Bowers & Wilkins has announced the P7 Mobile Hi-Fi headphones, the company’s first over-ear headphones.

Moving parts are constructed from brushed and stainless steel, as is the folding mechanism. The headband and ear pads are encased in soft leather, for long listening sessions. The P7s also features a detachable remote-control- and-microphone cable.

Bowers &Wilkins say that for the P7 “we have created a headphone driver that works more like the drive-unit in a hi-fi speaker, with a diaphragm focused purely on the job it’s supposed to do: generate sound”.

The internal speaker baskets encasing the P7s’ drive-units are perforated with air vents covered with a resistive film. This allows for “precise control of the airflow from behind the drive-unit, resulting in a more uniform, piston-like movement”. The P7s’ voice coils are constructed from an aluminium-copper compound. The decrease in weight means that the drive-unit can move more freely which the company say helps in improving high frequency dynamics.

The P7’s speaker baffle plates are constructed from a polymer material that has been heavily braced and tuned to make it very rigid and inert to attempt to limits any resonances that might colour the sound of the headphones.

The Bowers & Wilkins P7 headphones are available in September in the US, priced at  $399.99