Apple has announced a new premium headphone offering to its AirPods range, the AirPods Max, that will allow users who prefer an over-ear experience to listen to music on the go. 

The new headphones, which will cost £549, are the official name of the much rumoured AirPods Studio headphones that have been doing the rounds for most of the year. Apple says the new headphones promise to bring the "magic of AirPods to an over-ear design with high-fidelity sound."

That means, according to Apple a custom acoustic design, H1 chips, and advanced software to power computational audio for a breakthrough listening experience with Adaptive EQ, Active Noise Cancellation, Transparency mode, and spatial audio

The headphones will be available in five colours, including space grey, silver, sky blue, green, and pink. They are available to pre-order today, but won't be available until Tuesday 15 December. 

The headphones headband is made from stainless steel with a telescopic design to fit a variety of head shapes and sizes while Apple says the price is justified by a "revolutionary" mechanism that balances and distributes ear cup pressure, however it doesn't look like they fold, a must for most travellers. 

AirPods Max feature battery life with up to 20 hours of high-fidelity audio, talk time, or movie playback with Active Noise Cancellation and spatial audio enabled and will come in a smart case. 

On the sound front, the headphones will offer many of the same technologies as found in the AirPods Pro in-ear headphones but feature a much bigger 40mm Apple-designed dynamic driver.

Apple already offers high-end premium headphones via its Beats brand, but this is the first time the company has offered an over the ear device itself with the Apple logo. The new headphones will not only be going up against the Beats offering, but a number of high-end headphones from the likes of Bose, Sony, and others.