AlphaTheta announced the HDJ-F9, a pair of professional on-ear wireless DJ headphones built around SonicLink, the company’s own low-latency wireless technology. They will be available in late October for $349.
Latency is the main thing keeping DJs from going wireless. Any delay between what plays in the headphones and what comes out of the speakers turns beatmatching into guesswork. SonicLink keeps that delay as low as 9 ms. According to AlphaTheta, that is low enough to monitor a mix and even scratch without a cable.
With Touch Pairing, DJs connect by touching the headphones to compatible gear, starting with AlphaTheta’s DJM-V5 mixer, which needs a firmware update first. To connect to other devices, you need the separately sold SonicLink Transmitter HP-TX01.
The headphones use newly developed 40 mm drivers with a bass-reflex chamber in each housing, and they weigh 285 grams. With the status LED on, the battery lasts about seven hours over SonicLink and 13 hours over Bluetooth. With the LED off, those figures rise to nine and 25 hours. A coiled cable comes in the box for wired monitoring.
