I can't believe the Audeze Maxwell 2 ANC is still missing this crucial gaming feature

The Audeze Maxwell 2 ANC just launched at $429 for PlayStation and $449 for Xbox, and it finally brings active noise cancelation to one of the best-sounding gaming headsets on the market. But that’s a $100 premium over the standard Maxwell 2, and for that money, a lot of gamers like myself were hoping Audeze would fix the one thing this headset has always lacked: the ability to stream audio from its 2.4GHz wireless dongle and a Bluetooth device simultaneously. To be fair, the new model does support dual audio — but only over a wired connection and Bluetooth, not via the low-latency dongle. And that distinction matters more than it might sound.

If you haven’t used simultaneous dual wireless audio, here’s why people care so much about it. Your headset stays connected to your PC or console via the low-latency dongle for game audio while also staying paired with your phone over Bluetooth. That means you can sit in a Discord call, take a phone call, or keep your music going without ever touching your game audio, and both streams mix together in your ears. It’s the kind of feature you use once and immediately can’t live without, because it solves the most common real-world scenario for anyone who games with friends: game sound from one device, voice chat from another. A wired connection can’t always fill that role, especially if you are a console gamer. The whole appeal of a wireless gaming headset is gaming untethered from the couch, and plugging in a cable to unlock audio mixing rather defeats the purpose of buying a wireless headset.

The frustrating part is that Audeze has actually offered this feature before with the Penrose, its budget gaming headset from 2020, which supported simultaneous 2.4GHz and Bluetooth audio. The company’s cheapest gaming headset had the feature its $449 flagship still lacks.

What makes the omission harder to defend is how common this feature is in 2026 at half the price. The SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7 Gen 2 mixes 2.4GHz and Bluetooth audio simultaneously for $199.99 at Amazon. The Turtle Beach Stealth 700 Gen 3 does it for $199.99 at Amazon and goes a step further with dual USB transmitters, letting you blend audio from two consoles or devices at once. Even the Razer BlackShark V3 Pro, which packs ANC and a lower-latency wireless connection than most of the field, handles simultaneous dual wireless at $249.99 at Amazon. These aren’t obscure boutique products; they’re some of the most popular gaming headsets you can buy, and every one of them treats dual wireless audio as table stakes.

I’m not questioning what the Maxwell does well. Its planar magnetic drivers deliver sound quality that embarrasses most gaming headsets, and the new adaptive ANC should hopefully address a crucial gap for a headset at this price. But at $429, you’re no longer competing on sound alone — you’re competing on the whole experience. Implementing simultaneous dual wireless audio would have been an easy win for Audeze here, especially after omitting it from the Maxwell 2 just a few months ago, and it’s exactly the kind of addition that would have made the $100 premium feel more worthwhile. Audeze clearly knows how to build it (they already did, six years ago). Until it brings that feature back, the Maxwell will remain a headset that may sound like the future but connects like the past, and gamers who live in Discord will keep buying something cheaper that lets them do so.