claimed 12dB more maximum output than the Studio Pro. That 12dB figure is a company claim and nobody has independently measured it.

There is a catch in how the tuning works that most buyers will never find on their own. Adaptive EQ only runs when both ANC and Transparency are off, and that off mode has to be enabled first in iPhone Settings, Mac System Settings or the Beats app on Android before it even shows up in the button cycle. With ANC on, which is how most people will use these all day, Adaptive EQ is not running and the bass sits heavier.

There is no manual or custom EQ on any platform. On a Rs 42,900 pair in 2026 that is hard to defend, especially when the Sony app gives you full parametric control at a lower price.

Codecs are AAC and SBC. No LDAC, no aptX, no LC3, and no Hi-Res Wireless badge. Combined with the missing cable, there is no route to lossless on this product at all.

I heard punchy bass and clear vocals and this is not a reference-flat tuning and sound-wise it is the best sounding Beats I have used. But I'd have still loved a custom equaliser.

Without a cable and without a high-res codec, the best this pair can ever do is a well-tuned AAC stream. That is fine for a playlist on the metro but for anything more than that, it's slightly limiting.

Beats says the 360 delivers up to 1.75 times more total noise cancellation than the Studio Pro, measured in its own lab. Total means active plus passive together, which is a friendlier way to count than active alone. Nine microphones handle the work, eight of them feeding ANC, with two shared between noise cancelling and voice pickup.

Here is the thing worth knowing- nobody has independently verified that claim. Not one published review carries a decibel attenuation figure or an isolation curve for this product. The site that normally publishes those charts has them marked as pending, and the other major measurement site has not reviewed it at all. The 1.75x number is sitting in every launch story unchallenged.

What is established is that the cushion you fit changes the result. UltraPlush seals tighter and cancels more. Performance Knit, the pair that ships fitted, cancels less. Anyone judging the ANC on the out of box cushions is judging the weaker configuration, and most buyers will never know.

On calls, the mics held up on a busy cafe with people talking and the caller heard none of it. The voice sometimes was over-processed, which never felt like an issue for a quick call or for a video meeting. I really liked the quality of calls in my case while paired with iPhone, Pixel and laptop.

For Indian conditions, where horns, brake squeal, a conductor's whistle and someone's phone speaker on the metro are mid and high frequency bursts, and no ANC system on the market handles those the way they handle a jet engine. So I tested it not only in the office and on flights, but also on busy streets, and it did not disappoint.

The cushion choice matters more here than the marketing does. If you are judging these on the knit pads they shipped with, you are judging the looser seal, and a passive seal is doing a lot of the work against exactly the sharp noises Indian streets throw at you.

The 360 runs a custom Beats chip, one in each cup, not an Apple H series part, which is deliberate. Apple's own hardware leadership has described Beats as the dual ecosystem play, built for Google and Apple together, and the feature list reflects it.

On an iPhone you get one touch pairing, iCloud pairing, automatic device switching, Audio Sharing, Find My and hands-free Siri. Personalised spatial audio with head tracking works too, though setting it up needs an iPhone with a TrueDepth camera, so Android-only users get the generic profile.

On Android you get Fast Pair, Audio Switch and the Beats app with firmware updates and control customisation. For an Android-majority market like ours, that cross-platform support is the most underrated thing about this product.

What is missing matters more as there is no wired audio of any kind, no manual EQ, no wear detection, no Auracast.

Beats rates the 360 at up to 32 hours with ANC and personalised spatial audio both running, which is eight hours more than the Studio Pro manages and twelve more than the AirPods Max 2. Fast Fuel gives an hour of playback off a five minute charge.

In practical terms, 32 hours means you charge these roughly once a week if you are using them for a commute and a few hours of work. That is the number that matters more than any lab figure, and it is the one area where the 360 comfortably beats both the AirPods Max 2 and the Studio Pro.

In my usage, I did not intentionally push it to see how quickly it dies. I used it in my daily routine like morning calls for about an hour, music and shows with ANC for around 2 hours, 1.5 hour of workout and then some usage by the night. So I used it for 5-6 hours an average for a week and I had to put them on charge with some battery left on the fifth day.

The Beats 360 costs Rs 42,900 and went on sale here from September 24, in Black, Cloud, Pink and Sky. You buy it from Apple, which in practice means the Apple India online store, the Beats India webstore and a handful of Apple retail stores. Extra cushion kits are Rs 6,900 each.

Every competitor in this bracket is sold through open retail and trades well below its own MRP. The Sony WH-1000XM6 lists at Rs 39,990 and has been going for around Rs 35,989, or roughly Rs 32,489 with an SBI card offer. The Bose QuietComfort Ultra 2nd Gen has been selling near Rs 31,990 on Amazon. The Sennheiser Momentum 5 landed here on October 1 at Rs 39,990. Beats does not play that game, so the gap at checkout is wider than the gap on paper.

Apple India has not published an out-of-warranty battery replacement price for the Beats 360, and the standard one year warranty excludes normal battery wear.

Buy it if you want one pair of headphones that goes to the gym, survives a monsoon dash to the office and still works on a flight. The IPX4 rating is the one spec nothing else in this band has, and it is not a small thing in a country with four months of rain and nine of sweat. Buy it also if you switch between an iPhone and an Android phone, because the cross-platform support here is better than Apple's own AirPods Max 2 offers.

Skip it if you listen seriously. No cable, no lossless, no EQ and AAC as the ceiling is a lot to give up at this price. Skip it also if you are the sort of buyer who waits for a sale, because this one is unlikely to have any soon.

The alternatives are uncomfortable for Beats. The Sony WH-1000XM6 gives you LDAC, a cable, multipoint, full EQ and about Rs 7,000 to Rs 10,000 back in your pocket. The Bose QuietComfort Ultra 2nd Gen has been going near Rs 31,990 with USB-C lossless and an analogue cable. The Sennheiser Momentum 5 arrived here on October 1 at Rs 39,990 with 57 hours of battery and, pointedly, a battery you can replace yourself with a screwdriver.

And then there is the Studio Pro, which Beats still sells, now at Rs 32,900 officially and around Rs 25,000 if you shop properly. It has the jack, the USB-C audio and the lossless. The 360 is the newer, tougher, longer-lasting pair. But... What you do not get anywhere is the level of comfort, style and audio packed in headphones that are best for a run or a tough workout session.