Lewitt LW6 Wireless Headphones

Lewitt LW6 Wireless Studio Headphones

The Lewitt LW6 is a closed-back headphone that goes wireless without the usual cost. Its RealSound link sends music from the included transmitter uncompressed, with 5.8 milliseconds of delay, so what reaches your ears is the signal your DAC or laptop sent and not a codec's approximation of it. Lewitt built it for recording studios, where a cable has always been the price of hearing yourself on time. The same link that lets a singer step away from the desk lets you leave the cable behind at home.

Lewitt is a Vienna microphone company whose mics turn up on Grammy-winning records, and this is its first headphone. It is tuned to sound like a good open-back while sealing like a closed-back, which makes it a headphone for late nights and shared rooms, and it pairs over Bluetooth for the commute. Everything it needs is in the box, transmitter included.

The Cable Is Gone. The Sound Is Not.

Bluetooth has to squeeze music through a narrow link, so it compresses the signal on the way out and rebuilds it on the way in, and a rebuilt signal is never quite the record. RealSound skips all of that. The LW6 and its LW TX transmitter talk over an ultra-wideband radio link with enough bandwidth, 1728 kilobits per second, to carry the audio as plain uncompressed PCM. There is no codec and nothing to unpack, so the music arrives whole, 5.8 milliseconds after it left, and sounds like the wired feed it came from.

The transmitter is a small box that lives next to your source. Plug it into a computer over USB-C and it appears as an audio device at up to 24-bit/96kHz, or run a 3.5mm cable from the headphone output of your DAC, amp, or streamer into its analog input. Then get up. The link is good for about 5m (16ft) with a clear line between you and the transmitter, so it covers the listening room rather than the whole house, and it wants to sit on the desk rather than above your head. For the walk to the kitchen, there is Bluetooth.

Open-Back Air, Closed-Back Quiet

People who love open-back headphones tend to love them for the same reasons: the air around instruments, the natural voices, the feeling that the music is in the room rather than inside your head. The price has always been that everyone else in the room hears it too. Lewitt's goal with the LW6 was that open sound inside a sealed cup, so a late-night album does not wake anyone and the neighbor's television does not join in. The seal comes from thick memory-foam pads, and there is no active noise cancelling: it blocks what a good closed-back blocks, which is plenty in a quiet home and not enough for a jet engine.

The tuning is balanced rather than boosted. Lewitt voices the LW6 to its own target curve, which lands close to the Harman curve that most well-liked headphones aim for, with finer resolution in the highest octaves. It measured the headphone on real people with microphones in their ears as well as on a test rig, listened with expert panels, and by its own measurements keeps the result within 2dB of the target. If you know and like an even, natural balance, that is where this sits. If you want more low end for a Friday night, the Enhanced Bass preset is a button press away, and your own five-band EQ lives on the headphone itself.

Hear It From the Engineer's Chair

A studio headphone is meant to show the mix engineer exactly what is on the recording, and that is what a music lover wants too: the drums where the drummer put them, the reverb tail the producer chose. The LW6 was tuned to make those decisions on. Its Virtual Studio Monitors mode goes a step further and presents the music as if it were coming from a pair of speakers in a well-treated room, which gives a familiar album a sense of distance and space that headphones usually skip. Space Replicator Essential, the plugin in the box, does the same with real places, from a mixing room to a club to a car.

Everything the LW6 does runs on the headphone, so you set it up once in the HEADPHONES app for Mac, Windows, iOS, or Android and forget the phone. Two buttons on the earcup take a single-press and a double-press assignment each, Loudness Guard caps stray peaks before they hurt, a lock mode keeps you from changing a setting by accident, and the spoken confirmations can be switched off once you know what each button does. Lewitt's team spends its days in studios, and the small decisions show it.

If You Make Music Too

This is where the LW6 has no real rival. Play an electric guitar and hear yourself 200 milliseconds late, and at 150 beats per minute you are always half a beat behind. Ordinary Bluetooth headphones sit in that range. The best low-latency codecs manage about 50 milliseconds, which still sounds like your amp is 17 meters away, and musicians start noticing delay at around 20. The LW6 comes in at 5.8, so you can track a vocal or a part with the mic across the room and no cable in the way. The transmitter takes the headphone output of an interface, a second jack passes the feed to a wired pair, and mono, side-only, and left-right swap checks are a button away.

All Day, Then the Trip Home

At 358g with memory-foam pads and an adjustable headband, the LW6 is built to stay on through a long evening, and Lewitt says it fits over glasses. The pads and the cable are both replaceable. The battery runs 21 hours on RealSound, charges fully in 80 minutes over USB-C, and a 15-minute top-up buys about 3 hours.

Out of the house it pairs over Bluetooth 5.3 like any wireless headphone, with play, pause, and skip on the earcup. The codecs are SBC and AAC only, so this is the casual mode: fine for a train, not how you would listen to a favorite record at home. There is a USB-C port for wired audio and charging and a 3.5mm input as well, so a cable is always an option.

How the LW6 Compares

The obvious neighbor is the Focal Bathys at $799, the wireless closed-back most of our customers already know: another 40mm dynamic design at around 350g, with a USB-C DAC mode, active noise cancelling, aptX Adaptive, and a 30-hour battery. Its wireless is Bluetooth, though, so at home it is still listening through a codec. Take the Bathys on a plane. Take the LW6 to the couch, and to the studio.

If wireless is not the point, the wired Sennheiser HD 620S at $399.95 and the planar HiFiMAN Audivina at $699 are the closed-back references to weigh, and our closed-back buying guide covers the field. The only other low-latency wireless headphone in the store is the Audeze Maxwell 2 at $329, a 560g planar gaming headset with a USB dongle, voiced for games and 200g heavier than the LW6. At $699 the LW6 costs what a good wired closed-back costs, with a wireless link that gives nothing away and the transmitter included.

Key Features

• Closed-back over-ear headphones with a wireless link that carries music uncompressed
• RealSound ultra-wideband link: uncompressed PCM, 1728kbps, 5.8ms latency, 110dB dynamic range, 5m (16ft) range
• LW TX transmitter included: USB-C input (24-bit up to 96kHz, USB Audio Class 2.0, ASIO driver) and 3.5mm analog input, plus a 3.5mm pass-through output
• Open-back style tuning in a sealed cup: voiced to Lewitt's target close to Harman, measured in real ears, checked by expert listening panels
• 40mm dynamic driver with bio-cellulose diaphragm, 32 ohms, 114dB SPL/V, 121dB SPL maximum
• Five-band parametric EQ with three custom profiles plus Transparent, Enhanced Bass, and Enhanced Highs presets, stored on the headphone and applied to every input
• Virtual Studio Monitors speaker simulation, Loudness Guard, mono / side / left-right swap checks, three target volumes
• Two custom buttons, lock mode, voice feedback that can be turned off
• Bluetooth 5.3 (SBC, AAC) for the commute; USB-C audio and charging; 3.5mm analog input
• 21-hour battery on RealSound, 80-minute full charge, 15-minute top-up for about 3 hours
• 358g, memory-foam ear pads, adjustable headband; pads and cable replaceable
• HEADPHONES app for macOS 12 and up, Windows 10 and up, iOS 17 and up, Android 10 and up
• Space Replicator Essential plugin license for Mac and Windows included

Technical Specs

What's in the Box

• Lewitt LW6 Wireless Studio Headphones
• LW TX RealSound transmitter
• USB-C cable, 3m
• USB-C cable, 1.5m
• 3.5mm analog cable, 3m
• 3.5mm analog cable, 1.5m
• 2x 3.5mm to 6.35mm jack adapters
• USB-C to USB-A adapter
• Transmitter thread adapter
• Transport pouch
• HEADPHONES software for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android
• Space Replicator Essential license for Mac and Windows