Master & Dynamic MW08 Sport Review: My Saddest Return Ever

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I write this review as a form of grieving. I had the Master and Dynamic MW08 Sport headphones for just under two weeks, managed to fall in love with them, and then have my heart broken by them. Will I love again? Maybe? I don’t know how someone comes back from a breakup this bad.

Okay, no, I’m goofing around. But I am actually very disappointed here.

I started looking at a previous model of these headphones, the MW07. I was waiting for an elevator and my coworker saw me using AirPods. He pointed out how great his new headphones he just got sound over the AirPods, the MW07. They were small, with a cool metal case, and had a shiny outer shell. He claimed they had incredible sound. I found reviews online, and they backed up his claim. But I wasn’t in the place to buy new headphones at the time. I liked them, but I couldn’t justify buying them on my budget.

Years later I always had a reason not to get them. The AirPods Pro came out. They don’t have wireless charging. How could they exist without wireless charging? Then Master and Dynamic released the MW08 Sport version of the MW08 headphones. They came with a water resistant charging case made of Kevlar, foam ear tips, and a new sapphire glass cover. They’re gorgeous. I finally had no good reason not to order them, so I did.

They were wonderful. They sound incredible. The multipoint pairing sometimes had issues, but also often was really handy at times. But they had a fatal flaw that made them useless: you can’t use them for phone calls. You can’t use them for anything that uses the microphones.

Yup. It’s absurd. Let’s dive a bit deeper.

Specs

• Case Size:
  • Width: 64.8mm
  • Height: 48.1mm
  • Depth: 26.8mm
  • Weight with headphones: 73g
• Headphones weight: 9g, each
• Factory-Claimed Battery Life: 10 hours with ANC/Ambient, 12 hours without. 42 hours with the case

Sound Quality — 9.5/10

I giggled a little when I first hit play. It was stunning. Coming from the AirPods Pro, the sound just hit me. It was vibrant, energetic, and it actually had some decent bass. This was more than I expected from truly wireless earbuds. In fact, it was what I expected from decent in-ear monitors. They were shockingly good.

The sound profile is warm, with a definite ‘V’ shape. However, the bass and highs are pretty well balanced, they don’t drown out the mids. There’s a bit of roll-off on both the bass and the highs. The volume drops off. While the bass is well represented, sub-bass isn’t as powerful as the initial, slightly higher pitched hit. These still maintain a punchy sound, and that low bass is still great.

In Childish Gambino’s Redbone, you can hear that deep bass holding a sort of resonance throughout the song. It also shows off a sound stage that is more spacious than you’d expect on in-ear headphones. In rock and metal, you really feel the range of these headphones as they slam the drums and hit the hi-hat. St. Vincent’s Masseduction shows the lively range of these earbuds, while still highlighting the warmth in the vocals. Lil Nas X & Jack Harlow’s Industry Baby shows just how punchy the bass can be in a song where that perfectly timed, punchy bass goes perfectly with the lyrics. These earbuds have range, but never lose that signature warm sound. There’s just a bit of that roll-off and ‘V’ shaped sound curve that define these earbuds. Lively, but not pushing the limits of earbuds. Detailed, but not harsh. It’s fantastic to listen to some truly wireless earbuds with not only a personality, but one that really works across so many types of music.

When I first tested these, they were the best-sounding truly wireless earbuds I had ever used. They even rivaled some of my favorite IEMs. However, I’ve since tested another set of headphones, the Bang and Olufson Beoplay EX headphones, and those do take the cake. But if you’re looking for headphones that can both feel warm and comfortable and energetic enough to get you up and out of your seat, it’s a fantastic sound profile. Master and Dynamic says they were going for acoustics that mimic the sound “of a live performance,” and I think they absolutely nailed it.

That fantastic detail, punchiness, and energy comes from an 11mm beryllium driver. These are top of the lime drivers, and it’s surprising to find them in truly wireless earbuds. They’re quite sizable for these kind of headphones too. At full volume, you’ll certainly damage your hearing with these, but I did find it interesting that they didn’t get louder. It made me wonder if perhaps the size of the driver would be difficult or just too harmful to allow it to go any higher, or if they dialed back the amp to preserve battery life. Maybe it helped contribute to that warm sound. Whatever it is, it works, and, unless you’re nearly deaf already, they get plenty loud enough.

While listening to these, I was surprised by the energy and feel they have. I described the sound as almost friendly, welcoming, all while still being exciting. It’s almost intimate. While they may not be the most detailed headphones I’ve listened to, or the bassiest, they certainly do a great job of creating a lovely sound profile that’s enjoyable to listen to all day long. Seriously, this sound quality was hard to beat, and is why these were so hard to return.

Active Noise Cancellation and Transparency 7/10

The ANC on these is actually quite good. Master and Dynamic isn’t always mentioned when ANC is brought up, so it surprised me. The AirPods Pro might not be the best in the business, but they are the best in-ear headphones with ANC I’ve tested. So, let’s pretend the AirPods Pro are a 10. Given that, these are an 8. They’re not quite as good as the AirPods Pro with cancelling sounds, but they’re not bad at all. They certainly drown out the sound of loud trains, traffic, and your surroundings. I could see using these in an office to get some peace and quiet.

The transparency isn’t quite as good as the active noise cancellation though. There is a voice boost mode that boosts voices around you, including your own, but it’s still not perfect. It’s as though it doesn’t boost the sounds around you uniformly enough, like the mics aren’t sensitive enough and just boost everything to the same volume. It can be hard to tell distance something is away from you, or even when someone is talking to you. I had a shopkeeper go from talking to a coworker to me, and I couldn’t even hear that he was now facing me. It’s like trying to talk to someone in a noisy club, there’s so much sound going on it can be hard to make out your friend’s voice. While this isn’t deafening—like most clubs—it is the same problem. Everything’s the same volume. Once again, using the AirPods Pro as a golden example (which they may actually be, transparency is killer on those), it’s a 5/10.

Despite these shortcomings, the worst part of M&D’s transparency mode isn’t when it’s working though. It’s when it turns off.

Mic Quality — It’s Complicated/10

Sound: 8/10 Usefulness: 1/10

The mic quality on these is actually quite good. In a quiet room, even with a fan on, anyone can hear you loud and clear. They even do work to boost your voice against background noise, though they do let a bit of that through. The real problem is that the microphones are kind of useless. In fact, I thought it was a bug until customer support told me my headphones were working as designed.

When you have transparency mode on, you can hear your surroundings pretty well. You can hold conversations in less noisy spaces well enough. But the moment you go to make a call, record a voice memo, or talk to your virtual assistant, that all goes away. Instead, they go to a neutral setting, neither ANC nor transparency. It’s like trying to talk with ear plugs in. All you hear is your own voice resonating through the bones in your head. It’s muffled, unclear, and deep. It’s distracting, and can make it difficult to talk at all. I tested them for one meeting, decided to stay mostly quiet after realizing how unpleasant talking was, and went back to using my AirPods for meetings after that. It’s truly a terrible experience. M&D could have piped in your own voice, kept on transparency mode, or just put transparency mode on one ear and used the mics on the other. Anything would have been better than making it so hard to hear yourself.

It may sound like something small, especially since I loved the sound quality of these headphone so much, but it’s a deal breaker. I need to be able to use my headphones for everything: listening to music, phone calls with my friends, work calls, setting timers while I’m cooking, everything. It’s a lot to ask, but for a $350 set of headphones, in 2022, it’s expected. Nobody gets excited about a transparency mode in headphones so they don’t talk. I have over-ear headphones for when I really want quality. I have AirPods Pro for conversations. I wanted a set of earbuds that could do it all. If they couldn’t, they were redundant. That’s one of the main reasons I had to part with them. If you just want sound quality, save yourself some money and get some Sennheiser 600’s or HiFi Man 4XX headphones. If you want truly wireless earbuds though, you probably want more than just music quality. These fell short on a vital feature.

Battery Life 10/10

I kept either ANC or transparency mode on during all of my testing. Master and Dynamic says these could last around 10 hours like that. I was seeing around seven to eight hours in my testing, sometimes more, depending on what I was listening to. Still, this was shy of the 10 hours. The the case, you can supposedly get up to 40 hours. I think that may be plausible. I was seeing a little over 30 hours in my testing, but I could see a lower volume and ANC/transparency off easily lasting 40 hours.

That’s incredible. That’s double the battery life of many other headphones with the case. These last on one charge long enough that you could keep them in for most of your work day without breaks. If you take them out and charge them even a little bit, like during a quick meeting, or to grab lunch, you’re looking at all-day battery life. It’s fantastic. They support fast charging and the earbuds, with the case, can all be fully charged to 100% in under 1:45h. I say under because I walked away and came back to find them not only fully charged, but cool. They must have finished fully charging some time prior, as these, like all headphones, get warm when charging from zero on a wireless charging pad. While the listening time with ANC on was a bit shy of estimates, the battery life is still astounding. This is what truly wireless earbuds should all be like. There’s no excuse now. M&D put most other headphone manufacturers to shame here. These are headphones that will not only let you listen longer, but will last long before you need to replace them. It’s better for your day-to-day listening, it’s a better investment, and it’s better for the planet. Everyone else, especially Apple, should take note.

Connectivity 4/10

One of the first things the Master & Dynamic app will tell you to do is update the firmware on your headphones. It’s a trap! You see, M&D went through a lot of trouble to provide multipoint connections through an update. They did not go through the trouble to make it good. I had a similar issue with my Shokz OpenRun headphones. However, I could turn multipoint off on those. M&D did not make this an option for the MW08 Sport headphones.

You can connect to multiple devices. Sometimes it works well. You stop playing media on one device, start playing something on another, and it all switches over. Most of the time it doesn’t work this well. Sometimes the controls get lost between devices. Once I had a strange echo effect where one headphone was about 10-50ms behind the other, making for highly distorted and uncomfortable audio. When I tried to connect them to three devices, the third being my work computer, they connected and disconnected rapidly. I frequently needed to do a factory reset to start syncing with devices again.

If you’re just connecting these to one, maybe two devices, you’ll be fine. Three or more? Nothing but frustration

Controls 7/10

Besides the issue of multipoint, which once left me with audio playing from one device but the controls going to another, the physical controls are nice to have. You can always feel them there, and they’re easy to access and use. I liked having physical controls for volume too.

However, the controls to turn ANC/transparency off or on were frustrating. You’d have to hold volume up or down for about 3 seconds. The problem was the announcement would then take another second or two to read out, “ANC On,” “Transparency On,” etc. You’d need 5-6 seconds to switch between modes. Want to quickly turn on transparency to talk to a barista and order your coffee? Good luck.

Charging

The case and headphones charge pretty quickly. The case can charge via wireless charging pad or USB-C. The case doesn’t tell you when it needs charging with very much accuracy though. The light on the outside will go to red when it has a significant amount of battery life left. Frequent charging can damage the life of your battery, but letting your case die could mean you’re without your headphones at some point.

And what if you’re in public? Public? Without headphones? A nightmare!

Appearance 9/10

I’ll admit, I had read reviews and watched videos online before buying these. Most stated they didn’t have the best sound quality, active noise cancellation, transparency, or connectivity in the field. Good at everything, the best at nothing. But they’re absolute stunners. They look like jewelry. They look like something you’ll feel cool to have in your ears, instead of the idiotic designs everyone else is using. I swear, nothing makes me feel like tech is full of nerds quite like the dullness of our tech designs. The last non-folding smartphone design that actually introduced something new and fresh was, of all things, the Google Pixel 6. Tech is just stale, sterile, boring. But these? These are beautiful.

Shiny aluminum and sapphire glass with just a hint of color adorn these headphones. I wish they had more colors available, as the color beneath the sapphire would be incredible. Ruby red sparkling under sapphire glass? I might be tempted to buy them and be disappointed by their terrible firmware again if they introduced something like that. These are the best earbuds I’ve seen, they may be some of the best designed tech on the market. They’re gorgeous. All tech should have this attention to design.

I went back and forth on the case design. I’ll describe it more in the section for it, but it’s a very nice, durable case. It’s also Kevlar. Kevlar is tough, durable, and out of place. The headphone colors have more muted, masculine colors, which is honestly a downside. These leaned hard into the idea of “Sport is a manly thing,” going with more masculine colors and Kevlar. Kevlar doesn’t look bad on its own, but it’s gained a reputation of being the kind of thing that assholes, doomsday preppers, overcompensating people use. If you looked at it knowing nothing about Kevlar, you might compliment the low contrast weave of gray and black. But knowing the reputation it has for being super duper tough and sought after by the kind of people who feel like other people should see them as super duper tough too? It just takes away from the potential of the headphones for being just so beautiful. It’s not elegant.

I think Master and Dynamic has a lot of potential here. More color options would make this a fashion item. I took a point off for the limited color choices, mostly. Also the case. To be honest, I can put up with the Kevlar case. It’s a grippy material and it’s tough. I get it, it’s great for this application. Kevlar might even be the best material for the job. I just wish douchebags hadn’t made the material into a personality trait.

Fit/Comfort 9/10

These aren’t light headphones. Sapphire glass and aluminum are certainly heavier than plastic. They also don’t have a stem, so it’s not like they can rely on directing the weight just right. Instead, they just sit in your ear.

And it works.

These are comfortable for hours. I felt just the smallest twinge of discomfort on one of my ears after a few hours, but nothing truly bad. With the foam ear tips, they stay firmly in your ears too. I found the silicone ones could as well, but the foam eartips were definitely better at staying in my ears and blocking out external sound.

These aren’t as comfortable as the AirPods Pro, but they’re close. However, the AirPods Pro have irritating silicone ear tips. Between the two, I might take the Master & Dynamic MW08 Sport.

Sustainability 5/10

The casing is mostly cardboard. There was a plastic overwrap, but that was it. The rest was all well-fitted cardboard. Obviously this would be better with zero plastic, but it’s a start. Thanks to the lengthy battery life, you’re more likely to keep these for an extended period of time. You’re not going to be trading these in to M&D in 3 years for a new battery, like you might some truly wireless earbuds. Still, they are going to mostly end up in the waste one day. It’s not as though you can easily have them serviced, buy replacement parts online, or swap out the batteries yourself. M&D is probably doing this the best in the industry, but it’s still not very great.

Charging Case 9/10

Let’s set aside ideas about Kevlar for a second. This case is good enough that I realized I had to add a section to talk about charging cases because of it. I love the three light system that shows you when each headphone is charging and the charging status of the case itself. I love the grippy texture. I love that it can survive in my bag without getting covered in scratches. I love that it holds on to your headphones in the case quite well. It snaps closed nicely, flips open easily, and just feels good in the hand. The texture is some weird combination of soft and smooth while being grippy. It was a fantastic decision to make the case out of Kevlar.

I didn’t take a point off for the appearance here. I took it off because I really wish it could communicate with the app. Just to tell the battery level, perhaps. Or, better yet, perhaps some tracking? Skullcandy has added Tile support to its latest $30 Dime 2 headphones. They’re $30, these cost over ten times that. Why couldn’t Master and Dynamic add Tile or Find My support to these? At this price, something that could get lost and couldn’t be found by my phone in 2022 just feels silly.

Odds & Ends

Part of what makes these a “sport” headphone is increased waterproofing. The headphones themselves have IPX5 for strong splashes of water. They’re not waterproof, but decently water resistant for sweat or rain. The case is IPX4, which is about standard, perhaps on the higher end, for truly wireless earbud cases. These will likely be in a pocket or bag, so it’s less important to be that waterproof.

I also found the app to be lacking. It’s a bit slow and doesn’t have an equalizer. It’s pretty much only useful for updating the firmware. It’s one of those things that reminded me that Master & Dynamic’s engineers absolutely nailed the hardware. Their designers nailed the look of the hardware. Then they spent nothing on software engineers and got something that looks like it was churned out by contractors on a budget with a product manager who figured they didn’t really have to think about use cases.

I sincerely hope M&D doesn’t have full-time engineers who sit around complaining about not getting the time to work on this app, because, wow, that was exceptionally cruel of me to say if they do. Bluetooth is hard, from a programming standpoint. But some of these decisions, especially turning any transparency off when you’re actually using the microphones to speak, are just dumb. Simply bad choices.

Overall — It’s Complicated (9/10 or 6.5/10)

My biggest takeaway is that this is fantastic hardware ruined by terrible software. I’ve often heard, “hardware is easy, software is hard.” This felt like that. A company that has nearly a decade of experience making fantastic audio devices suddenly found themselves needing to do more for the software and firmware side than they’d likely want. The company is just over nine years old, but it reminds me of companies with decades of experience in making speakers suddenly going, “What the hell is Blue Tooth?” Multipoint is lousy, the app lacks features, and the decisions around microphones makes me think the person who made that decision doesn’t actually use Bluetooth headphones.

There are few brands with better looking designs than Master & Dynamic. Few brands that can match them on a signature, warm yet detailed, sound. And yet, many can surpass them on day-to-day usage. You could be walking down the street with the MW08 Sport in your ears, looking cool, listening to your favorite, uplifting tunes, and get a call, and you won’t want to take it because, even on this busy street, you might end up being the crazy person yelling on the sidewalk because you can’t tell how loud you’re being.

I returned these headphones, and I’m still bitter about it. I loved the sound, the look, the battery life, even the case. When it comes to features, these are jack of all trades, master of none headphones, but in a great way. And yet, they fall apart on little details that matter so much. Would I recommend them? If you never want to use them to take calls and will only connect them to your phone? Sure. They’d be great for that. But if you’re like me and want to connect your headphones to everything, use them for everything, and basically live with your headphones in your ears? You might want to consider some other headphones. It breaks my heart to say that, I really loved these and wanted them to work out, but in the end, I returned them, and I think people with modern expectations of what headphones should be would as well.

If Master & Dynamic ever fixes their firmware, and maybe releases some colorful versions, I’d consider coming back. But as it is, I bought some other headphones—the Beoplay EX—to replace these and they don’t have the same flaws. While they lack the soul, they’re better for what I need. It’s a shame Master and Dynamic came so close to the perfect truly wireless earbuds with the MW08 Sport earbuds, and then just fumbled at the end zone.