Our active headphones, such as our ATH-M50XBT, ATH-SR50BT, ATH-ANC900BT and ATH-ANC700BT models, are designed to work with a wired audio cable so that the headphones can continue to work if you're caught out-and-about when your battery runs out, so it's not necessary to power on the headphones when using a wired/auxiliary audio cable.

If your headphones have features - such as noise cancelling or noise reduction - that require power to work, then you will still need to switch on the headphones to be able to use these functions; however it's not necessary for standard high-quality audio playback through cable - particularly for headphones that qualify for the 'Hi-Res' badge from the Japan Audio Society.