Guide · Headphones
How long should a pair of headphones last?
The battery is not what kills them. Three parts fail first, and only one of them is replaceable on most models.
People buy headphones expecting the battery to be the thing that ends them, and it almost never is. Lithium cells in this class hold roughly eighty per cent of their capacity after five hundred charge cycles, which for a pair charged weekly is about six years. Long before that, three other things go.
The earpads go first
The earpads go first, usually somewhere in year two or three. The foam compresses and the covering hardens, and both matter more than they sound: the pad is what creates the seal, and the seal is what does the passive isolation that active cancellation cannot. A pair with worn pads sounds thinner and cancels worse, and most people conclude the headphones have degraded when what has degraded is a twenty-euro consumable. Check before you buy whether the maker sells replacement pads separately and whether they are user-fitted. Some are a thirty-second job; some require dismantling the cup.
The headband adjustment goes second, and this one is usually terminal. Sliders wear, detents stop holding, and on many designs the mechanism is bonded rather than screwed. If a maker publishes an exploded parts diagram or sells a headband assembly, that tells you something real about how the product was designed to be owned.
The cable socket goes third on anything with a wired mode, and it fails from lateral force rather than from use — a cable yanked sideways while the headphone sits in a bag. A recessed socket survives this better than a flush one, which is visible in photographs and never mentioned in specifications.
Durability is a parts question, not a build-quality one
What this means practically is that the durability question is not about build quality in the abstract. It is about which of these three parts the manufacturer will sell you. A three-hundred-euro pair with available pads, a replaceable headband and a standard cable socket is a six-year purchase. A four-hundred-euro pair with bonded pads is a three-year one, and the difference does not appear on any spec sheet.
One thing worth doing before you buy: search the model name together with the words "replacement pads". If the results are all third-party sellers guessing at dimensions, the manufacturer has told you what they think about the second half of the product life.