- Fender has presented two Bluetooth speakers at CES 2026
- They are joined by supra-aural wireless headphones with a 100-hour battery.
- They are not manufactured by Fender, but by another company that licenses the name.
You probably know Fender as a legendary guitar brand, ubiquitous for its Stratocasters, Telecasters, and Jazzmasters, as well as its amplifiers and pedals. But as part of CES 2026, we’re now seeing consumer products bearing the name, designed not just for music performers but music listeners as well.
Headlining this line are two Bluetooth speakers, under the title ELIE, an acronym for Extremely Loud, Infinitely Expressive. There’s the $299 ELIE E6, with a power output of 60W and a battery life of 15 hours, and the $399 E12 which doubles the power and adds three hours of power. Exact release dates and international availability are yet to be confirmed.
The exact audio specifications of these speakers are yet to be confirmed, but they have built-in subwoofers for powerful and detailed bass. They offer Bluetooth connectivity, allowing you to pair two speakers in stereo mode or up to a hundred in multi mode with cacophonous sound, and there’s also a 3.5mm AUX jack connection. A handle ensures they are extra portable.
A cool feature is that ELIE products have an XLR connector, so in theory you can plug in your guitar and use them as portable amplifiers. Obviously, they won’t completely match. current portable amps, but they could come close, and it’s something I’d like to check out with my own Stratocaster.
However, with ELIE the creators may have overlooked a trick that rival music companies Orange and Marshall knew when moving from amplifier to speaker. The Orange Box and Marshall Middleton II models retain that amp DNA, looking like tiny versions of the stacks that would grace the sides of a stage at a concert. Fender ELIE models are… boxes, basically.
Mudguards, but to tie around your face.
The other release is the first wireless headphones to carry the Fender name, called the Fender Mix (styled ‘MIX’ in the marketing), which will go on sale at some point in the future for $299. These use 40mm drivers and have many of the features you expect from the best headphones: noise cancellation, spatial audio, 3.5mm connectivity, and the ability to listen over USB-C and 3.5mm.
The official battery life is 52 hours with ANC on or 100 hours off, and apparently you can continue using them once they’re at 0% via a wired connection. The traffic jam, it seems, never ends.
At a glance, the Mix looks like your standard Bluetooth headphones; I don’t want to harp on the Marshall thing, but their own headphones maintain that guitar amp aesthetic, and some might call the Fender options slightly Boring in comparison. We can’t judge a speaker by its cover, however, so we’ll have to test these inaugural models to see if they can live up to the brand’s iconic status.
These three products mark the debut of the consumer-oriented Fender Audio brand, which is technically owned by Fender but operated by a Singapore company called Riffsound. They were actually announced a month before CES, but the brand made it clear in its initial reveal that CES would mark its “true” unveiling, and why not? CES is a huge Las Vegas showcase worthy of a rock ‘n’ roll legend like Fender.
Because another company is using the name, it’s unclear how closely these and future products will adhere to the Fender style, and how much of the brand’s musician- and guitar-specific amplification technology will be used in these consumer products. Once again, the proof will be in the pudding, ie. the tests. But I don’t expect a licensing deal like this to be done for just three devices; We’ll probably see more in the future.
TechRadar will cover this year’s edition extensively CESand will bring you all the important announcements as they happen. Go to our CES 2026 News page for the latest stories and our hands-on verdicts on everything from wireless TVs and foldable screens to new phones, laptops, smart home devices and the latest in artificial intelligence.
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