DALI iO-6

Around a decade back, the headphone market exploded. Driven by the youth-orientation of then-Monster’s Dr Dreslash-Beats headphones and boosted by Bluetooth freedom, the size of the market mushroomed. Dozens of new brands were introduced to grab their share, and every hi-fi brand on the planet rushed to create its own headphones. In this category you might imagine that established loudspeaker brands would have an advantage—headphones are, after all, merely loudspeakers writ small and stuck on your noggin. Yet DALI never did so.

Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries, which had been founded in 1983 by Peter Lyngdorf (originally as Danish American Loudspeaker Industries), watched from the sidelines, seemingly unwilling to jump on the bandwagon.

So when DALI’s first-ever headphones had their premier public outing at IFA 2019 in Berlin, DALI’s booth in Hall 1.2 was positively loaded with demonstration pairs of these over-ear wireless headphones in their two finishes of an attractive ‘Caramel/White’ combo or more purposeful ‘Iron Black’.

These were, in fact, DALI’s first-ever and second-ever headphones, since they were showing two models: the iO-6 reviewed here, which has noise-cancelling including a transparent ‘pass-through’ mode, and the iO-4, which seems to be physically identical but without the noise-cancelling and its controls.

THE EQUIPMENT

More to the point, DALI has not simply grabbed some affordable off-the-shelf parts and delivered a ‘me too’ headphone. While relatively compact, the iO headphones manage to incorporate large 50mm cone diaphragms which show DALI’s speaker heritage in using not the common Mylar or other synthetic material, but honest-to-goodness paper/fibre cones.