Cambridge Audio Melomania P100 review: A genuine disruptor

I don’t think there’s much of a finer example of a ‘heritage brand’ than Cambridge Audio. Founded in 1968, they’ve been making fantastic audio kit including amps, record decks and headphones for such a long time, and as such, are a brand I’ve admired from afar. Their P100s are their first run at wireless, over-ear headphones with noise cancelling, which is as competitive of a market as it gets for audio.

Allow me to explain a bit further – the state of play for wireless noise cancelling headphones in the £200 to £300 price range that Cambridge Audio has targeted has been taken up by the likes of Sony and Bose for several years, with other options from the likes of Sennheiser and Bowers and Wilkins sitting around, too. We have seen more specialist brands and models such as the Focal Bathys and the Mark Levinson No. 5909s enter the fray in recent years, although they’ve been priced way over what the status quo has been. What the P100s represent therefore is a bit of an anomaly – a specialist hifi brand making a set of more ‘affordable’ cans to truly take it to Bose and Sony alike.

Things are certainly positive as soon as you take the P100s out of their black packaging with a lovely woven fabric hard case for transport that features a neat compartment for braided USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to 3.5mm cables. The case features a small indented Cambridge Audio logo, and little else stylistically. After all, it is just a case.

With the cans themselves, they carry the same modern, clean lines as a lot of other Cambridge Audio kit does, which looks great. The main arms, yokes and outer portion of the earcups are all aluminium, while the plush earpads are memory foam and vegan leather. It’s all very thoughtfully assembled, and helps to make the P100s wonderfully comfortable. A 330g weight isn’t abnormal either, while their Goldilocks clamping force makes the P100s a pair of cans that you could wear all day without much trouble. I definitely had no issues in my weeks of use, for travel, or general listening.