Mel Martin of Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity once swapped a pair of Edifier R1280Ts in for the KEF LS50s in his bedroom while he reviewed them, speakers costing a fifteenth as much, and he came away calling them "a pleasant listen." Edifier's idea is to sell the amplifier and the speakers as one product. In the R1280T, the right speaker holds the amplifier for both channels and feeds the left speaker over ordinary speaker wire. Because the amplifier is built for those exact drivers, the owner has nothing to match and no separate amplifier to buy. Edifier's headphones follow the same plan, with the electronics built in. Passion for Sound found the Stax Spirit S5 sounds much the same wireless or wired, because its onboard chip processes the signal either way. Edifier suits listeners who want hifi sound on a desk, in a bedroom or on the move without assembling separate components.

The R1280T is the place to start, and Erin Bashford of Tom's Guide called it "some of the best computer speakers money can buy right now." Its two inputs work at the same time, so a computer and a turntable can share it, though a turntable without a built-in phono stage needs a separate preamp. Side dials adjust bass and treble, and Bashford turned the bass all the way up. The R1280DB adds Bluetooth. The step up is the S2000MKIII, which gives each tweeter and woofer its own amplifier, and Andrew Munro of KitGuru found it sounded "excellent at all volumes." For headphones, the Stax Spirit models are the hifi pick. They have no noise canceling, so they suit a quiet office better than a train, and Passion for Sound ranks the S5's EQ among the best it has seen. Commuters can look to the noise-canceling W830NB, which Dave Carr of SoundGuys says "packs plenty of value."

Edifier was started in Beijing in May 1996 by what it calls "a small group of enterprising music lovers." In 1999 it was one of the first companies in China to build 2.1 and 4.1 speaker systems in wooden enclosures, and today Edifier says it sells through distributors in more than 70 countries. The headphone line carries a famous name. Stax of Japan, founded in 1938, released its first electrostatic "earspeaker," the SR-1, in 1960, and The Absolute Sound's video reviewer has long kept the Stax SR009 on a personal list of top headphones. The Stax Spirit models use planar magnetic drivers instead. Edifier describes the driver as a flat, thin diaphragm with embedded wires, suspended in a magnetic field so the whole film moves together. Sean Talks Tech points out that the S3 also uses Audeze's magnet structure and Uniforce diaphragm design. Robbie Khan of Neowin titled his S5 review "Probably the best closed-back Planar Magnetic headphones."