Mpow H10 Wireless  Headphones Review

The Mpow H10 have a pretty generic look and don’t have a design that particularly stands out. The headphones look plasticky but don’t have the same glossy finish as the Mpow H5 Wireless. The cups are dense with good padding. The headband is also decently padded, but unfortunately, they only come in one color scheme.

The Mpow H10 are comfortable headphones that you can wear for long periods but won’t be ideal for people with small heads. The headband is fairly large, and some people will feel the headphones fall on their head, making the ears touch the top of the cups. On the upside, the padding is very plushy and soft, which is very comfortable. The headband is also well-padded and distributes the weight of the headphones well. Some may feel like they're a bit tight on the head.

The Mpow H10 have a decent physical control scheme. You get access to common functionalities like call/music management, volume control, and track skipping. You can also enable/disable their ANC with a physical switch on the left ear cup. The buttons are fairly clicky and easy to use, but you don’t have a way of differentiating the buttons as they have the same shape. You might need to take a second to feel the other buttons to know which one you are pressing.

Like most over-ear headphones, the Mpow H10 trap a fair amount of heat under the ear cups, and most will feel a noticeable difference in temperature while wearing them for a while. They won’t be ideal for sports as you might sweat more than usual.

These over-ear headphones are fairly bulky and won’t be very portable. On the upside, you can fold them into a more compact format, making them a bit easier to travel with. Also, the cups swivel to lay flat, which makes it easier to carry them around your neck and to slide in a bag. They don’t come with a hard case to protect them.

These headphones come with a soft pouch that protects the headphones against scratches and very minor water exposure. The pouch won’t protect the headphones against physical damage from falls, but it doesn’t add bulk to their design.

Unfortunately, the Mpow H10 feel cheaper-made than the Mpow H5 Wireless. While the cups feel better designed, with slightly better plastic, the overall feel of the H10 is worse. The headband got downgraded and doesn’t feel as sturdy as the H5’s. Also, the hinges, when folding the headphones, make a very loud cracking noise, giving you the impression that you just broke the headphones every time you fold them. On the upside, they don’t have the fingerprint-prone glossy finish of the H5. For another better-built option, you can take a look at the TaoTronics TT-BH060 Wireless, but their sound quality is sub-par.

These headphones aren’t that stable and shouldn’t be used for physical activity and running. They wiggle around fairly easy and come off your ears. They're stable enough for you to tilt your head back on forward, but that’s about it. This shouldn’t be a problem for casual listening. On the upside, their wireless design eliminates the risk of a cable getting stuck on something and yanking the headphones off your head.

• Mpow H10 headphones
• 1/8" TRS audio cable
• Micro-USB charging cable
• Carrying pouch
• Manuals

The Mpow H10 have a good frequency response consistency. In the bass range, they seem to be using their ANC (active noise cancelling) to check for seal and ensuring proper bass delivery like the Bose QuietComfort 35 II/QC35 II Wireless 2018 and the Sony WH-1000XM3 Wireless. In the treble range (below 10KHz), the maximum amount of deviation is below 5dB, which is good, but the positioning of the headphones on the head can have a small effect on their perceived brightness.

The Mpow H10's bass performance is okay. It's overemphasized across the range, which results in extra, thump, rumble, and boom. However, it can sound muddy and overwhelming.

The Mpow H10's mid accuracy is great. The low-mid is overemphasized, so vocals and lead instruments can sound a bit cluttered and muddy while a dip in the mid-mid nudges them to the back of the mix. The high-mid is well-balanced though, ensuring the clarity and intensity of these sounds.

They have a sub-par treble performance. It's overemphasized across the range, resulting in bright and detailed vocals and lead instruments. However, a high peak in the mid-treble makes sibilants like S and T sounds piercing and painful.

These headphones have excellent imaging. Their weighted group delay (GD) is 0.24, which is very good. The GD graph shows that their group delay is under the audibility threshold. This ensures a tight bass and a transparent treble reproduction. Also, the L/R drivers of our unit were very well-matched in frequency, amplitude, and phase response. It's important for accurate placement and localization of objects, like footsteps and instruments, in the stereo field. However, these results are only valid for our unit, and yours may perform differently.

The Mpow H10's soundstage is disappointing. They show a decent amount of PRTF accuracy and activation, which should translate into a relatively large soundstage. However, their PRTF Distance score is disappointing, suggesting a soundstage perceived to be located inside your head, as opposed to in front. Also, because of the closed-back design and ANC, they tend to sound less open than open-back headphones.

The Mpow H10 have a great isolation performance. With their ANC (active noise cancelling) enabled, these headphones achieved more than 18dB of isolation in the bass range, which is very good. This means they can cancel out the low rumbling noises like airplane and bus engines to a great degree. In the mid-range, important for blocking out speech, they isolate by 22dB, which is also good. In the treble range, occupied by sharp sounds like S and Ts and air conditioning systems, they achieved about 25dB of isolation, which is decent.

The leakage performance is sub-par. The significant portion of the leakage is spread between 300Hz and 3KHz, which is a relatively broad range. The overall level of the leakage is relatively loud, too. With the music at 100dB SPL, the leakage at 1 foot away averages at 46dB SPL and peaks at 62dB SPL, which is noticeably above the noise floor of an average office.

The recording quality of the Mpow H10’s integrated microphone is mediocre. LFE (low-frequency extension) is at 233Hz, which means transmitted/recorded speech with this mic will sound noticeably thin. The HFE (high-frequency extension) of 3.1KHz indicates speech that lacks detail and is noticeably muffled. This will hurt the understandability of speech, but it should still be understandable in quiet environments.

The integrated mic's noise handling is mediocre. In our SpNR test, it achieved a speech-to-noise ratio of about 11dB. This makes this microphone suitable mostly for quiet environments, and not great for moderate and loud environments, as it will have difficulty separating ambient noise from actual speech.

The Mpow H10 have a great battery life that offers 23 hours of continuous playback with their ANC feature, which is more than enough for a workday, and it won’t need daily charging. They also don’t take that long to charge fully, which is great. They also have a standby mode to save some power. You can use them passively, even if the battery is completely dead, which is convenient, but you can't use the ANC if they're dead. Note that when powering the headphones off, you also have to switch the ANC off, or the battery will continue draining.

Mpow doesn’t have an app that offers customization options.

The Mpow H10 are Bluetooth-compatible headphones. Unfortunately, they don’t support NFC for quicker and easier pairing and can only connect to a single device at a time.

With 122ms of delay, they have less latency than most Bluetooth headphones, which is good. Some may still notice a small delay between audio and video while watching TV or any video content. On the upside, some devices and apps seem to offer some compensation, so you might not notice the delay as much. You can also use the headphones with the audio cable to get rid of the latency. If you want a pair of similarly-performing headphones that also support aptX-LL for an even lower latency connection, check out the TREBLAB Z2 Wireless.

You can use the included 1/8” TRS audio cable to use these headphones with any platform that has the appropriate audio jack. However, they only support audio, as they don’t have an in-line microphone.

The Mpow H10 don’t have a base or dock.