Headphones

Sennheiser Momentum 5 — The House Sound Goes Wireless

Sennheiser has always sold restraint as a feature, and the Momentum line is where that philosophy meets Bluetooth. The Momentum 4 was already a sensible, unshowy flagship; the Momentum 5 arrives with a genuinely useful hardware upgrade — a user-replaceable battery — bolted onto sound tuning that borrows, quite deliberately, from the wired side of the family. For a company that also makes the HD600, that’s not a coincidence.

Bowers & Wilkins Px8 S2 — Leather-Clad Flagship, Refined

B&W has always sold wireless headphones as furniture for your ears — proper materials, proper finish, a price that says “hi-fi maker” rather than “consumer electronics brand.” The Px8 S2 is the moment that pitch finally has the engineering to back it up across the board, not just the leather. It’s a genuine, comprehensive rework of the original Px8, and at £629 it’s asking you to pay for craft over spec-sheet showmanship.

Sony WH-1000XM6 — The ANC Benchmark, Refined Again

Every couple of years Sony quietly resets what “best noise-cancelling headphone” means, and everyone else spends the next eighteen months catching up. The XM6 is the sixth swing at that target, and it’s the first in a while that actually changes shape rather than just the numbers on the spec sheet — the folding hinges are back, which tells you Sony listened to the one complaint the excellent XM5 never lived down.

Sennheiser HD 800 S — The Reference Everyone Argues About

Few headphones have generated as much forum argument as the HD 800. Sennheiser’s answer, over a decade on, was the HD 800 S — the same enormous ring-driver open-back, quietly recalibrated to settle the one complaint that never went away. It’s still the headphone people reach for when they want to talk about soundstage, and it still punishes a mismatched amp.

Hifiman HE1000 Stealth — The Flagship Planar Made Invisible

The original HE1000 put Hifiman on the flagship map; the Stealth Magnet version is the one that finally sorted out the diffraction problems that came with the territory. Swap the visible metal magnet arrays for acoustically transparent ones either side of a nanometre-thin diaphragm and, on paper at least, you get all the resolution with none of the comb-filtering side effects. In the ear it’s one of the most complete-sounding planars I’ve spent time with.

Meze 105 SILVA — Warmth Carved From Walnut

Meze Audio built its reputation on walnut cups and boutique flagship electrostatics, and the 105 SILVA is the moment that DNA trickles down to a genuinely attainable open-back. At around £469 it undercuts most of the planar open-back pack while sounding like a hand-made instrument rather than a lab exercise. This is Meze proving the 99 Classics formula scales up as well as it scaled down.

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.