Last year, I tried the new H100 Bluetooth headphones from Bang & Olufsen, and they were both the best Bluetooth headphones I’ve ever tried and a pair I could never recommend. They sounded as good as the best wired closed-back headphones, with incredible detail and a massive soundstage. They felt unbelievably premium, with beautiful magnetic wheels to adjust volume and noise canceling on each side, but they were also light. I would like them to have marginally stronger noise canceling and fewer Bluetooth glitches; otherwise, they’re perfect. And yet, I could never recommend them because they retail for $1,550, which is an astonishing, absurd amount of money to spend on Bluetooth headphones.

Bang & Olufsen have some solid reasoning for the price, though. It wasn’t simply that the headphones were well made but that they were designed to be easily repairable and updatable. A driver could be replaced with a screwdriver in the store, as could the driver, and the firmware could easily be updated over the air, letting them upgrade the Bluetooth standard over time. The promise that Bang & Olufsen made was that, if you bought these headphones, you would comfortably use them for the next decade or so, which isn’t something you can say about most headphones, and they justified that claim by looking at their history of maintaining and restoring their products.