FiiO’s new must-have headphones are a more affordable option for audiophiles

The new FiiO FT1 over-ear headphones have an impressive specification and an aggressive price: £139 / €159 / $159 (roughly AU$270).

FiiO make great headphones, as you can tell from our reviews: we said that the FiiO FT3 were "superb" and that the flagship FiiO FT5 delivered "planar magnetic perfection". But not everyone can drop £290 to £430 on a pair of cans, no matter how great they might be. So the launch of a much more affordable set of high-end headphones from FiiO is very exciting indeed.

The new FiiO FT1 promise to deliver high quality audio for significantly less cash than their siblings: the price is a relatively budget £139 / €159 / $159 (roughly AU$270). But lower cost doesn't mean lower quality. These headphones come with serious specs.

FiiO FT1 headphones: key features

The most striking thing about the FT1 headphones is the use of American walnut wood in the ear cups. That's not just there to look gorgeous, although clearly it does. It's a very dense wood, and that means it can help reduce resonance and unwanted standing waves at low frequencies.

The drivers here are larger than many similar headphones at 60mm, which should mean truly subterranean levels of bass, and there's an ultra-fine copper-clad aluminium voice coil specially imported from Japan to take care of the high end.

The diaphragms are made from European spruce fibres and carbon fibre. Spruce is a wood commonly used in the manufacture of acoustic musical instruments, and the carbon fibre adds the required toughness to the ultra-thin material.

According to FiiO the FT1's new W-shaped suspension gasket delivers a 25.8% increase in effective vibrating area, minimising vibration loss and reducing distortion, and the U-shaped damping tube reduces the cavity resonance frequency to deliver clearer bass. Conical baffle plates break up sound convergence, reduce standing waves and minimise high frequency attenuation.

The FT1s come with two interchangeable cables, one 3.5mm and one 4.4mm balanced, and both are made with oxygen-free copper-plated silver wire with 392 individual wires.

The new FiiO FT1 headphones are on sale now. You can find out more from the FiiO website.