FiiO Announces First BT headphones – EH3NC

FiiO may only have been around since 2007, but they’ve undoubtedly got a snowball-effect going on with their product releases, especially in the last 2 years. From very respectable in-ear monitors to genuinely premium-quality music players, things just keep getting better for FiiO. However, they’ve never released a full-sized headphone…that is until now. FiiO has named it the EH3NC (rolls right off the tongue, huh?), and it even features Bluetooth and noise cancelling.

I think it’s fair to say that most companies would play things safe. They’d produce a few headphone models and learn along the way which direction they want to go in before committing to some bolder product releases. But that’s not how FiiO rolls.

No, FiiO has jumped, head first, into the deep end and decided that their first headphone release should offer features that can, at least on paper, compete with products from some of even the most widely available and established brands such as Sony and Bose.

For the EH3NC, FiiO have included Bluetooth 5.0 which makes it compatible with practically every Bluetooth audio format out there, including AptX HD, LDAC, and even HWA. There’s also NFC capability to ensure simple and easy one-touch pairing with compatible source devices.
Then there is what is arguably the biggest surprise for such a ‘first product’, and that’s noise cancellation. The EH3NC features an ADI noise-cancellation chip and the tech behind it is called ‘hybrid feedforward-feedback active noise cancellation’. This particular type of tech is not my forte, so I can’t say how this compares to the ANC used in other products from the likes of Sony and Bose, but it will nonetheless be interesting to see just how well the EH3NC will perform out in the real world.

Availability and Pricing

Exactly when FiiO plans on releasing the EH3NC is still not clear, but it has been said in this Facebook post that the estimated retail price will fall within the $200-250 range.