Beats Solo vs Studio: Same 40 mm, and Ten Hours Apart

Beats sells the two lines side by side, and at the dealer the gap today is $100 flat. Solo 4 costs $149.95, Studio Pro $249.99. Both pages promise the same things in almost the same words, so the question is what the money actually moves. Two rows on the specification tables change in the dearer pair's favour, four move the other way, and four more don't move at all.

Same 40 mm both ways, and only the dearer page prints it

The dealer gives both headphones a driver of 1.6" / 40 mm. Beats gives that number to one of them. On the Studio Pro page the wording is "Custom 40mm active driver"; on the Solo 4 page it's "custom acoustic architecture with upgraded drivers", and no diameter appears anywhere else on that page either. So the number exists, but the maker won't print it except beside the dearer product. Whichever page a buyer opens first decides whether that figure exists for them at all.

Across this collection, forty millimetres doesn't distinguish anything, mind you. It's the median of the 26 over-ear cards that give a size, at 40 mm, and the median of the four on-ear ones as well. Both shapes land on the same driver diameter, and what really separates them is mass rather than millimetres. Which makes the asymmetry on the two Beats pages a choice about what to say, not a difference in what's inside.

The cup, the cancelling, and nothing else

Two rows change with the price, and both sit on the same side of it. The first is shape. Solo 4 answers On-Ear (Supra-Aural) while Studio Pro answers Over-Ear (Circumaural), and that's the whole physical difference between them. One presses on the ear. The other encloses it, which is also why the cups in the photographs aren't the same size. Second comes cancelling: Solo 4 answers No under Active Noise Cancellation, whereas Studio Pro answers Yes and adds a transparency mode beside it. Those two are the only rows where the dearer pair comes out ahead.

Cancelling needs microphones and a processor running for as long as the music does, and the battery pays for them. Which is exactly where the swap starts costing something back.

Ten hours, multipoint and NFC go the other way

Solo 4 runs 50 hours. Studio Pro runs 40 with the cancelling off and 24 with it on, so on a like-for-like setting the cheaper pair lasts ten hours longer. Against the mode most people buy the dearer pair for, it lasts more than twice as long. Quick charging tilts the same way, and ten minutes gives Solo 4 five hours of playback against Studio Pro's four. None of that reads as a fault in the dearer pair, though, because cancelling costs power for as long as it runs.

Two connection rows tilt that way too. Solo 4's card reads Bluetooth 5.3 / NFC and answers Yes under Multipoint Support, whereas Studio Pro reads Bluetooth 5.3 and carries no multipoint row at all. A pair holding two connections at once can be playing to a laptop while somebody stares at a silent phone, so that row earns its place either way.

Both battery numbers came from one playlist, a year apart

Apple prints the test behind each figure, which almost nobody does, and the two tests match on everything except when they ran. Each used 358 tracks bought from the iTunes Store at 256-Kbps AAC with the volume at 50%. Studio Pro was measured in May 2023 against an iPhone 13, and Solo 4 in March 2024 against an iPhone 15 Pro. So the comparison rests on a stated protocol rather than on a claim, though it's still a comparison across ten months and two different phones instead of a bench test of both on one afternoon.

Nobody publishes what the difference would be on a single handset, and it probably isn't large. But the honest way to read the pair is as two runs of one procedure rather than a head-to-head.

Where the two don't differ at all

Four rows come out identical, and one of them is the row people assume separates the lines. On the wired side both take a 3.5 mm TRS cable and USB-C, both run Bluetooth 5.3, both support spatial audio with head tracking, and both answer Closed-Back. Beats adds that Solo 4 needs zero battery power on the analogue cable, so a flat pair still plays. Ten of the 67 headphone cards here have no analogue socket at all, and neither of these is among them.

By mass they separate by 42 grams, which the shapes explain on their own. The dealer's cards say 216 against 258, the maker's pages 217 against 260. Neither pair is heavy for its row, though. Solo 4 sits above the on-ear middle of 190.5 g, whereas Studio Pro sits under the over-ear middle of 289 g.

Owner scores run the other way from the price

Solo 4 rates 4.4 at the dealer. Studio Pro rates 3.1. That puts the dearer pair second from the bottom of the 32 over-ear cards carrying a score, under a middle of 4.6, with only a Bang & Olufsen below it. Both samples are tiny, mind you, so neither figure settles anything on its own and neither one's a verdict on the hardware. Across nine Beats and Bose cards the scores otherwise sit high and close together, which is what makes this one stand out.

By price the row sorts oddly as well. Solo 4 is the dearest of the four priced on-ear cards here, over a middle of $91.50, while Studio Pro sits below the over-ear middle of $349.00. So in the Beats Solo vs Studio pairing the cheap one tops its row and the dear one doesn't.

Under the maker's own prices both dealer figures sit lower. Beats asks $199.99 and $349.99, which turns a $100 gap at one shop into a $150 gap at the other. Neither page explains why, and neither one's obliged to.

Questions people ask

What is the difference between Beats Solo and Studio?

Shape and cancelling. On the ear sits Solo, with no active cancelling, whereas Studio goes round the ear with adaptive cancelling and a transparency mode. Everything else on the two current cards matches, including the driver size, the Bluetooth version, the wired sockets and spatial audio.

Do Beats Solo 4 and Studio Pro use the same driver?

The dealer says yes, giving 40 mm to both. On the maker's own pages it isn't symmetrical: Beats states the number for Studio Pro and calls Solo 4's "upgraded drivers" without a diameter.

Which Beats headphones last longer on a charge?

Solo 4, by ten hours with cancelling off and by twenty-six with it on. Both figures come from Apple's own test at 50% volume on a 358-track playlist.

Is Beats Studio Pro worth the extra money over Solo 4?

The extra buys cancelling and an over-ear cup, and it costs battery, multipoint and NFC. On owner scores the cheaper pair rates higher, though the samples are too small to settle anything. What the tables don't carry is a sound figure of any kind, so they can't answer the part people mean.

Are Beats on-ear or over-ear?

Both, depending on the line. Solo 4 answers On-Ear (Supra-Aural) and Studio Pro answers Over-Ear (Circumaural), and those are the only two shapes Beats builds with a headband.

Sources

1. Beats' own product page for Solo 4: $199.99, a weight of 217 g / 7.65 oz, up to 50 hours of listening, Fast Fuel giving five hours from a ten-minute charge, USB-C and 3.5 mm inputs, "zero battery power required when listening via 3.5 mm audio cable", and drivers described as "custom acoustic architecture with upgraded drivers" with no diameter anywhere on the page.
2. Beats' own product page for Studio Pro: $349.99, 260 g / 9.17 oz, up to 40 hours with cancelling off and 24 with it or transparency on, a ten-minute charge giving four hours, a built-in DAC for lossless over USB-C, and a "Custom 40mm active driver", which is the number the Solo 4 page leaves out.
3. B&H Photo Video's listing for Beats Solo 4: $149.95 against a struck-through $199.95, In Stock, 4.4 from five ratings, and a specification table giving Driver Size 1.6" / 40 mm, Earpiece Design On-Ear (Supra-Aural), Active Noise Cancellation No, Multipoint Support Yes, Bluetooth 5.3 / NFC, Runtime 50 Hours and a weight of 216 g.
4. B&H Photo Video's listing for Beats Studio Pro: $249.99 against a struck-through $349.99, In Stock, 3.1 from fourteen ratings, and the same table giving Driver Size 1.6" / 40 mm, Earpiece Design Over-Ear (Circumaural), Active Noise Cancellation Yes, Bluetooth 5.3 with no NFC, no Multipoint Support row at all, Runtime 40 Hours / 24 Hours (ANC On) and a weight of 258 g.
5. Row counts and medians come from listings of 200 audio products collected the same way. How those are read and compared.

All four pages were read on 28 August 2026.

What we did not do

Neither pair was worn for this page. Every figure above is a maker's or a dealer's own published row, and what we add is the arithmetic between them: which rows change with the price, which change against it, and which don't move at all.