Fender, the legendary guitar amplifier manufacturer since 1946, has ventured into consumer audio through a licensing arrangement. Fender Audio, overseen by Riffsound for design and production, launched its inaugural products—the Mix headphones and Elie speakers—after revealing them in January and showcasing them at CES 2026.
The Mix headphones aim to deliver premium noise-canceling audio at an accessible price point, competing against established brands like Sony, Bose, and Sennheiser. The package includes extended battery performance, thoughtful design features, lossless Bluetooth connectivity via a dongle, and modular, replaceable components.
Design Strengths
The headphones showcase intelligent engineering decisions. Users can swap ear pads, ear cups, and headband components for customization. The lossless Bluetooth dongle stores conveniently within the left ear cup, eliminating the need to carry it separately. A removable battery allows for future replacements. Control design emphasizes physical buttons over touch controls, featuring a five-way joystick for intuitive operation—press for play/pause, push upward or downward to adjust volume, move left or right to skip tracks. A dedicated button cycles through noise-canceling modes.
Sound Quality
In lossless mode, the Mix delivers its finest performance with restrained bass and improved balance. When listening to acoustic material, the soundstage expands convincingly, creating an enveloping experience rather than left-right channel projection. This mode reveals subtle details that pull listeners back repeatedly.
Standard Bluetooth operation presents challenges. The stock tuning emphasizes bass excessively, particularly problematic for genres like bluegrass and jazz where the low end muddies delicate instrumental interplay. For aggressive music, this bass weight contributes positively, driving the impact of distorted guitars and breakdowns.
Noise Cancellation
ANC performance remains respectable but falls short of premium competitors. It effectively manages mild-to-moderate ambient noise suitable for offices and cafés but struggles with loud voices and sudden sound spikes. Transparency mode operates naturally, picking up sufficient vocal input for comfortable calls.
Battery Performance
With ANC enabled at 70% volume, the battery retained 52% charge after 30 hours of mixed ANC and transparency usage. Fender claims 52-hour battery life with ANC on and 100 hours with ANC off (at 50% volume). These figures represent meaningful advantages over competitors.
Missing Features
The headphones lack modern conveniences prevalent in premium offerings. No automatic EQ adjustments or adaptive ANC exist. Wear detection for automatic pause is absent. Head gesture controls are unavailable. Voice detection for auto-pause during speaking is missing. Call quality suffers from inadequate microphone placement—just two microphones proved insufficient. While adequate for basic communication, voice transmission sounds mediocre compared to speaking directly into a phone.
Currently, modular customization remains theoretical—additional parts haven’t launched for purchase, and only black and light gray color options are available.
Final Assessment
The Mix occupies an uncomfortable middle ground. While design choices impress and lossless capability distinguishes it, the bass-heavy default tuning and absent modern features prevent wholehearted endorsement. At $299, this model feels overpriced—a $250 price point would substantially strengthen the value proposition. The Mix functions capably as a daily audio accessory, but falls short of being an essential purchase.
