Philips Fidelio T1

Available in either black or white, the T1 sits at the top of the Fidelio range, but it provides attractive sound quality, along with noise cancellation and other useful features. The design may not suit everyone as the earbuds are rather large, with an extended oval shape that projects forward quite noticeably from the ear.

To be fair, Philips is clearly aware of this and goes out of its way to help you get a good fit, including six different sizes of silicon and three sizes of Comply memory foam eartips. It also has an IPX4 rating for water resistance for outdoor use.

The earbuds house 10mm drivers with a hybrid design that combines a balanced armature for higher frequencies and vocals and dynamic drivers for the low end. This gives the T1 an impressive frequency response of 7Hz-40KHz, which is unusual for compact in-ears. It also supports AAC for Apple devices and LDAC for Sony fans and some of the latest Android devices. As you'd expect at this price, there's active noise cancelling and the app provides an 'awareness' mode that lets you hear some background noise when you need to, as well as a separate slider that allows you to manually adjust the level of noise cancellation. Unfortunately, the button controls on the earbuds prove rather unhelpful, sometimes not responding unless I press hard enough to almost dislodge the earbuds. Weirdly, they don't provide a physical volume control.