HiFi

Audeze MM-100 — Manny Marroquin’s Budget Blueprint

Audeze’s collaborations with mix engineer Manny Marroquin have quietly become some of the best-value headphones the company makes, and the MM-100 is the second and cheapest of them. At $399 it takes the driver philosophy out of the pricier MM-500 and packages it into something light enough to actually wear on a flight, not just sit at a desk in. For a brand whose entry point used to mean the Audeze LCD-X, that’s a genuinely different proposition.

Hifiman Edition XS — Arya DNA at a Fraction of the Cost

Every so often a manufacturer accidentally makes their expensive flagship look overpriced. Hifiman did exactly that with the Edition XS — it borrows the teardrop shell and stealth-magnet driver architecture straight out of the Hifiman Arya, launched at $499 and now drifted to roughly $269 street. For a while this quietly obsoleted the Hifiman Sundara as the value planar to buy, and it hasn’t really been dethroned since.

FiiO FT1 Pro — Planar Bass Without the Premium

FiiO built its name on dongles and desktop DACs, so a full-size open-back planar felt like a stretch — until you see the price. £180-ish gets you a planar driver in a market where that used to mean queuing up next to a Hifiman Sundara or an ageing pair of HE400s. The FT1 Pro doesn’t reinvent anything, but it proves FiiO can build a proper pair of cans, not just amp them.

FiiO FT1 — Warm Wood, Honest Value

The £149 closed-back bracket is usually where headphones get boring — safe V-shapes tuned for a demo, not for living with. The FT1 is FiiO applying the same engineering rigour it brings to its DACs to a pair of cans, wrapping a genuinely thought-through 60mm driver in real American black walnut, and the result is a rare closed-back that doesn’t feel like a compromise purchase.

Topping DX1 II — Compact DAC, Uncommonly Capable

Topping has a habit of turning up in a price bracket and quietly resetting what’s expected there, and the DX1 II — landing in the UK this summer at £119 via Electromod — is the latest example. No power brick, no fuss, just a small aluminium box that pulls everything it needs from USB-C and still finds over a watt of balanced output on the other end.

FiiO K11 — Desktop Muscle on a Budget

The budget desktop DAC/amp category used to mean picking your compromise. FiiO’s K11 is the point where that stops being true: a sub-£110 box that puts out more power than desktop amps twice its price, wrapped in a chassis that actually looks like it belongs on a desk rather than apologising for being there.

Shanling UP6 — Bluetooth Power, No Apologies

Shanling has been building towards this since the UP2: a Bluetooth dongle that stops apologising for being wireless. The UP5 was the previous flagship; the UP6 replaces it with dual ESS DACs, a proper colour screen and enough balanced power that “just a dongle” stops being an accurate description. This is the segment FiiO’s BTR17 has been quietly redefining, and Shanling clearly noticed.

iFi hip-dac 3 — The Orange Box Gets Serious

The hip-dac has always been the fun one — that gaudy copper-and-black shell, the glowing volume knob, the sense that iFi didn’t take itself too seriously even while the electronics inside were dead earnest. Three generations in, the joke’s worn off and what’s left is a genuinely accomplished USB DAC/amp that happens to still look like nothing else on your desk. It’s not chasing the BTR17 or the Mojo 2 on outright spec-sheet bragging rights; it’s chasing “you’ll actually use this every day,” and it mostly wins.

Qudelix-5K — The Value Benchmark, Still

Every category needs a device everyone else gets measured against, and in pocket Bluetooth DAC/amps that’s been the Qudelix-5K since 2020. Six years is a geological age in dongle years, yet it’s still the first name that comes up when someone asks for portable parametric EQ done properly. That kind of staying power isn’t an accident.

FiiO KA17 — A Desk Job in a Dongle

FiiO’s dongle line has quietly turned into a technology testbed, and the KA17 is where the ambition goes furthest. No Bluetooth radio, no screen gimmicks for their own sake — just two flagship DAC chips, a dedicated power port, and a Desktop Mode that genuinely means it. Having just spent weeks with the BTR17, its wireless sibling from the same generation, the KA17 is the wired, no-compromise answer to the same question: how much desktop-grade amplification can you cram into something that lives on a keyring?