It's pretty hard to make budget headphones look and feel like this, but Xiaomi's Redmi has done it. The Headphones Neo come in at less than R1,500 but, at a glance, could have cost you quite a bit more. There are sacrifices, sure, but they're taken from unusual places. The audio is left mostly alone, though you'll find it possible to overpower these at maximum volume. Still, it's one hell of an experience.
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Sound
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Design
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Battery
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Features
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Value
Stuff has received a few pairs of budget Chinese headphones lately, some of which perform better than others. The Redmi Headphones Neo over-ears are an example of doing budget cans almost ridiculously well. They certainly look and feel more premium than you’d expect from a R1,300 pair of overs.
There are concessions to the price, but they’re in places we don’t usually see sacrifices — the smart features. Build, audio, comfort, and noise-cancelling are left more or less alone, with some quality-of-life functions discarded instead. It’s… actually a pretty fair swap, considering what you’re paying for these.
What? Budget?
Xiaomi/Redmi has done impressive work in making its Headphones Neo look far more expensive than they actually are. The faux leather earcups are decently padded, and there’s more than enough space for your ears. The headband, while nominally plastic, feels sturdy. The connecting posts to the folding cups also do a decent job of mimicking metal. The headband is reinforced by a section of steel running inside the padded top. The cups themselves are also dense, high-quality plastic that feels more premium than expected.
Overall, it’d be easy to mistake the Redmi Headphones Neo for something released by Sony or one of its many copycats in 2025. The only thing really missing here is the colossal dent in your bank’s balance.
There are some physical controls on the right-hand cup. The front button does a ton of heavy lifting, enabling power on/off, connection functions, and also acting as a factory reset if you’re heavy-handed. At the rear of the cup, there’s a multifunction button and a separate volume rocker. The multifunction key handles calls, music play/pause, and track selection. Hold it down, and you switch between ANC and transparency mode. Between these two lies the USB-C charge port.
A choice was made
It’s in this department that the Redmi Headphones Neo trimmed back costs. Initial setup for various devices — we used phones, a PlayStation Vita, and a MacBook Air — is simple enough. Well, simple once you realise that the Neo overs didn’t bother to hire a voice actor to tell you what the thing is doing. There’s no ‘pairing’ vocal notification, just a chime that could mean… anything. You’ll muddle through. We did. But hold the pairing key too long and it’ll just reset the whole thing.
The other area the Redmi Headphones Neo just didn’t bother with was wear detection. Music will continue when you pop these off your skull. The same thing applies when they’re inactive. Leave ’em powered on, and it’ll chow through its battery while you’re not looking. There’s plenty, if you’re using them with ANC off, but it’s still a confusing experience. After all, these look like headphones that don’t do that sort of thing.
Redmi reckons you’ll snag 72 hours of listening from the 600mAh battery with ANC off. We certainly outlasted a week at work with ANC on, but we also learned first-hand that they don’t stop draining if you forget to manually turn them off. Recharging is decently speedy, plus you can just keep using them if your USB-C cable is long enough. The Bluetooth 5.4 connection isn’t fussy. Just as well, because there’s no wired connection option at all.
Sound’s important
The missing bits aren’t really why we’re here, though. The price was the open door. The audio is the deciding factor. You might as well consider that decided. These cans aren’t the pinnacle of audio, but they’re definitely outperforming the R1.3k you’re spending on a pair.
There are some things to consider, of course. The Redmi Headphones Neo will sound thinner if you’ve got transparency enabled. The integrated microphones are not outperforming their price tag. Keep ANC on, and listen at moderate to high volumes, and you’ll nab audio performance that comes awfully close to matching the look and feel Redmi presents here.
Feed ’em some good Doom (Ahab’s Old Thunder will do), and you’ll get a good sense of how Redmi’s cans handle crunching distortion, spatial separation of stereo, and the overall soundstage. Stick on Iced Earth’s Cthulhu, and you’ll see just how they handle resonance in the slow build-up and how cleanly each escalating element holds together as the track takes off. Swing over to Nuclear Power Trio’s Critical Bass Theory, and you’ll be in awe of how well the Redmi Headphones Neo hold it all together. You’ll also have a strange urge to play Outrun 2006: Coast to Coast, but that’s a different element at work.
It doesn’t go the headphones’ way all the time, however. Extreme low and very high volumes aren’t as contained as they should be, whiffing at the bottom end and overpowering itself at the upper end of the scale. But at regular human listening volumes, these’ll do more than you paid for.
Redmi Headphones Neo verdict
There are budget headphones and then there are budget headphones. Redmi’s Headphones Neo have made a novel series of sacrifices to keep itself more affordable than it has any right to be. It looks and feels good. The buttons work the way they should. There’s a slight learning curve for anyone used to hand-holding, and they’re not going to turn themselves off. But the Headphones Neo will pump delightful audio (even if you listen to regular-people music) into your skull for not very much money at all. Given how the world’s going, that’s something we all could use.
