The flagship benchmark has well and truly changed. There was a time when the Momentum generations used to define Sennheiser’s cutting edge headphone efforts. As brilliant as they remain, that mantle has however been taken over by the HDB 630. More than anything else, it simply goes to show that Sennheiser can and has moved everything up a notch — the sound quality, noise cancellation and of course, the physical specifics of the headphone that demands you part with a fairly premium wad of cash, priced at ₹44,990. This is, at the risk of a spoiler alert, as close as it gets to a perfect premium headphone heading into 2026. Competition, of course, will respond at some stage, and that’s good news for consumers.
Sennheiser is undoubtedly going for that clean aesthetic as far as the design goes. That’s also largely the modern design language. Matte black ear cup casing with a gentle dash of silver for the headband linkages, looks surprisingly refined and pleasant. It’s plastic, albeit metallic looking at certain points, but very high quality plastic nonetheless. Off late, having had more than one tryst with fairly heavy headphones, happy to note that its back to typical Sennheiser weight reduction brilliance — hours of continuously wearing the Sennheiser HDB 630 will not elicit any neck pain, pressure on the ears or a headache. If I have to compare, this is half a notch more comfortable than the Momentum 4 in such scenarios — the softer ear cup padding composition seals that observation.
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The fact that Sennheiser is bundling the BTD 700 dongle with the HDB 630, adds real value that may not be apparent almost immediately. This dongle, standalone, is priced at ₹4,990 and the key is unlocking higher quality codecs including aptX, aptX Adaptive Audio, aptX Lossless and LC3 over Bluetooth. The process of pairing the dongle with the Sennheiser HDB 630 could have been simpler still, but once you do get past all this, results make that effort worthwhile. The better transfer bandwidth, and the fact that you get a dongle each with USB-C and USB Type-A means most of your laptops, desktops, tablets and phones will be well covered.
As far as the sound goes, the Sennheiser HDB 630 is a pristine delight right out of the box. I would encourage you to tweak the default sound settings further using the Sennheiser Smart Control Plus app (it’s available for iPhone, as well as Android), and chances are you’d find a couple of sweet(er) spots you didn’t know existed. Bass is one, because the HDB 630 is very nicely neutral at default sound settings. Tweak the lower frequencies, and you’ll begin to realise how capable this audio hardware really is. There is no audible artificial audio sculpting, and neither does any of the frequency bands betray boosting. If neutral sound is what you want from the outset, that is exactly what the Sennheiser HDB 630 delivers.
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As far as ANC, or adaptive noise cancellation goes, I would peg this at par with some of the recent headphones that have done an equally good job with this — the Sonos Ace included. The ear cup pads are a fairly thick layer, and the soft material means it’s an easy fit over the ears, all of which helps to passively block ambient din as well. The fact that the ANC performance, all tweaks considered via the companion app, being at par with the Momentum 4 means the flagship foundations are strong. Sennheiser claims the HDB 630 lasts close to 60 hours at the most on a single charge, and while it is difficult to get an exact minute by minute number on this, a mix of ANC on and off did get me very close to 55 hours of collective listening time over a couple of weeks, before I’d to plug these in again. No complaints at all here.
What the HDB 630 ultimately establishes is not just a new flagship, but a distinct recalibration of what “no-compromise” audio now looks like in Sennheiser’s universe. This is a headphone that resists visual spectacle in favour of a measured design, restrained tuning, genuinely effective noise cancellation, and a quietly clever decision to bundle the BTD 700 dongle. There is no exaggerated bass, and instead, the HDB 630 delivers the sort of flagship audio that’s more natural and less engineered. At ₹44,990, it demands premium for the price tag, but it perhaps also justifies that demand by doing something that’s often not as easy — getting almost everything right, simultaneously. As a reference point heading into 2026, it sets the bar high, and forces competitors to rethink what progress would actually mean with their next headphones.
