FiiO has never been shy about squeezing a lot of audio hardware into a small price tag, and the new EH13 over-ears take that habit to the entry-level battlefield. Priced at £49 / $49 / €49, these wireless cans are aimed squarely at Sony’s much-loved WH-CH520 — and they arrive bristling with features that budget headphones usually leave off the spec sheet.
At the heart of each earcup sits a 40mm dynamic driver with a sapphire-coated composite diaphragm, a material choice intended to keep the diaphragm stiff and well-behaved at higher frequencies. More notable for the money is the codec support: the EH13 handle LDAC, Sony’s own hi-res Bluetooth standard, with streaming up to 32-bit/96kHz. That puts genuine hi-res wireless playback within reach of a sub-£50 pair of headphones.
Then there’s the noise cancelling. The EH13 use hybrid active noise-cancellation, and FiiO has packed in five microphones alongside an ‘Environmental Noise Cancellation’ algorithm to clean up your voice and trim background din during calls. It’s an unusually generous mic count at this price, and a clear signal that FiiO wants the EH13 to handle commutes and conference calls equally well.
Battery life is where things get genuinely eye-catching. With ANC switched on you get up to 45 hours of playback, and turning noise cancelling off pushes that figure to a marathon 75 hours. That’s the kind of endurance that means you’ll lose the charging cable long before you run out of juice.
The practical touches are present and correct, too:
- Multipoint Bluetooth for pairing with two devices at once
- A 3.5mm input with a supplied cable for wired listening
- A fully foldable design for easier packing
- EQ tweaking and other adjustments via the FiiO Control App
The 3.5mm option is worth dwelling on — wired fallback is increasingly rare on cheap wireless headphones, and it means the EH13 keep working when the battery finally does run flat, or when you want a clean analogue connection to a source.
The EH13 are available now in black or beige finishes. At £49 / $49 / €49, they land right on top of Sony’s WH-CH520, a pair that has earned plenty of praise since launching in 2023. Sony’s budget champion still has a formidable reputation to defend, but on paper at least, FiiO has shown up with hi-res codec support, hybrid ANC and a five-mic array — a feature list that reads well above its asking price. Whether the EH13 can convert specs into the sort of sound and comfort that wins hearts is the question, but the value pitch here is hard to ignore.
