Audio-Technica’s First Wireless Open-Back Headphone Is $279 and Runs 75 Hours

Audio-Technica has been building open-back headphones for decades — almost all of them wired, and almost all of them designed to be worn at a desk. The ATH-AL5NC is the company’s first wireless open-back, and it’s a $279 bet that people will accept noise leaking out in exchange for air coming in.

What you get for $279

53mm drivers, LDAC for 24-bit/96kHz wireless audio, AAC and SBC for everything else, and Bluetooth multipoint so the headphone holds two devices at once instead of making you choose. Battery life is rated at up to 75 hours of continuous playback, with a 15-minute top-up adding roughly 8 hours. It ships with a 1.2m cable and a carry pouch.

Audio-Technica CONNECT, the company’s companion app, handles sound presets, codec selection and EQ. It also adds switchable modes aimed at specific use cases — a low-latency gaming mode, a noise-cancelling mode and a leak-reduction mode.

The trade-off, in plain terms

Nearly every wireless headphone you have owned is closed-back: the driver sits in a sealed cup and fires directly at your ear. An open-back headphone leaves that cup ventilated, so air moves from the outside through the driver. Audio-Technica’s pitch is twofold — less heat building up over a long session, and a sound that isn’t caged inside a plastic box.

This is why people describe certain albums as having “air” around the instruments. It’s an acoustic effect, not a marketing word: the driver isn’t fighting the pressure of a sealed volume, so the stage opens up and instruments separate. It’s also why open-back headphones have been a studio and desk-listening staple for as long as they have.

What you give up is everything a sealed cup exists to do. Isolation is gone — an open-back barely filters a quiet room, let alone a road. Leakage is the other half of the deal: whoever is sitting near you hears what you hear, at a level that ends conversations. And the deliberately light clamping pressure that makes it comfortable for hours is the same lightness that means it won’t hold on if you stand up.

That last detail is what makes the ATH-AL5NC more interesting than a nostalgia exercise. Putting a leak-reduction mode in the companion app is Audio-Technica acknowledging the obvious practical problem with its own product category, and trying to give the buyer a dial for it instead of a scolding.

Who it’s actually for

If you work from home, listen at a desk, or mostly play music late at night in a room that’s already quiet, a wireless open-back headphone solves a problem closed-back models can’t: it stops a long session from feeling like wearing a helmet. The wireless part matters more than it sounds like it should — the reason open-back headphones historically stayed at the desk is the cable, and that constraint is now gone.

If you commute, fly, or share an open-plan office, this is the wrong purchase no matter how good it sounds. Buying an open-back headphone for a train is the audio equivalent of buying a convertible in a rainy city.

And if $279 for a headphone that can only be used in a quiet room sounds like the wrong shape of purchase, the opposite bet landed the same week: Apple’s AirPods 5 put open-ear ANC at $129. Same category, entirely different problem — and a very different set of compromises.

There’s a nice symmetry in the timing, too. House of Marley’s Soul Rebel turntable ships with a replaceable Audio-Technica AT3600L cartridge, a belt drive and built-in stereo speakers — an object built entirely on the idea that listening is something you sit down and do. A wireless open-back headphone is the same instinct with a battery in it. Neither is trying to be the pair you take on a plane.

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