Noble Fokus Artemis review

If you know anything about Greek mythology, you’ll know that there were two contrasting sides to the goddess Artemis.

On the one side, there’s the graceful beauty and unmatched skill with the bow. This is the patron deity of archery, hunting and childbirth, after all, blending breathtaking beauty with awe-inspiring precision. Little wonder you’d want to name your headphones after someone capable of embodying those kinds of qualities.

Then there’s the other side to Artemis, the side of vengeful wrath and unforgiving cruelty. This is the deity who, having discovered a young hunter spying on her while washing in a sacred grove, turns the poor man into a stag and has him chased down – and subsequently torn to pieces – by his own hounds. Perhaps not the sort of pain and penury you want your high-end headphones to inflict upon you.

How, then, do the Noble Fokus Artemis live up to their namesake? Effortless beauty and precision…or a whole world of pain?

Price

At £799 / $899 / AU$1400 (approx), the Noble Fokus Artemis are placed at the higher reaches of the premium wireless noise-cancelling headphone market. These headphones sit above the likes of the excellent, five-star Focal Bathys (£599 / $799 / AU$1199) and superb-sounding Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2 (£629 / $699 / AU$1150), but below the even more high-end, Award-winning Focal Bathys Mg (£999 / $1499).

Build & comfort

We imagine that the Noble Fokus Artemis’s design will be a divisive one. Reactions in our office have been mixed, ranging from tentative praise for the headphones’ unique aesthetic to concerns over the somewhat cheap feeling of the earcups’ exterior that doesn’t quite match their high price.

The headphones deploy an aluminium alloy frame, supporting a pair of machined aluminium earcups which sport a marbled ‘Damascus Steel’ exterior pattern. The headband is padded with Alcantara on its underside and topped with a woven cloth exterior, the latter of which reminds us of a pair of premium Bowers & Wilkins alternatives.

In fact, the Artemis’s overall shape isn’t dissimilar to that deployed across the Bowers range, albeit with narrower ear cushions that taper slightly at the bottom in contrast with the more traditional rectangle form favoured by B&W. Like many of the wallet-unfriendly options at this kind of level, the Nobles don’t fold away, but a welcome IP52 rating means that modest water drops – for our testing purposes, some light autumnal rain – need not be of much concern.

Comfort-wise, it’s something of a mixed bag. Extended listening sessions are rarely blighted by the twin scourge of on-ear heat and excessive pressure, but things get less rosy when we start to move around.

The headphones feel unstable as they move about on our heads during a leisurely stroll, and though we unsuccessfully attempt to rectify the issue by tightening the sliding gimbals, we suspect the problem lies mostly with the Artemis’s earpad shape.

Noble envisions its premium flagships as being built “for years of use”, and while we imagine most of the various components are designed to go the distance, magnetically attached replaceable ear cushions and a user-replaceable 600mAh battery are on hand to help you eke out your headphones’ lifespan for as long as possible.

If you do start taking your headphones apart, you’ll discover that each earcup combines three distinct driver technologies: a 40mm dynamic driver primarily handling the lower frequencies, a 14.5mm planar driver aiming for a clear, open midrange, and a balanced armature driver covering those all-important high-end details. On paper, then, that's a lot of hardware working in the Artemis’s favour.

Features

Premium and high-end wireless headphones can often, understandably, sacrifice marathon battery life spans for a greater focus on performance, but the Artemis do a decent job in mitigating such a compromise.

The Noble cans offer an impressive 55 hours of playback with noise cancelling switched off, dropping to around 35 hours when ANC is in play, beating the 30 hours (ANC on) of the Focal Bathys and Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2. Better still, Noble’s premium contenders can charge from empty to full in around one and a half hours, something we confirm by draining them entirely and then juicing them via standard USB-C.

The Artemis make use of Qualcomm's QCC3095 platform, granting support for Bluetooth 6.0 as well as higher resolution codecs such as LDAC, aptX Adaptive, and aptX Lossless. Bluetooth Multipoint, meanwhile, lets you connect to two devices simultaneously and switch between them on the fly.

Aside from wireless, the premium over-ears support USB-C audio and 3.5mm wired listening via the provided cables, though be aware that the headphones need to be switched on when using a physical tether to your source device.

Spatial audio comes in two modes: a full-blooded ‘Immersive’ mode and a subtler ‘Studio’ setting. The more effective Studio mode is the one we’d recommend, giving the various atonal clanks and thuds scattered across Ludwig Göransson’s Troy a more appreciable sense of movement and positioning than the somewhat underwhelming ‘Studio’ setting.

You’ll naturally lose much of your music’s solidity and directness through either mode, though, with results varying depending on artist and genre. Ambient soundtracks, for instance, tend to fare far better than walloping thrash metal or beat-driven hip-hop.

ANC & call quality

The Noble Fokus Artemis are equipped with a seven-microphone array and boast active noise cancelling in variable low, medium and strong flavours, as well as an ambient mode for providing greater sonic passthrough.

To test the full limits of the cans’ ANC powers, we immediately select the most powerful experience possible, yet the so-called ‘strong’ setting struggles to live up to its name.

Noise cancelling feels subtle to the point of being downright ineffective, and though there’s some dampening of general exterior sounds, the fact that we can still pick out the rumble of a plane as it soars way overhead or the distant barking of a dog a good way down the street says little for the Artemis’ noise-cancelling credentials. The rival Focal Bathys don’t exactly offer Bose-level sonic isolation, but even they are better at shielding you from the outside world than the Fokus Artemis.

Voice calls are similarly mediocre. Human speech is reasonably clear – if mechanical and synthetic-sounding – but external sounds intrude with far too much ease. From the swooshing of cars as they pass or the simple rustling of nearby trees, the Nobles don’t do enough to isolate the caller from their surroundings.

Sound

We’ll give the Fokus Artemis their due – they’re capable of making your tunes sound as airy and spacious as a modern art gallery. The wireless over-ears’ presentation is admirably wide and uncluttered, helping each instrument sit neatly within its own precious space without interference from any unruly neighbour.

There’s also reasonable textural detail scattered across their midrange, a quality which shines as we stream George Benson’s Give Me The Night via Tidal on an iPhone 15. Connect the headphones to their source via USB-C, and that detail becomes even more sharply drawn, as is the case when streaming a hi-res recording of Radiohead’s Reckoner via LDAC using our Astell & Kern PD5 portable music player.

Sadly, these seem to be the limits of the Artemis’s talents, regardless of the method or medium through which we listen. Midrange detail might be sufficient in isolation, but against the Focal Bathys or Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2, it’s hardly class leading. When you consider that both rivals are just as spacious and easy to follow as the Nobles, this already presents a major problem.

Probing the lower frequencies moves the Artemis out of their comfort zone. Bass reproduction is poor, and despite not being massively powerful, it still manages to sound sloppy, vague and ill-disciplined. That’s a problem for Killswitch Engage’s pounding The Signal Fire, which ends up floundering on a woefully unstable foundation.

What really hurts like an arrow to the knee is how mechanical and stilted the Artemis sound, so much so that they appear to take no pleasure in reproducing anything from grunge to garage. Think of it as the difference between watching a movie on an IMAX screen with your mates at the cinema, versus being told about the plot from the film’s accountant. The information is technically still conveyed to your brain, but one way is clearly superior to the other.

Dynamics are flat when listening via both our iPhone and the A&K PD5, there’s little sense of tempo or urgency when required, and songs lack any sense of drive, intent or musicality. We do all we can to rectify these issues – wired listening, a personalised hearing test, tweaking the equaliser in the app – but to little avail. Those fundamental flaws remain, and they stifle any chance of us engaging with these headphones on an emotional level.

Worse, the Artemis are dynamically and rhythmically outmatched by more affordable offerings, from the Sennheiser HDB 630 (£400 / $500 / AU$1000) to the Sony WH-1000XM4C (£219 / $300 / AU$450). Criminally, even the budget Sony WH-CH730N forge a more tangible emotional connection than Noble’s stilted effort, and that has the alarm bells ringing at their very loudest.

Verdict

We feel let down by the Noble Fokus Artemis. They’re somewhat competitive in a few respects, but sound-wise, they’re well beaten not only by price-comparable competitors, but by far more affordable options.

At this substantial outlay, they should perform far better. This supposed huntress has badly missed the target.

Review published: 30th October 2026

SCORES

• Sound 2
• Build 3
• Features 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Focal Bathys

Also consider the Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2

Read our Sennheiser HDB 630

Best over-ear headphones: wired and wireless pairs tested by our in-house experts