Dali iO-8 headphones | ★★★★★ | £599 | dali-speakers.com
The most important tech purchase you’ll make, the one you should really, really agonise over, is your phone. You’ll use it every day, grasp for it during moments of reprieve and times of stress. It’s an extra limb, an extension of you. But the second most important tech purchase you’ll make is what blasts noise into your ears.
The thing is, for most people, there are only a handful of phone handsets you will realistically pick from – Apple or Android? Pixel or Galaxy? High-end or budget? With headphones, the choice is so vast as to be practically endless.
But the right set of headphones can change your life. Not in the same way as having a baby or quitting smoking, perhaps, but they will subtly improve everything from taking a flight to playing video games, from your morning commute to your lunchtime stroll. So which ones to pick?
Well, the Dali iO-8 over-ear cans are an excellent option. They are a new addition to the roster from a Danish company that’s already carved out a reputation for exceptional – if extremely pricy – audio equipment.
Dali iO-8 headphones
A pair of Dali’s flagship Kore floor-standing speakers will set you back a mind-boggling £85,000, while its iO-12 headphones come in at a prohibitively steep £849. The iO-8s are positioned as a more mainstream option, albeit one that will still cost you £599. But at this price they just about fall into the ‘treat yourself’ category – and I believe it’s time you treated yourself.
As soon as you open the box you can see the quality – these are a beautifully constructed pair of headphones. The brushed metal casing glints in the light and the fabric coating feels premium. They’re fairly hefty – far heavier than the ubiquitous Sennheiser Momentum 4, for instance – but the memory-foam padding means they don’t get uncomfortable, even during long flights (which you don’t have to worry about given the incredible 35-hour battery life).
Slip them on and the adaptive noise cancellation (ANC) immediately smooths the edges off the world. It’s not as stark as some rival headphones, rather designed to be unobtrusive when listening to music; these are for audiophiles, after all.
Dali iO-8 headphones
And the sound is brilliantly balanced: lush high notes and rich, buttery bass. I picked up subtleties in tracks wearing these that I’d completely missed wearing other headphones. On more complex tracks I had several moments when I noticed an unexpected instrument or a subtle variation in the bassline.
In terms of bells and whistles, they are fairly stripped back – there is no companion app and only two settings, Hi-Fi EQ or Bass (the former of which was better in virtually every situation).
There is no touch sensitive panel to pause, skip and rewind, either, rather a button on the right can (press once, press twice etcetera). But these aren’t about bells and whistles, they’re about quality of sound and build, and on those terms, the iO-8s are among the best on the market at this price point.
Dali iO-8 headphones | ★★★★★ | £599 | dali-speakers.com