There are expensive IEMs, and then there is the Brise Audio FUGAKU 10th Anniversary Edition, a ¥4,000,000 complete personal audio system that works out to roughly $25,000 at current exchange rates. Orders opened August 7 and remain open through December 31, 2026, with the first batch of 15 systems scheduled to ship in November and subsequent orders beginning to ship from March 2027. There is no overall quantity limit during the ordering period.
That price invites the obvious eye roll, especially when the Noble Audio Kronos already looks extravagant at $4,500 and the Astell&Kern NOVUS, built in collaboration with Empire Ears, arrived at $4,999. FUGAKU is not simply another flagship IEM with additional drivers, exotic metalwork and a cable thick enough to tow a Subaru, however. Brise has effectively built an active, multi-amplified five-way loudspeaker system for your ears, complete with its own analog active crossover and 12-channel portable power amplifier.
What Makes FUGAKU So Different?
The key is not how many drivers Brise managed to squeeze inside the titanium housings. FUGAKU moves the frequency division into its dedicated amplifier rather than relying on a passive crossover inside the IEM. A 10-channel active crossover splits the left and right signals into five frequency bands before 12 power amplifier channels directly drive the corresponding sections; the bass receives balanced amplification, while the remaining frequency ranges are driven unbalanced. Brise describes this full-analog multi-amplifier architecture as a first-of-its-kind approach.
The IEM portion uses an eight-driver, five-way tri-hybrid configuration consisting of an xMEMS MEMS speaker for the ultra-high frequencies, four Knowles balanced-armature drivers across the high and midrange bands, one Sonion BA for the mid-low frequencies and two 8mm LCP-diaphragm dynamic drivers for bass. The dedicated amplifier then provides separate amplification appropriate to those different bands rather than asking one conventional amplifier stage to handle the entire affair.
The 10th Anniversary Edition builds on the original FUGAKU introduced in 2024 rather than replacing the underlying architecture. Brise has added its NISHIKI 16 wire Ultimate cable and NISHIKI internal amplifier wiring, pure-titanium housings with new PVD finishes, HCNT material treatments throughout the signal path and a dedicated active-crossover tuning curve developed specifically around the new wiring. The entire system is hand-assembled at Brise Audio in Tamamura, Gunma, Japan.
Brise Audio FUGAKU 10th Anniversary Edition Specs:
- IEM: 8-driver, 5-way tri-hybrid
- Drivers:
- 1 x xMEMS,
- 5 x balanced armature,
- 2 x 8mm LCP dynamic
- IEM Frequency Response: 5Hz to 100kHz
- Amplifier: 10-channel active crossover plus 12-channel power amplifier
- Inputs: 4.4mm balanced, 3.5mm unbalanced
- Amplifier Frequency Response: 2Hz to 408kHz
- Battery Life: Approximately 7 hours
- Amplifier Weight: 545 grams
- Cable: NISHIKI 16wire Ultimate
- Construction: Pure-titanium IEM housings and amplifier chassis
- Production: Hand-assembled in Japan
- Warranty: 2 years
Suddenly, $5,000 IEMs Don’t Look So Crazy
eCoustics has covered plenty of ambitious IEMs. The Noble Kronos combines nine drivers with titanium housings, electrostatic tweeters and bone conduction for $4,500, while Astell&Kern’s NOVUS crams 13 drivers into each side using dynamic, balanced-armature, electrostatic and bone-conduction technologies for $4,999. Noble’s earlier limited-production Chronicle reached $6,130, which already felt like the outer edge of rational behavior for something small enough to accidentally leave in an airplane seat pocket.
FUGAKU belongs in another category because the ¥4 million price includes the amplification and crossover system required to make the concept work. You cannot meaningfully separate the IEMs from the electronics because Brise engineered the drivers, crossover, amplifier and dedicated 16-conductor cable as parts of the same system. That makes comparisons with Kronos or NOVUS imperfect, but it also explains why FUGAKU is genuinely unusual rather than another exercise in adding precious metals and two more drivers to justify a bigger number.
Is This as Crazy as Audio-Technica’s $108,000 NARUKAMI?
Financially, not even close. Audio-Technica’s NARUKAMI HPA-KG NARU system costs $108,000 and pairs a handcrafted dual-mono tube headphone amplifier using four Takatsuki 300B power tubes with specially matched ATH-AWKG NARU closed-back headphones. The amplifier can also function as a preamplifier, making it an altogether larger and considerably more expensive statement product.
From an engineering perspective, FUGAKU might actually be the stranger proposition. NARUKAMI is an extraordinarily luxurious execution of a familiar idea: build the best tube headphone amplifier you can and mate it with appropriate headphones. Brise decided to rethink how a multi-driver IEM is crossed over and amplified, then stuffed 12 amplifier channels, active filters and the necessary power supplies into a 545-gram portable amplifier with roughly seven hours of battery life. “Portable” is doing some cardio there, but the engineering is difficult to dismiss.
Who Is This Actually For?
Not someone making the jump from a $1,000 IEM, and probably not even the typical buyer considering a Kronos or NOVUS. FUGAKU is aimed at an extremely small group of collectors and personal-audio obsessives who already own flagship DAPs, multiple reference IEMs and enough boutique cabling to make airport security ask follow-up questions, but who want something more ambitious than another passive flagship connected to an expensive player.
Existing FUGAKU owners can move to the Anniversary Edition through a ¥2,400,000 upgrade program, although the word “upgrade” is somewhat misleading. Brise requires owners to return their complete original FUGAKU system and replaces it with an entirely new 10th Anniversary Edition; the original system is not returned.
The Bottom Line
The Brise Audio FUGAKU 10th Anniversary Edition is outrageously expensive, but dismissing it as a ¥4 million pair of IEMs misses what the company has actually built. This is a five-way active personal-audio system that terminates in a pair of IEMs, with dedicated amplification for every frequency band and the crossover, wiring, amplifier and drivers engineered as one signal chain.
Would we spend roughly $25,000 on one? That question belongs to somebody whose IEM drawer already resembles the down payment on a condominium. Compared with Audio-Technica’s $108,000 NARUKAMI, FUGAKU is not even the craziest personal-audio system we have covered, but it might be one of the most technically unusual — and for once, the lunatic price tag is attached to something more interesting than another fancy box and a thicker cable.
Where to buy: $25,789.80 at Brise Audio
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