In the hotly contested and heavily congested world of hi-fi and headphones, 2025 ends in such stark contrast to 2024 that you’d scarcely believe mere months separate the two (but that is how time works, after all). It’s like the big dogs went into hibernation for a year – a collective re-think; a fallow year in response to trying economic times – only to emerge stronger and more powerful.
Last year was a moment for niche European hi-fi brands, who saw an empty, near-silent dance floor and chose to inherit it by dancing to their own new tunes. Such was the dearth of input from audio’s global heavy hitters, plucky underdogs found their moment in the limelight. In the UK, for example, Bowers & Wilkins released its fantastic Pi8 earbuds and Cambridge found much success with its inaugural, affordable P100 cans.
But if I thought these refreshing wins for the quirky, oft overlooked visionaries of audio would continue into 2025, I was wrong. Know this: 2025 was the year the heavyweight hounds strolled back into the club… and quickly commandeered the dance floor once more.
2025 as it happened – headphones and earbuds
A quintet of product releases shaped the headphones landscape for 2025, starting out strong with the Beats Powerbeats Pro 2 in February. Why so momentous? Partly because they were the long-awaited update to the iconic 2019 Powerbeats Pro, but most pertinently because the Powerbeats Pro 2 proved that Apple could – and indeed had – used its sub-brand to nestle a proper heart-rate monitor into a set of earbuds.
Switching to the over-ear realm for a minute, May saw the launch of Sony’s WH-1000XM6. Everything finally came together for the tech giant and these exceptional headphones finally knocked the 2020-issue WH-1000XM4 off the top spot in our best headphones guide (something the WH-1000XM5 failed to do, back in 2022). Has any set of cans ever assumed the top spot for over five years? Not on my watch – so you can see the importance of this eventual changing of the guard.
And this theme of class-leaders heading back into the game – but even stronger and that little bit better – continued with the June arrival of the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen), followed by the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (2nd Gen) in September. 2025 was a thoroughly positive year for Bose overall, and this two-pronged attack on the market saw Bose undeniably reinstated as the true king of ANC.
But no annual audio roundup would be complete without shining a light on the biggest launch of them all: the autumn arrival of Apple’s AirPods Pro 3. The earpiece has been reworked, the ANC is doubly good and yes, they also monitor your heart-rate – in a slightly different way to their Beats stablemates and with increasingly tempting third-party fitness app support for iPhone owners. Still the most popular earbuds in the world? Irrefutably.
What was the fastest-growing product in the audio industry in 2025? Open earbuds, which, according to Huawei saw a 400% increase in production – and the February-launch Huawei FreeArc are certainly some of the best examples, along with the ANC-toting Honor Earbuds Open (yes really, active noise cancellation in an open-ear design).
2025 as it happened – hi-fi products and music streaming
Arguably the biggest news from an audio streaming perspective is that in September, Spotify Lossless finally landed as a free offering to Premium subscribers, serving nearly-as-good-as-Apple-Music resolution at up to 24-bit/44.1kHz. Although it wasn’t a huge hit with fans initially, the big green streaming machine’s revenue continues to look very healthy indeed – despite ongoing concerns over its payment to human artists, its tendency to look the other way when it comes to AI acts, plus certain financial investments. Wrapped, even with its ‘Listening Age’ feature, was a big success in early December, despite launching a day after Apple Music Replay.
If mindful music streaming concerns you, don’t forget that the original hi-res music service, Qobuz, has been doing some great artist-first things in 2025 and in 2025 it announced that it pays out an average of US$0.01873 per stream – which the company says is “four times the industry average”.
It’s not all wins across the board for the industry giants though. When discussing the hardware with which to enjoy your music at home, an underdog enters the fray. If you remember just one audio brand name this year, let it be WiiM.
As Sonos continues to struggle with trust issues among its once loyal fanbase (owing to that troublesome 2024 app update), the plucky multi-room underdog unveiled a screen-toting WiiM Sound speaker and then, in December, a smaller and cheaper WiiM Sound Lite option. And the firm would be more than happy to help you build a new wireless multi-room system with them…
In Bluetooth-only speakers, January 2025 saw music star and entrepreneur Will.i.am’s partnership with LG bear fruit – and given our glowing reviews of the LG xboom Stage 301 and the xboom Grab, it’s safe to say that the team-up has been a success. The Grab is probably the biggest rival to JBL’s Flip 7 I’ve heard yet, and I don’t say that lightly.
Wireless audio and headphones: what I want to see in 2026
An alternative to Li-ion batteries in portable Bluetooth tech
Another year of wire-free listening and it seems that nobody can come up with a viable alternative to rechargeable (for a while, at any rate) Lithium-ion batteries in our portable listening gear. And the problem is that when these little batteries go south, so does the whole product, especially in cheaper models.
Fairphone is a company that has long championed more eco-conscious listening, and the December launch Fairphone Fairbuds XL headphones offer 100% fair-mined cobalt, copper and silver, 100% recycled rare-earth materials and 100% renewable energy in their construction. They’re also modular, so if a part breaks you can replace it without needing a whole new pair of cans, and there’s a three-year warranty – which is a year longer than most headphones.
In speakers, the May launch Poca Pine Beat Bluetooth speaker also offers replaceable Li-ion batteries (and the UK specialist even claims it’ll be able to update the Bluetooth module in time) but the fact remains: even these eco-friendlier products still contain a battery that will deteriorate over time and will probably end up in landfill.
I’d love to see this change in 2026. Most of us know that Powerfoyle exists, but it’s not quite harnessing enough solar power for widespread implementation at the minute.
More Wi-Fi cans and buds – or at least better support for existing models
Since April AirPods Max can support Lossless via USB-C, but crucially you do still need to add a wire to get it. The only way to get Lossless audio on your AirPods Pro 3 is still to use a Vision Pro as a source – because although a September update initially was thought to add the super high-quality SPR AVS to iPhone 17, it seems the update referred to iPhone 17’s high-speed charging, rather than any Lossless or hi-res audio addition.
Why is this important? Because in March 2025, Xiaomi unveiled the first earbuds with Wi-Fi, delivering hi-res audio up to 4.2Mbps (image above). Great! So earbuds that’ll bypass Bluetooth’s compression issues and deliver hi-res audio in conjunction with Qualcomm’s XPAN technology? Yes, but there’s a catch: very limited phone compatibility – and definitely no iPhones. So, hi-res wireless earbuds are possible, but currently it’s a walled garden. Xiaomi said in March that a list of compatible devices would be on its website imminently, but in December (at the time of writing) the only supported phone listed is still the Xiaomi 15 Ultra.
Oh, I’m well aware that the ‘Wouldn’t it be great if products from different brands and ecosystems would just work with each other?’ rant is forming as I tap away on these keys. But I’m afraid that if I got into it, it’d be the end of 2026 before we knew it…
Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button!
And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.
The best open earbuds for all budgets
The best Bluetooth speakers for all budgets
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/bujkeuYhmZMxgjxetcJPBg-2560-80.jpg
Source link
becky.scarrott@futurenet.com (Becky Scarrott)
