Studio Reference... but WIRELESS? — KALI HP-1 Review
We test KALI’s $200 HP-1 “reference” wireless headset—complete with Studio, Consumer, and Bass-Heavy profiles—and talk about how a product concept that could in theory help with quick mix checks ultimately fails in practice.
We’ve been excited to see what KALI—well-respected in the studio monitor world—could do with a headphone. The HP-1 is their first swing: a closed-back wireless headset with ANC, pitched as a studio “reference” that lets you flip between three built-in voicings: Studio (Harman-style), Consumer, and Bass-Heavy. On paper, that’s a clever way to audition mixes across common listening curves without juggling plugins or separate headphones. In practice, it doesn't really nail any part of the user experience. Let's talk about why.
Build, comfort, and isolation
This is “headphone-looking headphone” territory—plasticky and plain—but surprisingly comfortable. The pads are the highlight: soft, deep, tall, oval, and the cups articulate well, so we consistently got a good seal and dependable bass. Isolation is notably better than many closed-backs in this price range. The headband could be cushier, but the whole thing is light enough that it’s not a dealbreaker.
What’s in the box & basic quirks
You get a hard shell case, 3.5 mm cable with 6.3 mm adapter, and USB-C charging cable. Some odd UX details: you can’t switch modes until the headphone is paired and actually playing audio over Bluetooth; via aux you can change modes immediately, but ANC is unavailable; and you can’t listen while charging. None of these are catastrophic, but they add friction.
The core concept: reference profiles on-device
We like the workflow. Compared with software like Slate VSX or dSONIQ Realphones—where you park a plugin on the master bus and click through models—double-tapping the ear cup to jump profiles in two seconds is genuinely very convenient. Rapid A/B/C’ing your mix against different curves can be useful for specific spot checks, like “is this snare too warm?” or “did I overshoot the sub-bass?” As a tool idea, this is smart... at least, in theory.
How it actually sounds (Studio mode, ANC off)
This is supposed to be the “reference” curve—Harman-like—but that’s not how we hear it. We measured on a B&K 5128 and, setting the measurement-rig debate aside, the result is a tonality that’s okay in overall bass–mid–treble balance yet riddled with localized issues: some extra energy in sibilant zones (S/F/T/sh), bass that doesn’t feel quite right, and a thinner-than-ideal midrange. The more we chase specific details, the more the presentation unravels. As a quick listen it passes; as a mixing reference it doesn’t translate confidently to known speakers or better headphones.
Consumer & Bass-Heavy modes
These emulate the kind of V-shape you find on popular consumer cans (think “store demo mode”). If your goal is to sanity-check how a hyped curve might exaggerate bass and sparkle, fine—but they sound rough and incoherent. We don’t recommend mixing to any of these profiles; at best, they’re perspective checks.
ANC: Where it really falls apart
Turn ANC on and the tonality gets completely ruined, basically unlistenable on all modes due to massive attenuation below 1 kHz. If you need noise reduction for a podcast on a plane, maybe—but not for any critical work. Honestly, we’d prefer this headphone had no ANC at all if the trade-off is this level of degradation.
Latency
Because it’s wireless, latency is too high for tracking guitars or vocals. If KALI had skipped ANC and wireless entirely, kept the on-device voicings, and focused on a simple wired path (aux or USB-C audio) with low latency, this could’ve slotted into a much more useful niche.
So… would we choose this over typical “pro” headphones?
As a concept, we like HP-1 more than living with a single fixed tuning (e.g., Beyerdynamic Pro series) if the voicing were executed well, latency were low, and ANC didn’t wreck the response.
In its current form, though, we wouldn’t. Our practical advice remains: pick a solid, honest headphone you already have (or buy one in your budget), and EQ it using high-quality measurements to compensate for your own HRTF and the headphone’s quirks. It’s cheaper, clearer, and more transparent than most “emulation” ecosystems—and gives you confidence in translation.
Bottom line
While we love the idea: on-device reference profiles for fast perspective checks. The execution is really messy here: the Studio curve doesn’t behave like a reliable reference, the consumer modes are too wonky to trust, ANC tanks the sound, and wireless latency limits studio utility. We’d skip this headphone for sure, but we would still be very interested in a simpler, wired HP-1 “Pro” with refined voicings and no ANC. Until then, EQ a good headphone and get back to making music.
Full Video Transcript Below:
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Okay, so today we're going to be talking about the KALI Audio HP1. This is a closed-back wireless headset that also has ANC available on it, and it is marketed towards the pro market. This is meant to be a reference headphone. But it's a bit of a different concept. It's not reference the way that you might think of as like the traditional, this is what stuff's supposed to sound like reference, which almost like never ends up being that. It's a unique one and it comes in at around $200. So we're gonna check it out in this video. Also, I've brought with me a listener to talk about what it's like actually making music on this device, because he has actually gone and done that. And yeah, just what the experience is like overall. So without further ado, let's get going with the video.
(music)
I just want to give folks a bit of context about the brand KALI, because maybe the folks watching this are not familiar with KALI, but you should be. KALI is a very well-known, highly respected speaker brand. It makes products for the pro market, but many people on the consumer side of things very much appreciate their products. So if you've researched what kind of speakers or studio monitors to get under $500 or under $1 ,000, it is likely that you've come across the KALI brand.
Yeah, kind of just echoing what you said, like KALI's pedigree in the world of studio monitors is substantial. They have a lot of respect because they make really good speakers at really, really affordable prices.
And that's why we've been so excited for this headphone. We wanted to see what they can do in the headphone space. And now we have it. And now we're going to tell you about it. So let's start off with the build, the design and the comfort. First of all, this is, as mentioned, this closed back wireless. It has a couple of features. We'll get into that stuff. But as far as like the actual like ergonomics and feel and look of the whole thing. this is like the complete opposite of what you imagine like high-end audiophile headphones to be this is the most headphone looking headphone yeah which has its own kind of charm but definitely this is nothing special when it comes to the way it looks and the way it feels but i do find it to be reasonably comfortable and one of the nice things about this one is that it does a pretty good job of isolating or like passive attenuation i just recently finished evaluating another wireless headphone that had a kind of like leather material for the pads that made it a bit springy and it didn't isolate all that well. This one is like the opposite of that. This does a much better job of actually like coupling to the side of my head and conforming around my ear, keeping all that passive noise out, which is nice.
How did you get on with the build, the design and the comfort?
Yeah, no, full agreement here. I actually found that the pads were a highlight. You know, they are sufficiently deep, which can't be said about a lot of closed back headphones. Sufficiently big. They're tall enough and they're oval shaped. So, you know, getting my ear in there was totally fine. but also the way they articulate and the way they kind of sit against the side of my head, they do couple quite consistently and I'm able to get a decent bass response at basically all seedings I've worn with this. So yeah, no real huge downsides, except for maybe the headband isn't quite as comfortable as it could be. I will say it's more padded than I think a lot of these are, but it's lightweight, so it's not really that bad.
It feels very plasticky. That's one drawback.
Yeah, it doesn't feel premium or expensive or anything like that. It feels and looks very much like, you know, a lot of other headphones people will have seen in their lifetime. Real quick, I just want to mention what comes in the box. You get a case, a little hard shell case, not much in it, but it's just the hard shell case— the headphone, a little aux cable, like a 3. 5 millimeter cable to connect to a headphone jack with a 6. 3 millimeter adapter if you want that, and a charging cable, which is just USB-C to USB type A.
So the KALI HP-1, it has ANC in it, but you really shouldn't think of this as an ANC headphone. This should be thought of strictly as a studio reference headphone, a wireless studio reference headphone. With several different things to be used as the reference, right? So when we think about we talk about reference, a lot of people think that it's a reference because that's what things are supposed to sound like. But that's not what's going on here— it's more reference to very specific things. And that's probably a better way to think about, you know, the concept of reference generally. One of those things is the Harman target. So in their default ANC off the studio mode, it's meant to be a Harman-like kind of sound signature. And then you have two other different profiles. One is called consumer, and the other one is called bass.
Bass-heavy.
Yeah, bass-heavy. And those other sound profiles are a lot more like what you'd get with conventional consumer-oriented headphones like the AirPods Max or like the Sony WH-1000XM5s and that kind of stuff that are maybe more V-shaped, more intense in the bass. and then the treble. And quite frankly, those ones sound truly horrible. But this is why it's kind of interesting. I think the intention here is meant to be, okay, when you're using this for your mixing and whatever it is you're doing, and you want to have that reference point to... again harmon then you'd be using it in the studio mode with ANC off and then if you're trying to see what that's going to sound like on more conventional headphones for what other people are going to be using listening to your mix on commonly then you would move over to the other either of the other two sound profiles Yeah, and I think when it comes to how that's implemented in terms of the sound profiles, I think it could have been done better.
But in terms of the way you actually use the device, I actually like it a lot. Um, because when you compare it to other headphone systems that let you emulate other headphones, like the Slate VSX or D-Sonic Real Phones, you have to go into a plug-in and like browse a bunch of settings and like find the headphone you're looking for and click that. It's got to be a thing that's living on your master bus at all times. Whereas with this, it's just a double click of a button on the ear cup and you're in the other mode within two seconds. And I really liked that when I was working with this, you know, doing some mixing. While I didn't find any of the profiles, including the studio one, really all that helpful for making judgments with confidence. I found that swapping between them all really quickly was interesting and useful for very specific things like checking if my snare drum is too warm or something like that. So, well, again, the curves aren't really all that great for probably a few reasons. I found that the implementation of it being on the device to be really cool. And I would like to see another product or even, you know, KALI's next effort at a headphone to have something similar like that.
Oh, and real quick before we jump into the next section, I do want to mention that there is a little bit of weirdness when it comes to using this headphone. So if you're not paired to a device, you're not going to be able to switch modes or anything like that. You can turn it on, turn it off, but that's it. Once you pair it with a device wirelessly, you can only change the modes once sound has actually been played through the device. So if you pair it up and you start trying to scroll through modes, you have to play something first. Now, if you plug it in via the aux cable, you can swap through modes immediately, but you don't have access to the ANC. But... that's actually probably a good thing, and we'll talk about that. Oh, and you can't listen to it while charging, so if you plug in the USB-C to charge, you're not going to be able to use the headphone.
So let's, we should talk about now what the sound actually is. And so, you know, we've obviously measured this on the B &K 5 and 2.8. And actually this is an instance where the measurement rigs really do matter. But let's just talk first about like the default sound profile that you are intended to use this most of the time, which is again, studio mode with ANC off. So what does this sound like? It doesn't actually sound to me the way that Harmon sounds when properly emulated. But again, that's a bit of an open question. We don't need to get into too much of that here. But basically, the intention is for it to be Harmon. Harmon-like in some capacity, but I find that this is it's a bit different. The treble also has a couple of extra stabbies there for me in the in the sibilant range— so the s's, f's, and t's. The sh sound. And I'm not a huge fan of the way that the bass sounds with this either. But this is an instance where it's like, individually, every range is maybe not great for me, but the overall relationship between bass, mids, and treble is okay. At best, I would say it sounds okay.
Then it's like, it's one of those things where it's like the more I listen for specific things, the more things sort of fall apart for me a little bit in that mode. I also think this is a bit of an issue to do with Harmon generally. When you're trying to essentially match a highly smooth target like that, you know, the reality is, is that these things are going to have various different resonances across different heads and ears. And I'm definitely getting some. So that's not great.
Yeah, I think it's the kind of signature where, at a glance, it's probably fine for a person—like, they'll hear you know prominent bass, clarity in the mids, and then you know maybe some wispiness in the treble. But I find a lot of listeners aren't really too bothered by that on a first listen. But I do think, if it's the kind of thing that's meant to be used as a tool, you're going to start noticing these issues pretty quickly once you start, say, comparing it to music you know really well or even your own music. Or when you're trying to use it as a tool and make decisions, and then those decisions have to translate to a reference speaker system, for example, you're probably not going to get very good translation with it, unfortunately. I'm not sure it actually does all that great of a job of emulating a likely speaker sound scenario or is something that is going to be consistent on a lot of the other headphones out there.
It's probably closest to like a weirdly implemented 2.1 system.
Yeah, it's kind of got that incoherence and that really thin mid-range. It's not what I would say is what should be aimed for as the reference, at least this version of this sound. Like I think Harmon is a fine target, but I don't really think this sounds like what I associate with the sound of the Harmon target necessarily.
And this is the best version of the sound that you get for this because the other modes are, again, as a tool to emulate what maybe most people are going to be listening to. If you think most headphones, consumer headphones are pretty bad, yeah, they did nail that, I guess. But it's not one that you would ever want to listen to, right? So I think it's like you have to think of it as that sort of like secondary reference tool, right? Where you're swapping between the modes. The one that sounds like it's supposed to be normal and then the one that's like... This is with all the consumer flair and store demo mode at work. There's tons of bass in the weirdest of places.
And I think that's what they're going for. I think they understand that. Certain mix engineers will have an AirPods Max on their mixing desk for when they need to reference it against something you know everyone has heard or something like that and they wanted to make that just attainable on this single headset but yeah, the actual sound is still pretty bad. And I feel like, I think we both have issues with the practice of doing that in the first place, because it kind of creates its own little circle of confusion between, you know, three, between three bad sounding presets. Are you really supposed to trust any of them?
Yeah, and speaking of the circle of confusion, for folks who are unfamiliar with what that is, maybe, do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Yeah, so the circle of confusion, put simply, is the kind of confusing peril we find ourselves in when we try to judge the timbre of a recording or a speaker or a microphone. So, say you're trying to judge the timbre of a recording, you're going to do that through a reference speaker. But what if the speaker's not reference-tuned? Well, then you have to judge that with a microphone. Well, what if the microphone's not reference-tuned? Well, you have to go back to judging that with either a reference speaker or a reference signal of some sort. That kind of circle of confusion is what plagues a lot of the evaluation of audio devices, whether they be headphones, speakers, or microphones. And the Harman target was put forth as an effort to solve the circle of confusion by normalizing the response of speakers and headphones to the same thing. we have our anchor point to judge the other stuff. Of course, what that requires is all of the headphones and speakers being tuned to Harman, which we know isn't the reality, but it's a noble goal, and with the HP-1, it is something that we think is a good idea to start with as your baseline profile, even if it wasn't achieved perfectly here.
I think the issue is that despite this being a reasonable goal, there's so many different challenges, right? Even with a product like this, where if you imagine the rig that it was measured on, even if they did achieve, you know, Harman 2018, that's not what it's going to end up sounding like to people. And it's because of the acoustic impedance conditions. And it's also not what it's going to measure, like on other more accurate measurement systems, like the B &K 5128. And we see that, right? We see the evidence of that where it's like, well, if everybody had the same acoustic conditions as the Gross 45 CA or whatever it was, yeah, that would make sense. But the reality is that we don't have those same acoustic conditions. We don't have the same ear. We don't have the same features behind the ear that change basically everything to do with the response as it's worn. And so for a device like this, it's like that goal is just one that is unattainable. Solving the circle of confusion is unattainable. And so you see, again, the problems showing up here. The more human-like you get with your measurement devices, the more revealing of the problems it is.
And this is one where I think maybe, if they had indexed a little bit more for the subjective sound in conjunction with maybe doing additional measurements as well to understand the ballpark, it may have ended up with a better result or figured out how to make use of the B &K 5-in-2 weight or more advanced measurement tools that we're on now with new standards. I think it's just it's one where it's like the idea is cool but the implementation just isn't quite there. Yeah, and the reality is like they are aware of all of this. Right, everything we're saying here is stuff that they presumably are aware of, and that's why this device exists. Because there's a recognition in this product that the circle of confusion hasn't been solved and won't be solved. So that's why there's these other consumer profiles going on. But that's, again, just to do with the ANC off. With the ANC on, everything goes to hell. It's just horrible. This is why, to me, and we'll put the graphs up on the screen here of what this sounds like in the various different modes with ANC on, but it's basically unlistenable with ANC on, or it's a very strange sound with ANC on.
you would use this maybe like if you're on an airplane and you're just, you know, not listening to, if you're listening to podcasts on a plane or somewhere where you're walking around outside and it's noisy, but you would never use this the same way you would use it with ANC off, you know, to actually, you know, as a tool. So the ANC itself is implemented poorly.
Yeah, it's not great.
The sound quality also goes to hell when you turn on the ANC mode. So I feel like, as much as this is an ANC headset or headphone technically, it would have been better if they had not put the ANC in yeah and just focused strictly on the pro application— the studio use case. The reference side of it. Because I think that is really cool.
For sure. And I think with the ability to use ANC, a lot of people are just going to default to using it, which is probably not the way you want to use this product in particular. So yeah, it's not always a situation of more options are better. Because if the options are implemented poorly enough, it'll ruin the sound like it does here. Building off of that, I feel like it didn't need to have ANC. And frankly, I'm not sure this needed to be wireless either. Like, I feel like they could have done something where they had just a few sound profiles stored on a chip, but it's still, like, a wired headphone or something like that. And that would have been cool, and it would have given this one more point of utility, which is that... In its current mode, it's unusable for tracking because the latency is so bad. So, if they had done something that was maybe a little bit simpler, like just EQ profiles on it, and then allowed you to just plug it in with a normal aux cable or USB-C cable or something like that, I would have kind of appreciated that because then I could have used it for like tracking guitar or vocals. Yeah, I just feel like a lot of the stuff here is unnecessary and it could have been a stronger product if it was maybe a little bit simpler.
So when it comes to headphones that are marketed for pro use, studio use, that kind of thing, the stuff that exists out there is typically very different from what you get with this. Things like the Beyerdynamic DT900 Pro X and the new DT900, DT990 Pro X, those ones. Would you say that this is a better idea than what those ones are trying to do? And would you recommend this one?
for mixing mastering that kind of stuff over those or would you still gravitate towards those ones despite some of the misconceptions to do with those so i think as a concept this does make a lot of sense to me and if it were implemented better both in terms of the stock sound profile as well as the other sound profiles and it didn't have the anc and latency problems that it currently has I would take something like this over those headphones because when it comes to mixing on headphones, even if it's, you know, pro marketed headphones, there are going to be idiosyncrasies once you place that headphone on your head that need to be either accounted for or calibrated. Away and to do that, you're going to need to do some sort of equalization. You know, this has that even if it's kind of a different idea than calibrating for the errors of the headphone, and instead introducing a bunch of errors that are typical to headphones. I find that this kind of idea might make a little bit more sense than just buying a single headphone and just living with that headphone's flaws. That said, I think the actual ideal here is just... using a headphone you already have or buying a decent headphone and equalizing it using measurements that are available online as long as they're high quality. And, you know, if you want high quality measurements of headphones, well, we have a ton of those on our forum at forum . headphones . com. and on our blog at the audio files at headphones . com and frankly i would rather recommend doing that than buying another headphone and then buying another piece of software like slate vsx or d sonic real phones where yes you can emulate a lot of other headphones or like a speaker condition or something like that but very few of these things are actually transparent about what's going on under the hood. And frankly, in my experience, I've gotten a lot better results just doing it myself. So while yes, I see merit in a product like this, I still think the best option for mixing on headphones is, you know, getting a decent headphone and EQing it yourself to kind of account for your own head and ears' idiosyncrasies.
So that basically does it for our take on the KALI HP1. I think the gist here is that it's a really cool idea. It's just that some of the execution leaves a lot to be desired. And I think it's safe to say that we'd probably skip this one, but maybe look forward to the next one. For sure. But if you'd like to learn more about headphone measurements, how headphones work, or maybe how to get into EQ, we have a whole bunch of articles for you up on headphones. com. And you can also chat with us in our forum or our Discord, also linked below. Until next time, we'll see you guys later. Bye for now.
Bye, guys.
