Kiwi Ears, a brand known primarily for its IEMs, decided CES 2025 is the perfect time to show off its upcoming series of closed-back headphones. We already saw a couple of more budget-friendly DJ/monitoring-style headphones from the brand late last year, and Kiwi Ears followed up on this with two different ANC wireless headphones to appeal to the more mainstream crowd. The Aventus uses a 50 mm dynamic driver, and the Ardor ups the ante by using two dynamic drivers—a 10 mm DD on top of the 50 mm DD in the Aventus—for a novel driver configuration in headphones. Both of course have RGB lighting in the ear cups to further appeal to the mainstream market, and will be launching later this month. The dual driver headphones theme continued with the Kiwi Ears Atheia, which foregoes the plastic RGB ear cups in favor of machined wood and now goes for a 50 mm DD + 14 mm planar magnetic driver hybrid configuration. This seems similar to the Noble Audio Apollo from last year, which uses a similar driver setup and adds wireless ANC connectivity on top. The Atheia is also expected to launch later this month, so Kiwi Ears is set to have a busy few days ahead.

Also at the show was yet another wooden ear cup set, although this currently uses the same body as the Atheia. This unnamed model—feel free to suggest a name for Kiwi Ears in the comments—is also closed-back in nature, and is using a single large planar magnetic driver. This is arguably the toughest type of headphones to get sounding correct, at least in the ~$400 price range that Kiwi Ears is aiming for. There's still work to be done with the tuning, and I provided feedback which is hopefully going to help the brand out. I used all of these headphones with my phone thanks to an upcoming Kiwi Ears dongle-style DAC/amp, the Allegro Pro, which connects directly to the Type-C port on your phone. It uses a customized DAC and a dedicated amplifier section, offers both 3.5 mm SE and 4.4 mm BAL outputs, and even has three onboard EQ profiles you can toggle through a button on the underside. The Kiwi Ears Allegro Mini should be launching within the next month or two, helping wrap up a great showing for Kiwi Ears at CES.