Imagine a typical rural vista. Rolling hills, the occasional shrub or hedgerow breaking up the undulating array of ploughed and furrowed fields, a healthy handful of docile white sheep dotting the landscape as the sun shimmers amidst a cloudless blue sky. Now imagine that you’re viewing that appealing bucolic idyll through a large window, a window that’s so spotlessly clean and transparent that you barely notice it’s there at all. All you can see are the hills, the fields, the sheep and the sky.
In our experience, Austrian Audio headphones tend to get closer to this ideal than most – precise, informative and resplendently clear in their presentation. Austrian Audio tends to produce cans that refuse to get in the way of your music, instead dropping back and simply allowing it to be as it is. No fuss, not much flavouring, just the musical facts.
While the relatively young brand has produced headphones that fly north of the £2000 / $2500 / AU$3500 mark – see the Austrian Audio The Composer – we’re very much in the sensibly priced realm with these Hi-X20 over-ears. They may not have a monster price tag, but from what we’ve heard, that sparkling Austrian Audio DNA flows just as strongly through their bespoke drive units.
Price
The Austrian Audio Hi-X20 will currently set you back £120 / $150 / AU$250, making them a reasonably affordable set of wired over-ear headphones. If you’re looking for cans from the same stable at a lower price, the hugely talented Austrian Audio Hi-X15 Award-winners could be yours for roughly £89 / $119.
The Hi-X20 do have a major price-comparable hurdle to overcome, and it comes in the form of the Award-winning Røde NTH-100 which, at the time of writing, will cost you roughly £109 / $150 / AU$189.
Build & comfort
With a few exceptions, if you’ve seen one pair of Austrian Audio headphones, you’ve seen them all. The Hi-X20 are very much of the same breed as their wired stablemates, sporting a simple, functional yet robust design that doesn’t offend the eyes, hands or heart.
What’s pleasing about the Hi-X20 is just how undemanding they are to wear and live with. Like the five-star Hi-X15, they’re lightweight and good-looking in a modest kind of way, with a rugged, plucky design which hints at a product that will go the distance.
Type Wired over-ears, closed-back
Cable length 3m
In-line remote and mic? No
Dimensions (hwd) 20.5 x 17 x 8 cm
Weight 255g
The headband’s adjustable slider is easy to expand and contract without us needing to yank at the mechanism to get it to cooperate, whereas the cans’ effortless folding action has enough resistance to feel sufficiently well-made. Not all wired headphones at this level fold away, with even fewer collapsing down with such reliable eagerness as our test pair – for wired listeners who like to wander, it’s a big green tick in the Hi-X20’s box.
We don’t have much trouble with them while they’re clamped onto our head, either. The cans’ soft foam earpads are resistant to overheating as minutes of listening turn to hours, and the nicely judged clamping force grants enough pressure and weight around your dome to keep everything locked securely in place.
The Austrian Audio over-ears are equipped with a long 3m cable that ends in a 3.5mm connector, while a 6.3mm adapter is also included. This means you can plug the cans into portable music players, laptops and DACs as well as serious hi-fi kit at home. For when you’re on the move, you also get a lightweight carry pouch in which to store your headphones if you’re worried about scuffs and scratches.
Thankfully, such fear of cosmetic damage may be little more than a phantom menace. After a good few weeks of daily usage, including frequent journeys stuffed into a cramped work backpack, we’ve yet to notice a blemish upon the surface of our still-pristine sample pair.
Admittedly, we don’t dig our nails into the headphones’ exterior with the force of a lion sinking its claws into a gazelle’s rear end, but scratching a hand across the earcups, headband and connecting hinges has us struggling to leave any lasting mark or indentation.
With the exception of the high-end The Composer cans, the Hi-X20 use the same set of 44mm dynamic Hi-X drivers as found in the rest of the brand’s lineup of ‘professional’ headphones. Those drivers incorporate a copper-clad, lightweight aluminium voice coil and an advanced ring magnet system in pursuit of “high-precision sound” that melds “perfectly balanced” mid and high frequencies with a powerful, controlled bass response.
Sound
If you’re something of a wired headphones aficionado, it will probably take you the lesser part of five minutes of listening time to realise that what you have here is a typical pair of Austrian Audio cans.
In fact, you could have blindfolded us and clamped a set over our heads and, within mere moments, we’d probably have nailed our guess at the mystery pair’s provenance.
Detail. Clarity. Organisation. These are the words that spring to mind as we soon realise that the Hi-X20 are not the sonic outliers within the Austrian Audio family. Soundgarden’s Burden In My Hand pops up on Tidal as we move from track to track across sources ranging from a work Microsoft Surface laptop to our Astell & Kern A&norma SR35 portable player, and it’s here that we’re arrested by just how much information the lightweight cans unearth.
It’s not just that they pick out and fill in the core details with which we’re familiar; these are headphones that uncover subtleties that, if you’ve spent your life listening via low-rate wireless earbuds, you might not have even realised were there in the first place.
Through the Hi-X20, Burden In My Hand becomes a richly layered, strikingly poised rendition. To borrow from dear old Will Shakespeare, the music’s now a stage, and all the instruments have their entrance and exits: first Chris Cornell’s searing vocals, then richly reverberating guitar strings, then a few crisp hi-hats and bass plucks that, rather than meshing into the bottom of an amorphous sonic block, are distinct and separate without seeming entirely sonically detached.
Space exists around each instrument, allowing us to track the rise and fall of a note’s given lifespan thanks to the penetrating insight the crystal clear over-ears provide.
Pull out a heavy metal track and the Austrian Audios have the grip and weight to bring out the power of the guitars or the punch of the drums.
A natural sense of rhythm doesn’t fall by the wayside, either – the Hi-X20 reveal the sunny, funky flow of George Benson’s Give Me The Night before turning their hand to the thudding march beneath Alice In Chains’ Man In The Box.
Whatever you throw at them, these are exceptionally precise and revealing headphones for the money, putting you in the picture across tracks ranging from metronomic electronic house to contemporary art pop.
Note, however, that revealing really does mean revealing. The Hi-X20 are as candid as a tough-but-kindly therapist, and if there’s a flaw to be exposed, then expose it they shall. That forensic attention to detail works wonders for bringing out the bite of a guitar pull or the shimmer of a reverberating hi-hat, but if you’re listening to a poor-quality recording or using a mediocre source, the Hi-X20 won’t shy away from revealing it, warts and all.
They’re also slightly light in the bass, and while we’d call this lower-end leanness a mere character trait rather than anything approaching a fatal flaw, it may not satisfy the most committed of bassheads.
Their Røde NTH-100 rivals sit on the other side of that particular fence, going slightly the other way in providing a fuller, more ample lower-end signature and a generally more easygoing, undemanding appeal. The Røde are also more forgiving of poor-quality sources and recordings, making them an attractive alternative if you’re not planning on feeding your cans anything but the finest sonic cuts.
Verdict
For the price paid, the Austrian Audio Hi-X20 are deeply impressive. While the Røde NTH-100 are more forgiving and perhaps better suited to more general use, purists who crave an honest, detail-rich pair of wired headphones will adore the pristine, slightly analytical nature of the Hi-X20.
If you want to hear your music’s minutiae, from the good to the bad and everything in between, they’re exceptional performers for the money.
First reviewed: April 2025
SCORES
- Sound 5
- Comfort 5
- Build 5
MORE:
Read our review of the Røde NTH-100
Also consider the Grado SR80x
Read our Austrian Audio Hi-X15 review
Best over-ear headphones: wired and wireless pairs tested by our in-house experts
