There appears to be no shortage of new TWS headphones being announced, but these ones are slightly different from the competition, as they have 27 year Sennheiser veteran Axel Grell behind them. The grell TWS/1 is the first product from grell, a brand from STRAX, which is also home to Urbanista, WeSC and several other brands that mostly focuses on audio or mobile accessories.

The TWS/1 does as you'd expect, focus on audio quality, but also includes all the kind of features you'd expect from current generation TWS headphones, such as ANC, Bluetooth 5.2 and support for the SoundID app from Sonarworks. The TWS/1 is based on Qualcomm's QCC5141 Bluetooth SoC which sits in the premium tier of Qualcomm's product stack and features a pair of DSPs as well as a system processor and an application processor.As the TWS/1 is based on Qualcomm hardware, support for atpX and aptX adaptive are part of the package in addition to SBC and AAC, but also LHDC (Low Latency High-Definition Audio Codec) from Savitech. So far LHDC doesn't seem to have very wide support with Xiaomi seemingly being the only phone maker that supports it, although several DAC makers seem to offer support for it. Voice assistants are supported, but there's no mention of which ones.

The speaker elements are simply 10.1 mm dynamic drivers, although we'd have to wait for some reviews to see how they compare to the competition. In addition to Qualcomm based ANC, the TWS/1's also features Axel Grell Noise Annoyance Reduction (NAR) and transparency mode. The battery life is said to be up to six hours with ANC on and eight hours with it off. The supplied charging case offers an additional four full charges for a total of 34 to 45 hours of battery life. Both USB-C and wireless charging is supported for the charging case. Finally, the headphones are splash proof (IPX4) and weigh in at 7.3 gram each.

You'd expect to pay a premium price for something like this, but surprisingly the TWS/1's are retailing for US$199.99, putting them well below the likes of Apple, Bose, Sennheiser and Sony's high-end models.