Two years on, I'm still waiting for this gaping hole in the wireless headphone market to be plugged

If you want some decent wireless headphones, you’ve never been so spoiled for choice. I won’t go through every single pair available to you right now, mainly because I don’t think there’s sufficient room on the page – suffice to say, from top to bottom, you’re (generally) very well catered for.

You’ve got cheap options at the bottom, such as the Sony WH-C520 (£34 / $50 / AU$79 or the slightly costlier Austrian Audio Hi-X25BT (£129 / $179 / AU$269), then you’ve got premium options in the shape of the Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 (£379 / AU$699 / $449) and Sony WH-1000XM6 (£379 / $450 / AU$699), or you could go the whole hog and blow a stack of cash on the luxurious Focal Bathys MG (£999 / $1299 / AU$2300). Something for everyone, then.

Well, sort of. The current wireless headphone market is a bit like a convertible with the roof down, or Darth Maul's two-handed lightsabre – a lot going on at the top and the bottom, but not much happening in the middle. If your budget is set at around £100-£250 / $125-$300, you’re not exactly spoiled for choice.

Look at how Sony structures its pricing. You can start at around £35 / $40 / AU$70 with the WH-CH520 and then £79 / $100 / AU$200 for the noise cancelling CH720N, before you jump all the way up to around £400 / $450 / AU$699 for the Sony WH-1000XM6, leaving a big old gap in the middle. Some brands, like Bose, don't even bother making cheap options, while many affordability-focused companies are the inverse: lots of cheap stuff, but very little in the premium market.

I’ve complained about this absence before, mainly with regard to the trials of finding a decent Christmas gift for someone looking to get themselves a pair of wireless cans at Christmas.

Spending £50 seems a bit miserly for a present, whereas £379 will have me living in penury until the next festive season rolls around, by which time I’ll have scraped enough cash together to dish out a handful of paperclips and a half-used bottle of shampoo.

The options that do occupy this strange market void remain, but as I’ve bemoaned before, they're disappointingly mediocre. We've never been fans of the rather bland Sennheiser Accentum Wireless (£160 / $180 / AU$300) or the Cambridge Audio Melomania P100 (£229 / $279 / AU$479), and what's worse, there aren’t many alternatives available around to take over the reins.

By and large, most releases tend to be super-affordable or aimed at the premium end of the scale. This year has seen the launch of the Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S3 and Px8 S2 (£629 / $799 / AU$1299), the Focal Bathys Mg, the Loewe Leo (£1299 / €1299), the Sony WH-1000XM6 and the second-gen Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones (review coming soon).

If you want wireless earbuds, it’s been a similar story in 2025 – just look at the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Earbuds (2nd Gen) (£299 / $299 / AU$450) or the luxurious Bang & Olufsen Beo Grace (£1000 / €1200 / $1500). Okay, we had the launch of the AirPods 4 with ANC (£179 / $179 / AU$299) in 2024 and latterly the AirPods Pro 3 (£219 / $249 / AU$329) in 2025, but if you’re not an Apple fan, it’s rather slim pickings on the in-ear front.

Why does such a gap exist? My hypothesis remains the same, in that it’s the middle market that tends to get hollowed out whenever times are comparatively tough.

Manufacturers tend to produce super-cheap fare to monopolise the buyers who want to keep costs down, while the high rollers of this world can still be targeted with shinier products, safe in the knowledge that those big-spenders aren’t tethered by financial constraints.

It’s still frustrating to be writing about the same problem almost two years after I first noticed it, but perhaps that’s more of a reflection on the state of the market, and the wider economy, than any wilful negligence on the part of manufacturers.

Let’s be honest, economic factors are the main driving force for any business decision, and it isn’t in most companies’ best interests to be plugging gaps that won’t yield the highest returns.

Still, it would be nice to have a golden middle point whereby buyers can spend a reasonable amount of cash and get the performance to match their budget, especially as not every consumer wants to be forced to pick between a 30-day matured sirloin or a tin of cheap mince.

The solution, it seems, is to eschew newer products in favour of the timeless oldies. Okay, you won't get the same array of cutting-edge features, but the likes of the Sony WH-1000XM4 (£189 /$200) or the Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S2e (£210 / $200) can be picked up for around half of what they originally cost at launch, and you're still getting excellent quality with our stamp of approval. Quite of few of those products are set to be even further discounted in the early Black Friday sales, by the way...

Until brands decide to target the mid-range market, the classic adage might well be true: old really is gold.

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