The Best Wireless TV Headphones of 2025

Top pick

These over-ear headphones are comfortable, with no audio lag and solid sound. The transmitter doubles as a charging base, but the system supports only a single pair of headphones.

The Insignia NS-HAWHP2 is our favorite pair of wireless TV headphones because it sounds good, is easy to set up (with both analog- and digital-input options), and is comfortable to wear for long listening sessions. And unlike the Bluetooth-based systems we’ve evaluated, in our tests this RF system did not create distracting lag between the audio and video. The wireless transmitter conveniently doubles as a docking and charging station.

These headphones offer better sound quality than the other models we tested, though it’s still not spectacular. The Insignia headphones are somewhat pricey for just the single pair and a base station, but they packed some of the best sound we’ve heard in our tests (which, admittedly, isn’t saying a whole lot, since none of them sounded as good as our favorite Bluetooth pair).

Whereas many competitors produced an audible hiss and had a hard, reverb-like edge with dialogue, these sounded clean and consistent, and our frequency-response measurements showed that they had better balance between the lows, mids, and highs. You’ll actually hear some bass with these headphones, though you won’t get the deep booms.

Also, the sound is a bit compressed, so everything is just a little flatter than what you’d hear from a good set of speakers, due to the mild bass and softer consonants. It’s not so intense that it would bother most listeners during your average TV-viewing time.

They’ll get the job done for watching a late-night movie while your partner sleeps, or for playing video games while your partner or roommate works. But with that slightly compressed sound, the Insignia system isn’t what we’d recommend for a high-quality movie-watching experience.

These headphones have low latency and are comfortable, making them ideal for binge-watching. We measured a low latency of just 17 milliseconds with this RF-based system, which is better than any of the Bluetooth-based systems we’ve tried. We didn’t notice any significant lip-sync issues between the audio and video.

With soft earcups and padding, the lightweight NS-HAWHP2 headphones are more comfortable to wear compared with most other wireless TV headphones we’ve tested, so they won’t fatigue your ears over time. The adjustable headband, built of light but sturdy plastic, felt well balanced without squeezing our large-headed testers.

The base station makes charging easy, and the battery life was longer than expected. The base station itself, also made of light plastic, looks a bit like the evil hat in Meet the Robinsons, with a single glowing button on top. The headphones are easy to keep charged since you can just pop them on the dock, and the glowing button turns green when the battery is fully juiced.

Insignia says the battery lasts up to 10 hours, but we got closer to 12 before the headphones started to beep a warning of the dying battery.

Insignia’s system is easy to set up and compatible with most TVs, but doesn’t include an optical digital cable. We liked the Insignia system’s ease of setup, and that it comes with both a power cord and a power brick (which a surprising number of wireless TV headphone systems we’ve tested actually lack).

The transmitter has both optical digital-audio and RCA stereo-analog inputs, making it compatible with most TVs (and many source devices too). The package includes RCA and RCA–to–mini-jack cables, but not an optical digital cable. (If you’re not sure which cord you’ll need, check out How to connect the transmitter to your TV.) The provided cables were long enough that it was easy to place the transmitter around a TV, which was an issue with some other models. Once you plug it in, you just need to hold down the input button on either the base station or the headphones for 10 seconds to connect to the current input and start watching.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The NS-HAWHP2 comes with only a single pair of headphones, and you can’t add more. For some people, this could defeat the purpose of buying a wireless TV headphone system, since multiple people won’t be able to listen simultaneously. You could buy two sets and split the audio signal coming out of your TV, but given the price of the NS-HAWHP2, that would be an expensive solution.

If you need support for multiple users, we recommend the Avantree Quartet system described below.

One important step during setup isn’t obvious. Though the system is simple to set up, the one step that’s easy to miss is the need to hold down the input button for 10 seconds when you initially put it together, as there are input buttons located on both the base station and the headphones themselves.

You’ll also need to hold it down if you switch inputs during your TV watching (say, if you find yourself switching from live TV to a streaming device or a gaming system). But beyond making sure the input is set, these headphones are essentially ready to go after being plugged in and charged.