Luxury brands and consumer electronics don't tend to be a good mix, largely due to the luxury brands either not caring or not being knowledgeable enough about the product they're making. Montblanc has taken a very different route with its new MTB 03 ANC earbuds, as the company has cooperated with Axel Grell, who used to work for Sennheiser before setting up his own brand of audio products. In all fairness, Montblanc did a similar team-up for its MTB 01 headphones where they worked with the founder of Audeze. The MTB 03's feature 7 mm beryllium drivers and are built around a Qualcomm Bluetooth 5.2 chipset which Montblanc is leveraging by adding aptX Adaptive support.

Furthermore, Montblanc has added support for Mimi Hearing Technologies sound personalisation software, on top of the tuning provided by Axel Grell. Sadly these luxury buds aren't without shortcomings, as the battery life is said to be good for only six hours of listening time, with another two full charges in the charging case. That's far less than most competing products on the market today. The charging case can be charged wirelessly or via USB-C and a 15 minute charge of the earbuds is said to be good enough for 100 minutes of playback time, while a full charge takes 90 minutes. For those still interested, a pair of the MTB 03's will set you back £345 or around US$439, although that price includes 20 percent VAT.