What Hi-Fi?'s reviewers first heard the 2024 Beats Pill on a beach, where at a moderate volume it was loud enough that a friend looked around to check on the nearby sunbathers. Ryan Waniata of Wired took one camping and noticed it buzzing warmly across the picnic table at breakfast. That energy has been the point of Beats since its first headphones in 2008, which Beats said would let listeners "hear what the artists hear." The early tuning leaned on bass for hip-hop and pop, and recent models aim for more balance. Waniata found the Solo 4 "not a bass-heavy sound by any means" and heard "a golden splash in the midrange." Newer Beats can also play lossless music over a USB-C cable, and What Hi-Fi? heard more detail and subtlety from the Solo 4 and the Pill when wired this way. Beats suits listeners who want an energetic sound that works as well with Android phones as with iOS ones.

The Solo 4 is the place to start. It's an on-ear headphone with long battery life, and it also plays over its 3.5mm cable with no charge at all. What Hi-Fi? says it sounds its very best wired. If you want noise canceling, step up to the over-ear Studio Pro, whose adaptive noise canceling David Carnoy of CNET found approaches the top models from Sony and Bose. He called them "very good performing headphones" and added them to his rotation. Plugged in over USB-C, the Studio Pro offers three sound modes, one for music, one for movies and games, and one for calls, and noise canceling turns off while the cable is in. For a speaker, the Pill is rated to survive half an hour under a meter of fresh water, and Digital Trends advises buying two. Hold the center button and volume up on one Pill to make a stereo pair, and the speaker you pressed becomes the left channel. Carnoy heard real stereo separation from a pair, enough to fill a small to medium-size room.

Beats began in 2006 with the producer Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, a co-founder of Interscope Records. While the first headphones were in development, Iovine asked musicians including Pharrell Williams, will.i.am, Gwen Stefani and M.I.A. for their opinions. The Studio arrived in 2008, and Carnoy counts the Studio line among the most popular headphones of all time. The on-ear Solo followed in 2009, and in 2010 its design team, which included Robert Brunner and Dr. Dre, won an International Design Excellence Award from the Industrial Designers Society of America. The NPD Group reported that in 2011 Beats held 64% of the American market for headphones priced above $100. The first Pill speaker came in 2012. The Studio Pro of 2023 is the fourth generation of the Studio and the first Beats to play lossless audio over USB-C. The 2024 Pill replaced the two round woofers of the Pill+ with a single racetrack-shaped one, which Beats says moves 90% more air, and Waniata put the new Pill on his shortlist of the best Bluetooth speakers.