As an pre-order adopter of the Penrose, I just wanted to stop by and chime in with my feedback after owning these cans for over a year.
Getting it out of the way first, I am not a power user, meaning I use the Penrose in a very simple, limited fashion. I use them purely as wireless headphones for when gaming on my PC. I don't even use the mic that comes with the Penrose as I have a USB desktop mic. What I was looking for when pre-ordering the Penrose was very specific; 2.4GHz headphones with fantastic audio quality. When I game with headphones, I cannot stand cables. I abhor them on an irrational level. At the same time, I disdain poor/mediocre audio quality and latency. This basically left me with one pair of headphones, the Audeze Penrose. So did they fit my needs? TLDR... Yes!
Negatives
Lets get the negatives out of the first. The Penrose are good sounding headphones, but not perfect and here are some shortcomings/drawbacks that I have discovered since owning them.
- The included pleather pads are incredibly uncomfortable. They get hot really quickly and in the time I used them, felt pretty stiff and shallow. Shortly after buying the Penrose, I had to replace them with some Dekoni velour pads. This changed them from being borderline unusable for long gaming sessions to very comfortable, so a HUGE change in quality of life.
- The dongle connectivity sucked when plugged into the back of my PC. Drops were fairly common until I got an extender and moved them out to on my desk at which point my issues went away. That said, if I walk downstairs with them, I get the dreaded connection warning over and over.
- The headband it comes with is serviceable, but ultimately the padding was lacking for extended usage. While not as significant as replacing the pads, getting a padded headphone cover was a huge QoL improvement.
- This one is 100% an aesthetic opinion, but I can only describe the Penrose's appearance as extremely tacky and tasteless. The relationship between "gaming" and stupidly bright colors needs to die yesterday. At the very least, there should be a blacked out or at least neutral color scheme available even if at a higher cost. The pair I have, the blue was so blue that I willingly spent like $40 more to buy the charcoal cups from the Mobius series.
- There is no live battery monitor on the headphones and as far as I am aware of, none via the 2.4GHz connection. I know they mentioned planning to add it in a later firmware and I have no idea if that ever happened, but this should have never, ever, EVER been a missing feature. It is mind boggling that this design decision (or lack thereof) ever was allowed to happen.
Positives
- These are the best sounding wireless headphones and it's not even close. In the world of wireless headphones, the Penrose are basically royalty and your typical gaming headsets from HyperX, Logitech, Corsair, etc are basically 2nd class citizens. That's how big the gap is.
- For planar headphones, they are pretty light. Once you put them on your head, you don't really feel the weight. Compared to the LCD-2 I owned, these are feather light in comparison.
- Audeze is a fantastic headphones company that stands behind their products in terms of support and commitment to improving them. Both the Mobius and Penrose have seen a lot of improvements over time, because Audeze takes customer feedback seriously.