Preface: I was sent a review sample of the Meze Advar as part of the global Tour (thank you @Andykong). Prior to reviewing, I spent two days burning in the drivers, though didn’t make any notes on burn-in changes. I was also sent Meze’s 4.4mm balanced cable for Advar as part of the tour package, which is available separately for $149 direct from Meze. The opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own, based on my music library and preferences.


Introduction

Meze is a company that has always impressed me, first and foremost, with outstanding industrial design, build quality, and ergonomics. Founded in 2011 by Antonio Meze in the picturesque town of Baia Mare, Romania, the company came to prominence with the launch of the 99 Classics headphone in 2015. The Classics were starkly different from other mid-priced over-ear headphones at the time, with a striking wood-metal-and-leather design that turned heads, if not ears, to its exemplary craftsmanship.

Since then, Meze has released several iconic products, including its most recent Empyrean and Empyrean Elite headphones that occupy the high ground in headphone styling and comfort. Its smaller-format IEM products have made less of a splash, however. The 12 Classics is rather basic sound-wise but still elegantly made, while the Rai Penta ‘flagship’ received mixed reviews for its laid-back sound, but across-the-board admiration for class-leading build quality and comfort.

Enter Advar, Meze’s new IEM that, at $699, sits between the cheap $69 12 Classics and not-so-cheap $1099 Rai Penta. Unlike Rai Penta’s multi-driver design, Advar is based on a 10.2mm dual-vented dynamic driver, encased in a small, ergonomic stainless steel shell polished to a brilliant black finish, with a distinctive circular brass inlay that doubles as one of the bass vents.



Single driver designs seem to be enjoying a mini-revival in the higher-end IEM market, and, when well-made and tuned, bring with them the advantage of perfect sonic coherence, light weight, accurate timbre, and easy-on-the-ear ergonomics. The ‘downside’ is that they generally struggle to match the technical ability of higher-end multi-driver IEMs, which employ fast and precise BA, electrostat or planar drivers (and often a combination of these) to bolster an IEM’s ability to resolve more detail, achieve higher speed, or create a larger sense of stage.

Advar embraces all the single driver advantages I listed above, with technical ability that won’t be embarrassed alongside costlier multi-driver IEMs. It also features one of the most unique shell designs – with an exceedingly comfortable universal fit – that I’ve come to expect from the Meze standard. But before I prematurely start singing its praises, let's take a closer look at what you get, how I hear it, and let you be the judge.


Packaging and presentation

Advar ships in a black hardboard box, adorned with a gold foiled crest of what I presume to be a symbol from Romanian lore. Removing the slip cover reveals a black foiled version of the crest on the box lid. Inside, the first thing you’ll see is the Advar shells, inlaid into a velvet-lined foam block, like two pieces of fine onyx and brass jewelry.

Beneath the shells, Meze has included some quality accessories, though it’s not what I’d call a generous package. This includes a beautifully-printed high-gloss booklet with hi-res images of Advar and some words about Meze’s design philosophy; a superbly made and styled hard-shelled case with faux leather exterior and soft felt interior, with two mesh pockets for storage; a silver-plated copper single-ended (3.5mm) mmcx cable; a cleaning brush, a clever mmcx removal tool that actually works; and a selection of genuine Final E-type silicone tips.


I would have preferred to see a 4.4mm cable in the box, with either a single-ended adapter or a second single-ended cable as standard. While Meze’s balanced cable – which I got to test as part of the tour – is available for a not-too-hefty $149, neither cable is what I’d call premium, being rather thin, wiry, and prone to tangling.

This doesn’t quite fit with the darker styling and premium build of the IEMs, and ergonomically the weight of the stainless steel earpieces makes them feel unbalanced on the thinner cable, despite the moulded earhooks. I’d personally opt for a higher quality third-party cable in any case, not necessarily for better sonics, but definitely for better ergonomics.


Design and Fit

Make no mistake, Advar is as beautiful in hand as it photographs. The smooth steel fascias exude quality craftsmanship, as does the distinctive ‘horn-like’ inlay on each earpiece that reminds me of the aspirational Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus. In the ear, the small size and shallow brass nozzles make for an easy fit, the cool metal shells lending themselves to all-day wearing comfort.

This is not the warm, skin-like metal finish of Rai Penta, one of the most comfortable IEMs I’ve used to date, but after a solid three-hour session I don’t feel any discomfort from the tiny Advar shells. You may want to go one-up on your tip size, depending on the size of ear canals, in order to get a tight fit. As with any IEM – but with Advar in particular – a tight seal is crucial for optimal sound, without which the Advar might only appeal to those who love shrill, piercing highs.


As an aside, I don’t recommend the included Final E-type tips. While I managed to get a decent seal (I have small, narrow ear canals so that’s never a problem for me), I found the E-types played havoc with the midrange and lower treble, letting in too much air and spoiling the midrange balance. Therefore, all my impressions for this review were made using original Spiral Dot tips, which edged out Acoustune AET07 tips for comfort for me, and didn’t lose much to the Acoustunes for sound. I also tried my go-to Sony EP-EX11 tips, but found the treble too sizzly for my liking.

I tried a quick cable swap too, but found little to encourage further rolling from a sound perspective. Regardless of the cable you choose, I suggest you take your time tip rolling extensively, especially if you find Advar’s treble too forward or harsh at first listen.


Sound Impressions

For an IEM with a fairly sizeable dynamic driver, I found Advar’s overall tuning very balanced. Tonally it’s a slight W-shape to my ears, with bass elevated above neutral (but only slightly), mids – especially upper mids – crisp and clear, and treble confidently forward, detailed and airy, but also smooth and natural. This is not a warm tuning, but it’s not overly bright either. The crystalline treble and articulate bass lend themselves to hours of fatigue-free listening, and I’m yet to hear any hint of sibilance – other than when I wore the ‘wrong’ tips.

Bass. Controlled yet powerful is how I’d describe Advar’s slightly north-of-neutral bass delivery. You can tell there’s a proper dynamic driver inside that steely shell, with a good sense of rumble and weight where the music calls for it, and a neatly-struck balance between sub- and midbass.

The big drum salvo in Heidi Talbot’s Cathedrals fills the space with heft and commendable texture, without ever drowning Heidi’s delicate vocals. Sub-bass reaches deep in James Blake’s Limit To Your Love, though it doesn’t quite rattle the skull like some subwoofer-style IEMs, while at the other end of the bass spectrum, the kick drums in the Eagles’ live performance of Hotel California have all the hallmarks of a really well-tuned bass driver behind them.

Overall, I wouldn’t qualify this as basshead bass, but it’s a satisfying bass nonetheless. It doesn’t add much warmth, nor does it add fullness to the notes. Still, it’s cohesive and detailed, with a natural decay that makes bass-driven tracks thoroughly enjoyable.


Midrange. Lower mids are fairly neutral, male vocals coming across neither overly full nor forward or recessed in any way. This lends itself to the more neutral-leaning tuning, but also makes way for some of the most open and revealing upper mids I’ve heard lately. This is not a forward upper-mid tuning either, but the way vocals (particularly female vocals) tend to sit in front of, or at least level with, most instruments, without ever being shouty or sibilant, is quite an achievement. Those looking for strident upper mids won’t find them here, but I don’t find them lacking either.

If the mids lack anything, it’s probably vocal resolution (I’ll get to that shortly), but it’s not as if Advar is unresolving. Rather, it’s tuned for smoothness over ultimate detail retrieval, and if I had to pick a preference, that’s what I’d go for. It’s also not the fullest sounding IEM I’ve heard, and goes for clarity over warmth. It’s not dry to the point of being sterile, but it’s not what I’d call an overly organic sound either.

Alanis Morisette’s distinctive vocals on Uninvited are delivered with a smoothness I don’t often hear on this powerful track, as is Missy Higgins’ crisp, sibilant-prone voice in Shark Fin Blues. Some would say both tracks are a touch too smooth, even, but I’m hearing enough nuance and clarity to make them stand out from the mix, and I much prefer this type of laid-back presentation to a mid-forward, high-energy sound. I also like how male vocals are presented distinctly and don’t get lost in bass-driven tracks like Peter Gabriel’s Grieve. The same goes for busier tracks like Richard Marx’s Hazard, with his voice rising above the punchy bassline and ever-present tambourine treble.

Overall, there’s much to like in Advar’s midrange delivery. On some tracks, like Ocie Elliott’s Slow Tide, I even hear it as slightly mid-centric, without having to resort to muted bass or stunted treble as is the case with some other mid-centric IEMs I’ve heard of late.


Treble. This is where impressions might swing wildly, depending on the tips you use. If I couldn’t tip-roll beyond the stock E-Type tips and the Sony EP-EX11s, I’d swear the Advar’s treble was way too hot and sizzly for my liking.

Thankfully, using Spiral Dot and Acoustune tips saved the day, and I have to say Advar’s treble is now one of beauty to my ears. It has the ability to highlight the small, shiny sounds and effects in most tracks, the ripples off guitar strings, and pings of bells and chimes, and almost render them on a separate layer to other sounds. It gives the music a sense of crystalline clarity, with just enough air between vocals and instruments, and plenty of sparkle without ever crossing the line to sibilance.

The medieval flutes and bells in Angels of Venice’s Trotto are pristinely rendered, as are the stick instruments and shakers throughout this lively instrumental track. The striking highlights of the clocks in Pink Floyd’s famous intro to Time are also perfectly pitched without ever getting too spiky, and the strings of Max Richter’s orchestra in his recomposed version of Vivaldi’s Winter 1 are spritely, lively, and lightning-quick, without ever getting too pitchy.

If anything, I’d say Advar’s treble, once tempered with the right tips, could even be a touch too smooth for some listeners, especially those who want extra energy and crunch from their guitars and cymbal crashes. Then again, they can probably get that with a tip swap, although I think the added quantity won’t come with a corresponding jump in quality.


Stage, to my ears, is above average in all dimensions. It’s not quite as wide and cavernous as some, but I never felt the stage dimensions holding me back or presenting a track more intimately than I’m used to hearing it. Meiko’s Crush, masterfully recorded with a binaural microphone, is presented with a wide, deep sense of stage. It’s not what I’d call holographic, but rather more cohesive and realistic.

Layering and separation are excellent, some of the best I’ve heard from a single dynamic driver. The wide, deep stage lends itself to instruments and vocals occupying their distinct space, and that’s exactly what I hear, on the whole. Midge Ure’s 80s classic, Dear God, is replete with echoes and shimmers, all of which find their own niche on the stage. I’ve always wondered how that’s even possible with a single driver, but Advar is an example of how it’s not only possible, but when done well, can be quite mesmerising too. Imaging on this track is also very good, though in this case, not quite as accurate as you’d expect from a higher-end multi-driver IEM.

Resolution is the one aspect I wouldn’t rate as outstanding. While I still consider Advar a fairly resolving IEM, it’s not really digging into all the details I know are present in some vocal performances, Whitehorse’s Dear Irony and Angel Olsen’s Chance being two that come to mind. It’s only apparent when you know there to be more to a track than you’re hearing, and I mostly notice this in vocals rather than instruments, but if you want the last word in resolving power this isn’t it.

That said, I don’t think Advar is meant to be a detail monster, and I consider the smoother, more relaxed tuning one of its strengths. If you’re looking for a more contrasty, powerful sound, with wild macrodynamic swings, this probably isn’t it.


Select Comparisons and Pairings

I don’t have many other IEMs on hand to draw meaningful AB comparisons, but I can give you a general idea of where I feel Advar sits on the spectrum compared to IEMs I’ve used before.

For starters, I do have a BLON BL-03 that I keep around just because it’s too good not to. For you BLON fans out there, Advar is unquestionably the better-made IEM, with a more secure fit and significantly higher quality accessories. The BLON has one of my favourite tunings of any IEM at any price, however, which is to say it’s slightly warmer than Advar, with fuller notes and bass that hits harder and bigger too. Advar eclipses the BLON technically: it’s more resolving, more nuanced, and the sound is generally a step up in most metrics and overall quality. Both are excellent all-rounders, and if you’re willing to pair the BLON with better tips and a proper cable, it’s an easy recommendation for not a lot of money.

While I no longer have it with me, Sennheiser’s IE 900 is (and remains) my top pick for a single dynamic driver IEM. It has a similarly open, clear sound to Advar, but ups the bass quality by a notch or two, and is overall more resolving and refined. Advar by comparison is more evenly balanced, without the IE 900’s upper midrange dip and lower treble peaks that prove problematic to some (not me). Vocals are clearer and more forward with Advar, but IE 900 is more dynamic, with a bigger, more life-like sound. IE 900 also ships with better cables (two balanced cables as standard), and a wider selection of tips, and isn’t quite as tip sensitive as Advar for getting great sound out the box. Both IEMs are small enough with shorter nozzles that ‘disappear’ in my ears, with IE 900 just edging Advar for all-day comfort.

At the time of writing, I’m still waiting for my review sample of the newer Sennheiser IE 600, which sound-wise and price-wise should be more directly comparable to Advar.


Advar is a fairly transparent IEM, and though it doesn’t need much power at all given its easy-to-drive 111dB/31-ohm sensitivity, it still scales upward with source quality.

My favourite pairing was with HiBy’s RS6 R-2R DAP. It has a warmer, fuller tonality that works well with Advar’s slightly cooler tuning. Vocals are clear and natural, with a punchy, extended bass and smooth, crystal-clear treble. This is also the most balanced-sounding pair-up I tried, with no frequency over-dominating, and the technical level of both DAP and IEM are neatly matched.


A small step down from the RS6 in terms of preference – though not quality or power – is iFi’s xDSD Gryphon. Retailing for around the same price as Advar, this would be my pick if you don’t need a DAP, and prefer to keep tonality fairly neutral and revealing. While Gryphon gives you the option of adding some punch (xBass II) and air (xSpace) to Advar’s sound, I generally didn’t find myself using either. Treble is slightly thinner compared to RS6, and vocals are less full, but detail and extension are improved, so if you’re more of a technical listener, this pairing works better.

I also tried Advar briefly with iFi’s GO Blu dongle (using a wired connection to my LG V60 phone), and direct from the LG too, and while both had more than enough power, I didn’t find the overall sound balance satisfying with the smartphone only. I’d definitely recommend adding the GO Blu over listening directly from a phone, if only for the jump in refinement in sound (and my general dislike for the ESS Sabre DAC in the V60).


Closing Thoughts

Whenever Meze announce a new product, you just know it’s going to be a work of art. Advar continues the Romanian company’s tradition of creating uniquely styled and impeccably-crafted ear jewelry that satisfies beyond the listening.

There’s something both exciting and rewarding in owning a beautifully-made IEM like Advar. Importantly, though, I feel in Advar, Meze has finally realised the potential of its ‘house sound’ – which is as easy on the ear as it is on the eye – without compromising technical performance.

Advar, to me, is the most accomplished Meze IEM to date. As long as you’re willing to tip roll, it has a balanced, clear sound, with more than enough power in the bass, refinement in the mids, and sparkle in the treble to suit almost any genre without ever sounding harsh, sibilant or dull. It also has all the benefits of a single driver design, with fast, coherent sound, and a wider, deeper stage than other IEMs I’ve heard – especially in its price bracket.


For some reason, Meze is stubbornly consistent with its omission of a balanced cable as part of the stock package, and even its balanced cable is nowhere near as nice as similarly-priced but far better-made, more robust options from the likes of Effect Audio and PW Audio. But that aside, it’s a small price to pay for an IEM that, to me, is easily the flagship of the range, at least in terms of performance.

It may not be as technically advanced as more expensive options from Sennheiser, and doesn’t quite hit the level of the best multi-driver IEMs, but that’s comparing apples and oranges really. For the cost of entry, it sits alongside the IE 900 as my current top pick for a single dynamic driver IEM, and is big step up from the likes of Sennheiser’s IE 300 and Oriolus Isabellae.

There are few IEMs that can compete with Advar’s combination of world-class design, ergonomics and build quality, rivalling some of the very best multi-kilobuck IEMs in look, feel, finish, and comfort. I highly recommend Meze’s Advar to anyone looking for a well-priced, balanced-sounding, easygoing all-rounder of the highest order.

Bravado (bra-va-doh) – noun – a bold manner or a show of boldness intended to impress or intimidate.

Empire Ears does nothing by halves, and that also goes for the naming convention of their IEMs. The Bravado MkII (which I’m going to call B2 for brevity) is everything the name suggests it is. That’s not giving anything away, though if reviews aren’t really your thing, you can just take the title at face value and be done with it.

B2 is my second bite at the Empire Ears cherry, so to speak, the legendary Legend X being the first. And here’s another spoiler: despite the similarities in name, shell shape and bass emphasis, the two are nothing alike.

I’ve also seen the B2 labelled as an ‘entry-level’ IEM, and I suppose in the context of the Empire Ears line-up it is. But that’s like saying an Audi A3 is an entry-level car. Make no mistake, B2 is a luxury IEM. I’ll be comparing it to a real entry-level IEM (BLON BL-03) and a real flagship IEM (Legend X) in the course of this review, but that’s purely semantics. Entry-level high-end IEM would be a more appropriate moniker, so keep that in mind as you’re reading this.


Let’s get started

For anyone unfamiliar with Empire Ears, the company founded and personally managed by a genius IEM designer and all-round good guy called Jack Vang, I’ll refer you to any number of articles on the company (Google ‘Empire Ears’ and you’ll see what I mean). Their website is also a good place to start.

Likewise I’m not going to spend too much time labouring over the design and specs of the B2 itself, because again, several comprehensive reviews have already covered that ground better than I could, or care to do (the best of which is Alex Twister’s review here).

But I should mention some basics that make B2 a rather unique IEM on its own, especially at its relatively affordable price-point for a high-end IEM.

Firstly, the packaging and accessories are similar to those you’ll get with any other Empire Ears IEM, which is to say top shelf. The presentation box is sturdy, compact and cleverly segmented, with a magnetic latch lid for the inner compartment and a pull-out drawer for the case and ear tips. You can almost smell the care and attention to detail in the construction and printing, always a good sign for a product that’s been lovingly made.

Second, the accessories themselves are not just throwaway add-ons that even high-end IEMs are often bundled with. You get genuine Final Audio E-Type silicone ear tips (all sizes), a genuine Effect Audio Ares II cable with custom labels and splitter, and Empire’s custom all-aluminium Pandora carry case, made from what feels like a solid block of chiselled metal.

Third, the IEMs themselves are made from a high-quality resin polymer and high-gloss lacquer finish, complete with what Empire calls the ‘Deep Field’ faceplate unique to B2. I’ve seen and used $6,000 IEMs that don’t look or feel this impressive, so rest assured you’re not being short-changed when it comes to build quality for your sub-$800 outlay.


It’s not all sun and roses, however, and if there’s one issue I have with B2 (in its universal form anyway – a custom version has just been announced at the time of writing) it’s the size of the damn thing. For some reason Empire Ears decided to launch B2 in the US (along with the other MkII variants) using the larger shell first seen in the flagship Odin. Compared to the Legend X (a 7-driver IEM), the 4-driver B2 is thicker, wider, taller, and has a notably longer nozzle that only allows for a deep insert fit.

It’s a strange decision considering the Asian versions of the MkII IEMs are all made with Legend-sized shells. The first time I put B2 in my ears I immediately knew fit would be an issue. Now, fit is a very personal thing, and I admittedly have smaller ears (with smaller canal openings) than what your average American lumberjack must have, because the smallest (SS) E-Type tips just about managed to sneak into my canal and felt somewhat comfortable, while my regular (MS size Sedna and Spiral Dot) tips put intense pressure on my canal opening and made the shells dangle awkwardly from my ears.

That’s all I’ll say about the fit, given many people won’t have any issues with it and considering how well the Odin was received, but it’s something to note if you found Odin too bulky or deep fitting. I likely wouldn’t have said anything if I had the original Asian version for review, but I can only write about what’s in front of me.


Let’s move on

If you’ve read this far, you already know that Empire’s most affordable luxury IEM is built as well as its flagships and comes with the same premium set of accessories. It may or may not fit as well as some of the others, but chances are it will, so all good there.

By most accounts, B2 bears little resemblance to the first iteration of its namesake. For one thing the driver configuration is completely different, with a pair of brand new premium electrostatic drivers joining the new Weapon IX+ (9+) subwoofer to reinforce B2’s formidable sonic firepower. In fact B2 has twice the number of drivers, but is only marginally more expensive – that’s what I call an upgrade.

The overall tuning also seems to be slightly different (if I’m reading Crin’s graphs correctly), taking on more midrange, upper midrange and mid-treble energy than the original, in line with what seems to be Empire Ears’ tuning shift towards higher-energy, higher-clarity sound. It’s not a change I’m entirely fond of (as you’ll gather from the sound impressions below), but at the same time I can understand the popularity of this type of tuning, and it’s not disagreeable with the right type of music.

Speaking of tuning, what you’ll hear can and will be influenced by the tips you choose. B2 is the first IEM I’ve used – ever – that makes sense to me with the E-Type tips. Not only are they very comfortable (even though I object to the deep fit), they attenuate the mids and treble to the point where any harshness in those frequencies is mostly mitigated. Using Sedna or Spiral Dot tips, for example, exposes the brighter (and shall we say less refined) upper frequencies, making some tracks sound rougher around the edges than they should. So my tip with B2 is to stick with the stock tips (and repeat that last sentence ten times just for fun).

As per usual with Empire Ears you get a smorgasbord of modern tech with your IEMs, and B2 is no different. From the 6-way synX crossover to resonance-resistive A.R.C. coating and Empire’s proprietary EIVEC e-stat transformer, nothing has been left on the cutting room floor to get the price down.

But sound quality is ultimately where the rubber meets the road. I’ll dive into more detailed sound impressions below, but if you want a TL;DR, B2 has a very fun, rather forward, somewhat steep U-shaped tuning, with bass (that’s BASS) and treble taking centre stage. Vocals are not recessed enough for me to label B2 a typical V-shaped IEM, and depending on the mix you might even hear it as a W on occasion. Make no mistake, B2 is every bit as bold as the name suggests, so if you’re after a laid-back, deckchair type of sound, you might want to look elsewhere.


Let’s dive in

At first listen, B2 is all about bass. Knowing the Legend X as well as I do now, nothing quite compares to Empire’s subwoofer-like dynamic driver, and B2 has the latest version of the Weapon IX doing bass duty. Of course having the most powerful woofer in IEM-land doesn’t automatically make an IEM a bass canon, but it seems that’s exactly how Jack’s designed the B2.

Out the box the bass is loose and rather flabby, but it quickly tightens up with some extended burn-in (something I’d recommend for any dynamic driver IEM). After a few days of constant playback, the flabbiness is gone, and what remains is a sleek, muscular bass response that unashamedly dominates any track with even a hint of a bassline. It’s a deeper, and I daresay meatier bass tuning than even the legendary Legend, but as I’ll discuss below, it doesn’t have nearly the same level of finesse or control.

Still, I hear the bass to be very fast – especially for a dynamic driver – and very well textured. The intro drums in Toto’s anthemic Africa are thicker and warmer than I’m used to with this track, but also very dynamic and bold, while the bassline that comes in at 2:38 in Yosi Horikawa’s electronic masterpiece, Bubbles, is deep, thick and warm, albeit with a hint of midrange bleed.

Compared to the bass, midrange is slightly dipped, notably the lower midrange where some male vocals and lower harmonic fundamentals are a little muted. That quickly changes as the mids slope upward towards an elevated upper midrange that gives female vocals and upper frequency harmonics much more zing and verve, with the danger of some vocals becoming shouty when poorly recorded.

In Lana Del Rey’s masterful Dark But Just A Game (off her latest LP Chemtrails Over The Country Club), the usually sultry vocals have a slight edge to them, not sibilant per se but ever so slightly glassy, and I suspect the elevated 5kHz and 8kHz peaks have something to do with that.

Interestingly in Chainsmokers’ radio mix of Closer, Halsey’s vocals are slightly more recessed than the lead male vocals, and also in relation to the instruments, except for the upper registers which are sharper and edgier and touching on shouty at 3:29. B2 definitely shows more zing with this track, which should appeal to those who like their modern pop more in-your-face than chillaxed.

Treble, while more elevated than the mids, is done very well, with a fair amount of detail and no real harshness, not that I heard anyway. Also like the mids, it’s not the last word in detail, nor is it particularly articulate, but is nonetheless fairly smooth and nicely extended.

In Heart’s Under The Sky, off their 80s superhit LP Brigade, most of the instruments lean to the slightly thinner, slightly brighter end of the FR, especially guitars, in what’s already a bright-leaning track. Staying with instruments but of a completely different kind and completely different pace, Max Richter’s interpretation of Vivaldi’s Winter 1 is telling in how precise B2’s treble energy can be (in the strings). It’s incredibly fast too, although the bass hits with a slightly bloated weight that masks some of the energy from the strings.

My treble impressions are coloured, excuse the expression, by my personal preference for a smoother treble presentation. I don’t mind elevated treble, but B2’s treble is, on occasion, slightly jarring. I’m not quite sure where this edginess comes from, and I might well be confusing upper-mid forwardness with excessive treble energy, but there’s a zing to the treble not unlike the one I heard with Trio, for anyone familiar with that otherwise excellent IEM. Definitely not a showstopper, but something to keep in mind.

Overall, I hear B2’s tonality as mostly natural, but with a harder edge around female vocals and some instruments. It’s quite a high-contrast sound, not compressed but one that emphasizes contrasts in the music. The upper midrange lift gives it a fair amount of clarity, so you’re not getting a thick, droll sound despite the elevated bass and midbass, and the e-stats take care of the sparkle and air that’s often missing from lesser IEMs in this price range.


What sets B2 apart from higher-end high-end IEMs is not so much tonality, but technicalities. That’s not to say it fails technically, far from it. Stage is decently wide, but I hear more depth than width, and it’s not what I’d call holographic. Resolution is very good, but details are more macro than micro, and a detail monster it certainly is not. Nor is it particularly clinical or precise; imaging and instrument separation are both good, sometimes very good, but not something I’d list in the honors roll.

Listening to Bubbles, stage depth is actually quite impressive, but it’s not an extremely wide presentation – which this track has in spades with the right IEM. Imaging is good, with easy-to-place effects, and I’m not struggling to tell the various ‘ball’ effects and synths apart.

Switching lanes, Heidi Talbot’s catchy folk tune Cathedrals shows up B2’s lack of absolute resolution. This is a simple track, with a simple melody, yet richly nuanced and layered, with a massive, dynamic bassline and heart-wrenching vocals. Detail is down a few notches here, and the vocals are notably more recessed (except for the sharper upper registers). Vocals are also edgier, and not quite as sweet as I know them to be.

Overall, there’s not much to say about B2’s technical acuity other than it’s very competent and pretty much at the level I expect it to be given the combination of quality drivers, tuning and placement in the lineup. Which is to say, it’s better than what I’d expect from many IEMs in this price range, and certainly better than what I’ve heard for less money, but it’s not going to challenge the kilobucks at this year’s technical excellence awards.

Let’s compare

I don’t have any other IEMs in the $500 - $800 price range to compare it to, so my entry-level daily driver (the BLON BL-03) and TOTL kilobuck (the Legend X) will have to suffice. Of course this isn’t a fair comparison, but it should still give us a good yardstick on how B2 sounds compared to known quantities, especially if you’re familiar with said IEMs.

Starting with the BLON, I keep it as a daily driver for one reason and one reason only: it has almost pitch-perfect tonality for my preferences. I’m not even going to mention technicalities here; B2 easily eclipses the BLON in every technical metric except, oddly enough, stage width, which for me is part of the BLON’s magic formula.

Neutral with bass boost is a generic description of the BLON’s tonality, but that’s exactly what it is. Comparatively speaking, B2 is slightly warmer, punchier, edgier and more dynamic. BLON is more easygoing, with an articulate bass response that’s more sub-bass than midbass focused, with even and natural mids, and a relaxed treble that’s never sibilant or harsh.

Strange as it sounds saying it, BLON is far closer to the Legend X in its tonality than B2. In fact I’d sooner call the BLON a baby Legend X than I would the B2. I’m not sure what the B2 is a ‘baby’ of, but it’s not the Legend X.

Compared to the Legend X, B2 is bolder, more bashful, less nuanced, less balanced. It can get rather aggressive at times, whereas the Legend is almost always measured and very composed in its delivery. Subtle is not something B2 does well, whereas for all its power Legend X is equally adept at rendering music with a featherlight touch.

The biggest difference with Legend X, though, is technicalities. While the B2 is, technically speaking, a very capable IEM in its own right (as it should be given its price point and heritage), it can’t really compare with the technical acuity of its older and far more accomplished sibling.

Nor does it need to, frankly. In my opinion these are two quite different IEMs designed with different audiences in mind, and can actually be complementary in a collection if you’re into both types of signatures.


Let’s wrap

So where does all this leave us? I’m still finding my way around Empire’s design and tuning philosophy, and in B2 I now have a very different, contrasting experience to the one I had with the Legend X.

It’s no secret I prefer the Legend X – in fact it’s not even close – but given the $1400 price difference and years of fine tuning and refinement that went into the Legend’s design, that’s not really surprising.

Despite the differences between the two, there are some crucial similarities. The package, build quality and accessories are second to none. Seriously, Empire Ears is right at the top of the tree when it comes to making you feel special about an IEM purchase, and the personal service and communication I’ve had with @Jack Vang and @JoshWatkins from halfway across the world has been my best experience in audio thus far.

From a functional perspective, both IEMs sport Weapon IX drivers, so both are equally hard to drive. Whereas the BLON is easily driven by the powerful HiBy R8 in low gain mode sans Turbo, I’m regularly setting the R8 in high-gain Turbo mode using the 4.4mm balanced output for both Empire Ears IEMs.

Sure you can drive B2 from a phone, but you’re not going to get maximum sound quality or control without a decent amp. It also scales nicely with better sources, and although I don’t see the point of driving IEMs with desktop amps, I’ve heard from many users who have done this successfully.

B2 is made with same care, using the same DNA, as all of Jack’s creations. It has an accessible, modern music-friendly sound, and even if I don’t personally think it’s squarely in my lane when it comes to tuning preference or comfort, the margin of difference is small enough for me to recommend it unreservedly.

If you’re looking to take the next step up from a cheap(er) Chi-Fi clone that’s been expertly crafted, want a warmer take on neutral that also satisfies your inner basshead, or want an IEM that isn’t afraid to let loose with some seriously dynamic, speedy sound, you’ll find it in this newly-revised but altogether new take on the ‘Bravado’ sound.

Full disclosure: Sennheiser sent me a sample IE 300 for review in exchange for my honest opinion, without any deadlines or expectations. The opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own, so feel free to PM me should you have any questions or comments about your own preferences or experiences.

Introduction

When Sennheiser launched the IE 300 as part of its new line of ‘audiophile’ IEMs earlier this year, it literally flew under my radar. Only recently, following the release of the IE 900 and my subsequent review of that incredible IEM, did I even notice – let alone show any interest – in the baby of the family.

In truth, the IE 300 is very much its own IEM, and while I’ve compared it to the IE 900 for this review, the two aren’t really comparable in terms of the target audience and what they’re aiming for sound-wise. For me, the IE 300 takes Sennheiser’s modern tuning philosophy and long history of sound design and driver innovation and distills it into a small, fun, lightweight and, importantly, utterly accessible package.

If you’re an avid IEM listener, enjoy Sennheiser’s take on ‘fun’ but accurate sound, but don’t have the budget or inclination to invest in the high-end of the hobby, the IE 300 strikes a perfect compromise in price-performance which, frankly, is some of the best value I’ve seen in this topsy-turvy, pandemic-stricken market in a very long time.


Fit for purpose

If you’re familiar with Sennheiser’s design aesthetic you’ll be right at home with the IE 300’s presentation. A simple, sturdy box, with quality printing of a high-resolution image of the IEMs on the cover, complete with Sennheiser’s trademark black-blue colourway. Nothing fancy, and certainly less elaborate than the tray-lined IE 900 presentation box, but more than acceptable for a brand-name product.

Aside from the earpieces, Sennheiser supplies a small selection of custom-made silicone and soft foam eartips, a Kevlar-reinforced (para-aramid, according to Sennheiser) single-ended (3.5mm) cable, a Sennheiser-branded cleaning tool, and user manuals in case you need instructions on how to use and clean your IEMs. I must say the loose packaging of the eartips inside a throwaway plastic packet isn’t quite consistent with the rest of the presentation, but the inclusion of a high-quality, fabric-lined Sennheiser-branded carry case more than makes up for it.

The IEMs themselves remind me a bit of the classic stippled finish of Sennheiser’s HD600 over-ear headphones, only nicer, with less marbling and a more nuanced texture. The plastic construction feels very sturdy, almost magnesium-like, and the shape and size are almost identical to the IE 900 (though since the IE 300 was released first, you could say the IE 900 follows the IE 300’s blueprint).


Either way, they’re super small, super light, and super comfy, with the one proviso being that if you found the IE 900 a less-than-perfect fit, you’ll probably find the IE 300 even less so due it its lighter weight. Once the stock cable – with its thick, memory-wire earguides – is attached to the tiny shells, the cable takes over the weight distribution, so that the earguides end up holding the IEMs in place. For me this works very well, as it did with the IE 900, but if you have very big ears, or aren’t used to the lack of ear-filling heft of more typically sized, ear cavity-filling IEMs, then you might struggle with the IE 300’s penchant to ‘disappear’ in your ears.

As with any IEM, I advise you spend some time tip-rolling to find the ideal fit (and subsequently ideal sound). If the stock tips aren’t a great fit (they weren’t for me), then it’s very likely you’ll find other tips more suitable. My current favourites with the IE 300 are the Acoustune AET07 (I use M- size for my smallish ear canals), as I find they seal very well, don’t put any added pressure on my canals, and sound better than the stock silicone tips. I didn’t try the included foam tips as I’m not a fan of the foam tip feel, so your mileage may vary if foam is your preference.

Also, while the stock tips include a foam insert to prevent wax deposits from falling into the bores, they’re not a must-have acoustically, despite what you might have read in some reviews. The foam attenuates less than 1dB of treble, which is all but inaudible unless you’re super sensitive to treble, of which the IE 300 has plenty (but more on that later). Bottom line, find the tips that fit best and don’t think you have to use the stock tips to maximise performance.

Lastly, since I’ve already mentioned the cable, I’ll just add that I find the stock cable to be very high quality, albeit slightly microphonic. Yes, it takes some getting used to (if you’re not used to the feel of memory wire around your ears, especially with ultra-lightweight IEMs), but it’s made very well, and the mmcx connectors are top-notch, if you’ll excuse the pun. If you do plan to try other cables, take note that the IE 300’s mmcx connectors, while standard, are slightly recessed, so not all cables will work. I know that @EffectAudio ConX connectors work perfectly, so if you’re looking for a higher-end cable option, that would be the first place I’d go.


Sound impressions

Before we deep dive into what you can expect to hear, let’s briefly discuss how the IE 300 does what it does. For starters, the IE 300 uses a derivative of the eXtra Wide Band (XWB) 7mm dynamic driver designed by Sennheiser’s André Michaelis more than 16 years ago to achieve the optimal sound profile in IEM form. This is the same driver design used in previous flagship IEMs like the IE 800 and IE 800S, and similar to the one used in the IE 900 as well, with a coherency that’s rarely found in multi-driver IEMs at any price point, let alone this one.

But the driver itself is only part of the smart engineering that went into the IE 300’s acoustic design. The driver sits in front of an acoustic back volume, a small ‘space within a space’ that controls the air movement of the diaphragm and helps with tuning the low-end (bass) frequencies, shaping and separating them from the midrange, and reducing resonance from the enclosure. Sennheiser has also engraved a resonator channel into the driver housing that helps attenuate treble frequencies, which purportedly controls errant treble peaks.

Spec-wise, the IE 300 is fairly ambitious, quoting a frequency range of 6Hz to 20kHz, 16 Ω impedance, a sensitivity of 124 dB (1 kHz / 1 Vrms), and a THD of < 0,08 % (1 kHz, 94 dB SPL). These are very similar to the IE 900, although the IE 900 extends further with even less distortion. In practice, I find the IE 300 very easy to drive, although it enjoys as much power as you can give it and will respond to beefier amplification, even though it’s not strictly necessary.

To gauge how most people will hear the IE 300, I used the stock cable plugged directly into my LG V30+ smartphone, resisting the urge to switch to a balanced cable and play it off my high-end DAP. While I’ve made some notes of how the sound changes and/or improves with better source gear, keep this in mind as you read my impressions below. I also used a combination of locally-stored FLAC files (both Redbook and Hi-Res), and on occasion, Tidal streaming via UAPP.


Tonality

The IE 300 is not your typical V-shaped IEM, even though bass and treble are emphasised in almost equal measure. I don’t hear vocals as particularly recessed, especially male vocals, though they’re definitely not elevated like they tend to be on many Eastern-tuned IEMs. As such, I’d class the IE 300’s tonal shape as more steep U than pure V, with a warm, pleasant timbre that lends itself to a fairly smooth, though still quite lively listen across most music genres.

Bass presence is generally full and warm, with a more-or-less equal emphasis on sub and midbass, but a notable midbass lift that adds extra warmth to most music. Lorde’s Royals kicks off with some bombastic bass drums that punch fairly hard but lack the rumble of more sub-bass-leaning IEMs. Similarly, the bass drop that kicks off James Gillespie’s What You Do isn’t quite as potent as I’ve heard it with some bass-first IEMs, but is still full, warm and resonant, if not overly punchy.

There’s some looseness in the IE 300’s bass that actually works in its favour with certain music. On Billie Eilish’s NDA, for example, the looser bass gives the track a cushioned feel that makes it a more laid-back listen than I’m used to. It’s not loose to the point where it loses shape or becomes muddy, but it’s definitely not as tight or textured as more refined IEMs, IE 900 being a good example. It’s probably not the most resolving bass I’ve heard in an IEM, the bass plucks of Feist’s Tout Doucement coming off as one-noteish and a touch bloomy, but again, only by comparison. This is still very high-quality bass, especially for an IEM at this price point.


Midrange is a mixed bag in that vocals, while not recessed, aren’t particularly forward either, and the less-than high-end resolution in the mids makes some vocals on busier tracks – where bass and/or string instruments dominate – harder to hear than they should otherwise be. Brandi Carlile’s husky-sweet voice on The Storymostly manages to come across intact, but around the one-minute mark, the instrument melee tends to dominate slightly. Paul Simon crooning over Bernadette, on the other hand, comes across clearly, with a very accurate representation of his familiar tone.

Instrument fundamentals in the midrange generally have a very natural, life-like timbre, as you’d expect from the tuning experts at Sennheiser. Guitar strings and piano strikes are probably more influenced by the bass lift than any residual treble peakiness, of which there is very little. Annelie’s rendition of Tomorrow, from her solo piano masterpiece Hetrz, showcases the rich, smoky overtones of the sustain pedal rather than the brighter key strikes, and while Joe ‘Satch’ Satriani’s guitar riffs in Always With Me, Always With You are clear and crunchy, they’re also nicely rounded with a slightly warmer edge.

Treble is definitely right up there when it comes to emphasis, but not to the point where I’d consider it overly bright. Lower treble rises up and above the mids, but doesn’t add excessive sibilance to poorly-recorded vocals. The shakers and snare drums in Def Leppard’s Love Bites have plenty of bite in them, giving the track a sheen that straddles the harshness line but never fully crosses it. That said, you do hear the brighter instruments more so than anything else on that track, which adds to my impression of the IE 300’s overall liveliness.

Jethro Tull’s instrumental intro to The Waking Edge is interspersed with brighter chimes and guitar plucks that shine, but not obtrusively so, with the IE 300. In each case, the bass tones serve to balance out any hardness in the treble, though not completely, if you know what I mean.

Where I feel the IE 300 lacks, by comparison, to higher-end (and higher-priced) IEMs, is in its absolute resolving ability, which gives the treble some of the hardness I speak of. More resolution usually helps to smooth out the gradation of treble notes, and while the IE 300’s resonator likely catches the hardest of these imperfections, the triple resonator in the IE 900 does a much better job, again only by comparison. There’s also some faint grain in some vocals, and a hint of sibilance in higher-register female vocals, but these issuesare both more prevalent in poor recordings.


Technicalities

While I wasn’t expecting top-shelf technical ability for $300, the IE 300 doesn’t skimp on technicalities either. Soundstage, for example, is neither out-of-my-head wide or inside-my-head intimate, finding a happy ground somewhere in-between the two. Yosi Horikawa’s Bubbles don’t feel like they’re all dropping on top of each other, with some even edging just beyond the imaginary borders of my ears. The IE 300 also displays reasonable depth with this track, so the effects aren’t entirely one-dimensional. I’d say the IE 300 has very natural, life-like staging, with the bass in particular given space to reverberate around the room, creating a good sense of space with most tracks.

Imaging, layering and separation are also fairly good, and very good for such a modestly-priced IEM. The female vocals and male backing vocals on Whitehorse’s Dear Irony are realistically placed dead centre and just left of centre respectively, and also layered ever so slightly apart. Instrument separation is particularly impressive on this track, which is not an easy feat for any IEM to pull off, let alone a so-called ‘entry-level’ IEM.


Detail and resolution, on the whole, is average. This is not necessarily a bad thing either. Where technical acuity isn’t quite up to top-of-the-line standards, a slightly less resolving IEM papers over more cracks than it exposes. This makes the IE 300 equally suited to playing less-than-perfect pop recordings like Dido’s No Angel as it is masterfully recorded productions like Rebecca Pidgeon’s Spanish Harlem. That said, the IE 300 has excellent clarity regardless of genre, and I’m yet to hear any veil or muddiness in its sound.

Dynamic range is also very decent, impressive even, with the IE 300 able to articulate subtle nuances and sudden bursts of volume in equal measure. When Hans Zimmer’s Mountains bursts into life at the 2-minute mark, the emotion communicated through the crescendo is palpable, while all the subtle details and effects in and around the main strings and piano strikes are clean and clear. Likewise, I was impressed by how the build-up to Max Richter’s Winter 1 wasn’t totally obscured, with subtle cues in the opening string instruments loud enough to enjoy, even at lower volume.

Overall the technical performance of the IE 300 was better than expected but not quite as advanced as what I’d want (and get) from a high-end IEM like the IE 900. Where this shows up most is on the ‘edges’ of tracks I know well, where minor details are missed (or obscured), or transitions aren’t quite as smooth or refined as I know them to be. For most intents and purposes, however, these deficiencies won’t be picked up by the majority of listeners, particularly more casual listeners who rely mainly on streaming services for their music delivery.


Select comparisons

Sennheiser IE 900. I’ve seen and read so many reviews that question the value of the IE 900 because, and I paraphrase, it’s only a subtle improvement over the IE 300 for far more money. Well, I’m here to tell you that as nice as it might be to think you can get almost the same quality of sound for less than a quarter of the price, in the case of the IE 300 and IE 900, that’s simply not the case.

If you’ve read my review to this point, you’ll already know I think quite highly of the IE 300. The technology, the design, the fit, are all at a very high level, much more so than the asking price suggests. The sound, too, is really very good, better than most $300 IEMs I’ve heard, and by some margin too.

But the IE 900, well, it’s in a different class altogether. Yes, some sound ‘improvements’ are more subtle than others, but on the whole, comparing like-for-like (same cable, same source, same files), the IE 900 represents a significant upgrade in every audible facet, most notably in technical performance. While they may share many tonal similarities, the IE 900 is further refined, and despite their FR graphs looking very similar, the two IEMs sound more different than the squiggly lines suggest.


For example, the IE 900’s greater bass impact is apparent in the opening salvo of Missincat’s Piu Vicino, where the drums hit harder, deeper, faster and with more weight and texture than they do with the IE 300. This track also clearly shows the larger virtual space the IE 900 creates, and the markedly increased resolution and separation which makes subtle background sounds and effects much easier to hear. Vocals are also quite a bit smoother on the IE 900, with the IE 300 adding a touch of sibilance that’s completely absent with its bigger brother. Lastly, the dynamic swing is larger on the IE 900, with softer sounds remaining soft, louder sounds hitting a higher crescendo, and the overall character of the music becoming more dynamic as a result.

Switching to one of my favourite EDM tracks, Armin van Buuren’s Intense collab with Miri Ben-Ari, and the flatter stage of the IE 300 is immediately noticeable, with less space for the notes to decay. Miri’s intro violins have a harder edge to them on the IE 300, not nearly as nuanced as they sound with the IE 900, and as new sounds and effects are added, they tend to overlap with each other far more with the IE 300 than they do with the IE 900. The smaller space also lends less room for the bass drop rumble, which is less distinct and shorter than it is with the IE 900.

Similar comparisons can be made between the two IEMs when listening to the beautifully instrumental Trottoby Angels of Venice, a track I use to highlight the realism that’s possible to achieve with simple (indeed mediaeval) instruments. Once again, stage size is larger and more holographic with the IE 900, flatter and more one-dimensional with the IE 300. But the biggest difference is the ability to distinguish subtle nuances in the playback of each instrument: the drums, whistles, flutes and bells, each in their own space. The IE 900 conveys a much richer and more life-like sense of the surface texture and size of each instrument, especially when they strike together. To use an analogy, this track shows better than most the difference between the 720P of the IE 300 and the 4K of the IE 900, not only in resolution but also in richness, contrast, and dynamic range.

All that said, is it even fair to compare the two siblings, given the $1000-plus price difference between them? Of course not, but also yes at the same time. Whether or not the quality difference of IE 900 is worth the extra money is a very personal choice, especially since the IE 300 is, despite the stark comparisons I made above, a very capable performer. It easily stands up against IEMs that cost more, and I can’t think of any IEMs that I prefer that cost less.

But to say the IE 900 is an incremental upgrade is false economy at best, downright inaccurate at most. That doesn’t mean everyone will get the same benefit from the upgrade, or even prefer it. Listen to compressed, lossy or poorly recorded music, and you might actually be better off with the less resolving IE 300. And of course, the IE 300 represents much better value if you’re not inclined to invest four figures in an IEM. So while the argument for and against can be made either way, the truth remains that sound-wise, the IE 900 will scale higher, sound better, and deliver a much more technically astute and tonally refined performance.


Sony WF-1000XM4. Here’s another one you might think is an apples versus oranges comparison. But look closer and you’ll start to see the similarities and overlaps. Both IEMs retail at around the $300 mark, and while their technologies differ (the Sony obviously being a self-contained, true wireless Bluetooth IEM), they’re really aiming for the same market: audio-loving consumers who want the best sound quality at an accessible price, with maximum mobility thrown into the bargain.

It’s true that the IE 300 will sound slightly different depending on the source – be it a smartphone, computer, DAP or desktop sound system – and that the Sony should essentially remain consistent because all of its amplification and sound smarts are internal. But given the same playback device (in my example, an LG smartphone), and it becomes more a case of which sound signature you prefer, and how many features you need from your IEMs.

It’s stating the obvious, but the IE 300 can’t compete with the Sony feature-for-feature. There’s no active noise cancellation, no built-in bone conduction microphones for calls, no inline volume and playback controls, no water resistance, no ambient or speak-to-chat functionality. So if all of these features are essential to you, stop reading right here and buy the Sony. But if you can live with having most of those features in the phone itself and focus purely on sound quality for music playback, the choice becomes much harder.

Normally I’d say the IE 300, as a wired IEM, is a shoe-in for sound quality. But true wireless technology has advanced to the point where IEMs like the Sony XM4 are quickly catching up to their wired counterparts, especially if listening is going to be less critical and more casual, like during the workday, for example.

Arooj Aftab’s gorgeous rendition of Baghon Main catches almost all the subtlety of the music and pristine vocals with the XM4, but even though the IE 300 sharpens the focus somewhat, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything, and indeed the Sony is probably the smoother of the two when I change focus from the music to writing this review. With its easy transitions from bass to mids, and a slightly rolled treble, the Sony is both warmer and softer, but no less engaging and entertaining than the IE 300 with this and similar music.

The IE 300 pulls away when it comes to pure detail retrieval, where its higher resolution compared to the Sony is telling on tracks like Rosie Thomas’s Why Waste More Time. I’ll tell you why, because switch sources from a smartphone to a dedicated DAP, and the IE 300 benefits from the jump in source performance, whereas the Sony sounds exactly the same. If you know you’re going to use a higher-end source, even a basic external audio dongle, chances are the IE 300 will reward you with a jump in sound quality above what the Sony can offer, despite its obviously excellent audio hardware.

Today the choice between the Sony and Sennheiser comes down to convenience versus quality, but I can see a time in the not-too-distant future where wireless technology will evolve to the point where wired IEMs don’t make much sense below a certain price point, for music lovers and purists anyway. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re not as far away as I used to think we were.


Closing thoughts

Sennheiser’s IE 300 wasn’t exactly what I expected it to be coming into this review. Everything I’d heard about it to that point was prefaced on it being the ‘baby brother’ of the more mature IE 900, but aside from the name and obvious family resemblance, I don’t think the IE 300 really lives in the same city, let alone neighbourhood.

None of this is a slight on the IE 300. As an IEM designed to bring home some of Sennheiser’s trademark sound at a price point favoured by more casual consumers, it delivers much more than that. Not only does it take its design cues from on-stage IEMs, with its fold-over, over-ear aesthetic, but the driver and technology inside the shell also have a storied history of innovation and manufacturing precision.

The IE 300 has an easy-going sound that’s neither too laid back nor overly intense. It’s a warm sound balanced by sparkling treble that, on occasion, gets close to my tolerance for zinginess, but somehow always seems to play nice with just about any music I’m in the mood for. I like how Sennheiser has managed to produce a beefy IEM with plenty of bass that doesn’t sound too bassy, and one with plenty of treble that doesn’t sound harsh or strident. Best of all, vocals are generally really well done, sounding clean, clear and natural, with only minor issues borne mostly out of poor recordings rather than poor performance.

Of course, the IE 300 isn’t going to win any technical awards, with its average resolving power (compared to higher-end IEMs anyway) and moderate stage size, but neither is it dull or cramped, and there’s more than enough detail to satisfy all but the most ardent listener. It’s also very well made, and assuming you find it as comfortable as I do, it can easily be worn for longer listening sessions throughout the day.


So who is this IEM for? Anyone who’s new to IEMs and wants maximum sound quality from a trusted brand for starters. Also, anyone who needs a small, light, easily-carried IEM with stellar sound quality for commutes, shift work, and light exercise will find much to like in the IE 300. And if you’re someone who’s had your fill of Eastern-tuned IEMs and want to hear Sennheiser’s take on a fun-reference tuning, the IE 300 could be just the ticket.

It has a big sound that’s immediately impressive, is easily driven from any source, comes with top-grade accessories, and carries a two-year worldwide warranty, so while some corners were necessarily cut to make it all work (it’s made in China rather than Germany, for example), you’re still getting far more than it says on the tin. In fact, at the current retail price of $249, I believe the Sennheiser IE 300 to be one of the best-value IEMs regardless of price, and exceptionally competitive for what it offers in its price range.

Full disclosure: Empire Ears sent me an EVO sample in exchange for a full and honest review. It’s not mine to keep, and if I want it, I need to buy it, like everyone else. The views and opinions expressed herein are entirely my own.

Also: The review features an exclusive Q&A with @Jack Vang about the motivation, challenges, and design of EVO, so you can enjoy some insights direct from the source. I’ve included Jack’s comments as ‘spoilers’ throughout the review, so you can choose to read it with or without his input.


First, some context

Basshead.

It’s a loaded word that, in the not-too-distant past, was used to distinguish ‘purist’ audiophiles from those who enjoyed blood and thunder with their music. IEMs with boosted bass were generally relegated to cheaper models, and the higher up the ladder one climbed, the more reigned in the bass seemed to be. If you wanted bass, went the saying, get a pair of Beats.

But then, one fine day in 2017, Jack and Dean Vang and their Empire Ears crew unleashed an IEM so confounding, so contrary to the norm, that it literally turned heads and had audiophiles of every ilk giggling like schoolgirls caught in a lie. Legend X, a derivative of Empire’s previous Legend lineage, almost singlehandedly upended the commonly-held notion that big bass had no place in civilized audiophile company.

It became, quite literally, a legend in name and reputation, and still holds sway today as one of the very best ways for serious audiophiles to have their bass fix and eat their Diana Krall/Eagles/Vivaldi cake too.

Still, despite the inclusion of higher-end technicalities and sophisticated tuning, Legend X wasn’t for everyone. Out the box with stock tips and cable, it was unashamedly a big bass sound first, refined listen somewhat distant second.

Over time, audiophiles started to find ways to fine-tune Legend X to their liking. They discovered it was very amenable to tip and cable rolling, and combined with neutral sources and some healthy burn-in time, it delivered a more balanced sound with bass still very much the foundation, but with its inherent technical strengths brought to the fore – like excellent resolution, a comfortably-wide soundstage, and a more open midrange.

Legend X was usurped as Empire Ears’ flagship long before the current flagship, Odin, was unveiled at the height of the 2020 pandemic, but even then, Dean and his team were quietly working on a new IEM that would take the very best of the technically-gifted Odin, and marry it with the raw power and sex appeal of Legend X. It’s an evolution of everything that the X began, matured and transformed, and appropriately called Legend EVO.



Introducing EVO

The headline feature that separates EVO from every other Empire Ears IEM before it is the all-new Weapon X full-range (5 – 35Hz) bone conduction driver. Using Japanese-made materials and a strong neodymium magnet, coupled with anti-resonance technology that minimises vibration diffusion, Weapon X affects and enhances EVO’s sound in different ways, from adding impact and physical vibration to the sub-bass response, to padding the air and volume in midrange notes and infusing a tweeter-like physicality in the highs.

This is a very different take on bone conduction than we’ve seen in other IEMs, with the main vibration channel working through a dedicated solid bore that connects Weapon X to the nozzle tip. It also means foam tips and very soft silicone won’t be as effective as solid core silicone tips for the bone conduction effect, something to keep in mind when pairing tips with EVO.


Weapon X is not the only new addition to EVO’s internals. The two Weapon IX woofers that made Legend X famous have been upgraded with the new Weapon IX+ drivers first seen in Odin, only this time they’ve been allowed to deliver their full, unbridled power, rather than tuned to neutral as in Odin. The same five custom-made BA drivers used for the midrange and treble frequencies have also been included, but re-tuned for EVO. Lastly, EVO sports an all-new nine-way proprietary synX crossover circuit that was designed specifically to work with Weapon X’s full range frequency extension in EVO’s Dual Conduction design.

Also present is Empire’s Anti Resonance Compound (A.R.C) coating that’s meant to eliminate internal resonances from those giant woofers inside the confined IEM shell. Build quality, as always, is top shelf, with the same seamless shell molding that makes Empire’s IEMs lightweight, comfortable, and highly resistant to shocks, though I’m still always ultra-careful bordering on pedantic when handling resin shells.

Presentation, design and fit

If you’re familiar with any of Empire Ears’ latest releases, from their ‘entry level’ Bravado Mk II to the aforementioned flag-bearers, then you’ll also be familiar with the attention to detail that goes into the retail packaging and presentation of these IEMs. EVO eschews some of the fancier elements – like the pull-out tray – and downsizes the box too, making it less bulky but also more environmentally friendly, while retaining the same solid appeal and obvious brand identity.

Gone is the magnetic foldover, replaced by a sturdy lid that lifts off to reveal some branded documentation and, beneath it, Empire’s exceptionally solid Pandora storage case, emblazoned with the all-new EVO logo. The first tranche of EVO preorders will receive, in place of Pandora, a custom Vishnu Leather case of similar dimensions, which may or may not be preferable, depending on your penchant for leather or metal.

Also breaking from tradition, EVO’s earpieces are no longer displayed in foam cut-outs and are instead shipped inside a small mesh pouch – separated down the middle to keep the earpieces from rubbing against each other – inside the case. Mine were sent already attached to the cable, so I assume retail versions ship with the cable pre-attached too – unless yours was shipped sans cable due to some unforeseen production issues at the time of launch.

On first removing the earpieces from their bubble wrap pouch (I didn’t get the mesh pouch with my review unit), I was struck by how similar-but-different they looked to Legend X. Made of solid resin, the shells are mostly opaque, polished to a brilliant piano black finish and coated with clear lacquer resin. EVO is notably bigger and bulkier than Legend X, but also translucent in parts, giving you a clear view of the Weapon X drivers when the light hits the shells just right. The left shell features the new EVO logo – and did I mention how much I like the new EVO logo? – while the right features the same Empire Ears ‘Wings’ logo that adorns recent Legend X iterations.


Size-wise they remind me of the new Bravado shells, only bigger, with slightly longer and thinner nozzles than Legend X. My main concern, prior to receiving EVO, was that the nozzle would be too long and thick for my smaller ears and canal openings. I personally dislike deep-insert IEMs, so it was with some trepidation that I picked the smallest-size Final E-type stock tips and, after saying a little prayer, carefully fitted EVO for the first time. To my surprise, the smallest tips were too small, and moving up a size allowed me to get a good seal – denoted by the customary ‘pop-pop’ of the Weapon IX+ driver flex – with a fairly shallow and reasonably comfortable fit.

Despite the better-than-expected fit, these are not the move around, walk outside, use for gym-type IEMs, at least not for me. Even with comfortable tips I still get some pressure, after a while, just inside my ear canal, and if I don’t tilt the earpieces just right, I can feel them pressing against the sensitive parts of my outer ear. You could argue this means the fit isn’t perfect, and I agree; they require careful positioning to seat just right. They’re large, cumbersome, and there’s no getting away from the feeling of having two large, intrusive objects stuffed in your ears, at least initially, and that feeling does go away after a while.

That said, they’re comfortable enough for how I use them, seated or lying down, on a couch or in bed, taking in an hour or two of quality listening. If you’re anything like me, they won’t work for all-day listening, but then few IEMs do. If, on the other hand, you’re blessed with big ears and even bigger earholes, EVO should fit you just fine, and so, like everything else in this hobby, YMMV.

One other thing to note is that EVO sports dual tri-port vents, unlike Odin and Legend X’s single port, likely to accommodate the new Weapon X driver, or possibly because twin Weapon IX+ drivers pushing air at full tilt need more pressure relief than previous designs. Regardless of the reason, the added port means slightly less isolation, though in practice EVO isolates extremely well, and I literally can’t hear anything else in my surroundings once the music starts playing. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t leak any sound either.


Cable and accessories

The new made-for-EVO Genesis cable (nice one guys…Genesis, EVOlution, get it?) is a 4-wire, 24-gauge, pure OCC copper cable by PW Audio. It features the typical PW Audio angled ear-hook design, which I’ve always found to be very natural, and appears to be a well-made higher-end cable in the same vein as PW Audio’s Anniversary-series cables. It also sports PW Audio’s updated matte-black Y-split hardware and chin slider, though the slider is irritatingly too big for the wire gauge and slides loose most of the time.

Dean clearly had a target tuning in mind when he picked Genesis for the EVO pairing, but it’s not my personal pick for EVO. Genesis is not in the same league as Odin’s Stormbreaker, which is based on PW Audio’s ‘The 1960s’ 2-wire/4-conductor design, or my custom-made @doctorjuggles Cardas copper cable for that matter – though I can only vouch for the sound and ergonomic improvements of the latter. It’s also slightly stiffer than I’d like, and the decorative blue core that’s visible through the translucent PVC jacket doesn’t quite gel with the EVO’s sleek black-and-gold colouring for me.

Still, it’s good enough, with a throaty, full-bodied sound that’s awash with detail, consistent with Peter Wong’s copper cable mastery. It’s also the first genuine Pentaconn-terminated Empire Ears cable, a welcome move that will surely be mirrored by all serious IEM manufacturers in the near future.


Along with Genesis, Empire Ears provides the same set of Final E-type black silicone tips in five different sizes, as I may have mentioned earlier, which again are not my personal pick for EVO. While comfortable enough, I’m not a fan of the Final E’s penchant for boosted bass with attenuated treble, as I feel EVO – even though it’s inherently more balanced-sounding than Legend X – sounds better with tighter bass and a tip that helps clarify and smooth out the upper mids and treble. For the record, I prefer Acoustune’s AET07 tips, which I also use with Legend X.

Regardless of how comfortable you are with tip and cable rolling, I strongly suggest trying out different tips and cables with EVO. I find EVO fairly sensitive to sonic changes, mainly with tips but also with cables, and if you’re not completely sold on the sound after a sufficient burn-in period (more on this below), switching up accessories could be the difference between good and great for your preferences.


Sound impressions

Unlike some reviewers, I don’t have access to a large number of different sources with which to test my IEMs, and I generally prefer a close-to-neutral source, which currently takes the form of HiBy’s flagship R8 DAP. As such all the impressions below are based on this pairing only, with the R8 set to high-gain Turbo mode, as it is for all my IEMs.

Keep this in mind if you’re using more coloured sources, because this can skew EVO’s sound significantly, based on my discussions with other enthusiasts. For a more comprehensive appraisal of different source pairings with EVO, check out the ‘Source Pair Up’ section of @twister6's outstanding EVO review here.

Another thing to keep in mind is that EVO is much easier to drive than Legend X, or the single-driver Sennheiser IE 900 for that matter. Despite being only 1dB more sensitive than Legend X on paper (103dB for EVO vs 102dB for Legend X), it takes a full 10 clicks on the dial to volume match the two. Moreover, I find EVO’s bass to be significantly more powerful, from sub-bass through midbass, at a much lower volume than it takes to achieve the same bass levels with Legend X, and with EVO also being a more dynamic and resolving listen, this makes it much easier to listen at lower volumes, not to mention safer too.

Lastly, my impressions allow for a 100-hour-plus burn-in period, and I wouldn’t recommend any proper assessment of EVO’s sound until you’ve put your EVO through a similar process. Without sparking the usual burn-in debate, I can say with confidence that EVO sounded very different out the box than it does today.

Initially, I found the bass was quite boxy and not very nuanced, almost too ‘big’ in fact, but within days it tightened up and became more precise, without losing any of its initial impact. I also heard some hardness or brittleness, for want of a better word, in more mid-forward tracks with very busy upper-mid/lower-treble sections, and this also settled after burn-in, continuing to settle even more after a few weeks’ regular use.

As a side note, you’d be well within your rights to suggest that a $3,000+ IEM should not have to be ‘seasoned’ like this to reach its best possible level, but this isn’t unique to EVO or Empire Ears IEMs, nor is it uncommon to most high-end, precision audio gear, especially gear with moving parts and/or dynamic drivers.


Tonality

While it probably makes more sense to compare and contrast EVO’s sound characteristics to its ‘predecessor’, I’ll leave that for the ‘Select Comparisons’ section below and instead focus on how I hear EVO on its own merits.

To my ears, from the very first post-burn-in listen, EVO shirks any suggestion that it’s a gung-ho L-shaped bass-heavy IEM. Instead, I’m hearing a very well-balanced W-shaped tonality, with some added oomph in the bass department only when it’s called for in a track. Even then, the way Dean tuned the mids – especially the upper mids – to generally follow the Harman target curve, means the added clarity and quality of EVO’s midrange is never overpowered by the bass.

With lower mids and upper treble slightly more relaxed, though still well within touching distance of the curve, and the transition from upper mids to treble being fairly gradual, there are no parts of the FR that sound unnatural to me. Upper mids are more forward than I’m used to, but I’ve come to appreciate how this plays into the overall tuning, allowing for listening at lower volume levels without any loss of detail, despite my moderate‘cookie bite’ hearing loss (worth a Google, if you’re curious).

Even for a non-musician like myself, I can tell that EVO has been tuned with instrumental accuracy in mind. The timbre of live instruments, especially drums and guitars, seems very realistic to me, and I’m also liking how EVO presents the attack, fundamentals, and decay of piano strikes right across the frequency spectrum. It’s not a dry, clinical tuning, but rather more lifelike, as I’d expect to hear these instruments played by actual musicians in person.


Bass is unquestionably the star of the EVO show, however. The same way you buy a performance car for its horsepower, you buy EVO for its bass. Yes, it has much more than just bass to offer, but there’s no reason not to flaunt your superpower when you have one. It’s difficult to describe EVO’s bass with one word, because it’s got not one, not two, but three different drivers contributing to a multi-faceted, multi-layered, almost multidimensional range of lower frequencies that are felt as much as heard.

EVO extends lower into the sub-bass region than any other IEM and virtually any other headphone I’ve heard before. At frequencies this low, sub-40Hz, the bass is more a feeling – a rumble – than an auditory experience. Before EVO I couldn’t imagine an IEM replicating the sensation of feeling the bass in my body, like a life-size subwoofer, and yet on several occasions, I’ve had similar sensations with EVO.

Take James Blake’s Limit To Your Love for a spin, and EVO might just leave you feeling a little seasick. From 0:55 both sets of Weapon IX+ woofers are activated simultaneously in a wavy, warbly sub-bass rhythm that's difficult to describe but oh so delicious to experience. I’m convinced there’s some bone conduction magic happening here too, since the intensity is so focused and also sandboxed in the sub-bass region, with almost no bleed into the upper bass and lower midrange.

Working through my checklist of sub-bass test tracks, EVO hits every low note with authority, from the door slam (0:13) in Rosie Thomas’s Why Waste More Time, to the ghostly rumble (0:59 and 1:07) in Kristin Hersh’s Your Ghost, and the repeating boom (from 2:21 onward) in Lana Del Rey’s Video Games. These brief moments add so much gravitas to each of these tracks that I can’t imagine them otherwise.

Moving further up the bass shelf, EVO doesn’t have a perceptible midbass ‘hump’ like many ‘bassy’ IEMs, and the curve dips gradually downwards towards the lower midrange, keeping midbass elevated, more so than other monitors but still very much in check. For me, this serves two purposes: to retain the maximum slam and punch in the bass when called for in instruments like kick drums, but also prevent the mid-to-upper bass notes from ‘veiling’ the detail in the midrange.

There are some great tracks I use to test out how ‘thick’ an IEM sounds as a result of its midbass emphasis. Ingrid Michaelson’s delicate vocals in The Way I Am can sound muffled when there’s too much midbass in the meaty upright bass plucks in the intro, which continues as a constant bassline throughout the track. With EVO the plucks are indeed weighty – and also perfectly textured – but stay well clear of the vocals when they start (0:17 onward). Likewise, Katie Melua’s indulgent bassline in Red Balloons sometimes obscures her vocal finery, but not with EVO.

Unlike many bass-boosted IEMs (like Legend X) that use special tuning tricks to keep elevated midbass from bleeding or bloating, EVO does it while retaining extremely healthy levels of bass quantity. With EVO it’s less a case of added midrange emphasis as it is sound shaping the bass.

The last thing I want to say about EVO’s bass is that, quantity aside, the quality is equally if not more impressive. This is not the slower, more elongated bass of the Legend X, or, the speaker-like but somewhat subdued bass of the Tia Fourte, or the hyper-realistic but ultimately less visceral bass of the IE 900. There’s a tactility and speed to the low notes that, to my ear, is a combination of very high resolution and precision. Then there’s the positionality (a combination of imaging and layering) that can only be achieved, it seems, with something other than traditional air conduction drivers, and so the combination of all three creates a bass presentation that, as far as I can tell, is unique to EVO and Empire Ears.

This isn’t limited to instrumental bass either; EVO makes EDM drops sound exceptionally clean, crisp and powerful, effortlessly keeping pace with even the fastest kick beats. Take DZP and Zanon’s hot single Indica,for example, featuring super-fast bass drops double timed with funk-like instrumental effects and exotic vocals. EVO can just as easily deliver skull-crushing bass on demand. A track like Groove Delight and Black Jacket’s Baiana, with some of the hardest-hitting drops I’ve heard (1:00 onward), makes EVO one of the most enjoyable EDM IEMs I’ve personally experienced.



Midrange is where things get interesting with EVO, and is perhaps its biggest tonal departure from Legend X. Empire Ears’ recent tunings have tended to introduce more upper midrange energy to the sound, most notably with Odin and, to a lesser extent, Hero. EVO follows a similar path, but in a less aggressive manner.

Before we get to the upper midrange minefield, however, a quick note about the lower mids, where most male vocals and the fundamentals of deeper female vocals tend to sit. On balance, EVO’s lower mids are maybe a hair below neutral, but there’s still enough residual energy from the upper bass, I feel, to impart male vocals with very natural if not overly chesty tonality.

Neil Diamond sounds very much like Neil Diamond in Hello Again, from the classic The Jazz Singersoundtrack. All the detail in his slightly coarse delivery on this track is there to be heard, with a hint of bass supporting his baritone, but it’s not the warm or coloured presentation that may be preferable to some. The same goes for Mark Kozelek’s brilliant supporting vocals in Holly Throsby’s What Do You Say, which I say sounds very natural indeed. I’ve heard him sound more weighty with other monitors, but I like how he sounds with EVO, and it’s probably more true-to-life too.

The upper midrange, as I’ve already hinted, is where things get interesting. Upper midrange/lower treble tuning – the so-called presence region of the graph – is an ongoing debate in audiophile circles. Some swear by boosted treble and recessed upper mids, a-la Tia Fourte and, to a lesser extent, IE 900, while others prefer boosted upper mids and/or upper treble to provide as much clarity, detail and air as possible.

EVO, for me, takes a measured approach. Yes, the upper midrange frequencies sit well above the lower mids, but the rise from lower to upper mids is more gradual than it is with Odin, for example. Beyond 5kHz, which is probably the upper limit of the upper midrange, EVO’s treble, which I’ll discuss in more detail below, doesn’t deviate sharply upward or downward, continuing the smooth transition from the midrange.

I therefore hear EVO, on the whole, as forward but smooth in this area, without any shout (in all but the poorest of female vocal recordings). It’s a midrange that’s neither too full nor too thin, too wet or too dry, but clear and full-bodied and definitely not sterile. This is tasteful colour, and when it works with the music, it works surprisingly well (for someone like me, who until recently was firmly in the recessed-is-best camp).

Norah Jones’s earthy vocals and accompanying instrumentation in Come Away With Me are so realistic, it’s as if I’m standing right next to her through the performance. There’s no hint of grain, glassiness, or sibilance in any of the tracks I use to test for them, including Katie Pruitt’s It’s Always Been You, Brandi Carlile’s The Story, BEYRIES’ Alone, Lana Del Rey’s Dark But Just A Game or Maggie Rogers’ Satellite. By the way, if you haven’t heard this last track, do yourself a favour and check it out, keeping in mind she recorded it as a teen with her high school band in a high school music studio.

While I do hear some added emphasis in the higher pitches of some female vocals on specific tracks, like Stevie Nicks in Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams, they’re never shouty – unless there’s shout in the recording. Vocals are also less forward than they are with some midrange-focused monitors, like Isabellae and, to a lesser extent, Traillii, but are so detailed that any hint of recession is overcome by the clarity.

It’s not all rainbows and roses, however. Out the box, one of the few issues I had with EVO was a brittleness or hardness in the presence region that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It only cropped up on certain tracks, and then only in very specific sections of those tracks. Def Leppard’s Love Bites was one of those tracks, and I say was because, post burn-in, the roughness I initially heard in the parts where the melee of snare drums, grinding electric guitars and Joe Elliott’s pitchy vocals (1:20 – 1:30) was less confronting.

Still, there’s a vibrancy and energy when instruments and vocals get wild and heavy in this FR range that’s palpable, and potentially more fatiguing, than they would be with sedate monitors. Some extreme examples include the crescendo to Jillette Johnson’s Love Is Blind (2:08 – 2:16), and one I picked from the forums, Seven Lions/Wooli/Trivecta’s Island (featuring Nevve), where the combination of compression, bright vocals, and intense electronic instruments (especially from 1:48 onward) sounds like a wall of razorblades on EVO, especially at higher volumes.

My personal view is that, extreme examples aside, there’s an intimacy and immediacy to EVO’s midrange – a tuning choice from what I understand – that works well for the vast majority of my music library, but on occasion shows up the lemons in the mix. Why that is exactly, I’m not sure.

What I am sure of is that EVO is less forgiving than Legend X, or IE 900, or any other number of IEMs with a ‘safer’ tuning. EVO’s midrange, like its bass, is highly resolving, not far off from the most resolving IEMs I’ve been privileged enough to hear, like Fourte and Traillii. The added dimensionality of the bone conduction driver also can’t be understated, often presenting music or specific sounds in surprising and unfamiliar ways, and it could well be this unfamiliarity that jars, at least at first.


Treble, thankfully, is far from jarring. I could probably stop right there, because unlike its bass or midrange, EVO’s treble is rather inconspicuous. That’s not to say there’s a deficiency here, at least not for my personal preferences. I hear EVO’s treble as smooth, natural and polite, supporting rather than headlining.

There’s no lack of sharpness or detail to Nils Lofgren’s exceptionally trebly guitar play in Keith Don’t Go, or Max Richter’s cacophony of violins in his recomposed version of Vivaldi’s Winter 1. What it does lack is peakiness, harshness or mid-treble zing, preferable, in my opinion, to Legend X (occasionally peaky), Tia Trio (occasionally zingy) or Tia Fourte (occasionally strident).

Despite its bass emphasis and relatively milder treble, you’d think EVO was a darker-tuned IEM, but that’s not the case. It’s not bright – though some tracks lean that way when they hit the lower treble region with too much energy. For those seeking more energy up top, and like their treble to sparkle like a Christmas tree, EVO is probably not your IEM. The same goes for those who seek an abundance of lightness and air.


Technicalities

Where EVO is a shift away from the warmer, more organic-sounding Legend X tuning, the two are even further apart when it comes to technical ability. Let’s not forget that Legend X was, and is, technically very capable. It has excellent wide staging, good resolution, and commendable imaging and separation despite an overall thicker sound profile. EVO, on the other hand, is a technical upgrade in every single metric. In fact, I don’t think there’s any technical aspect of EVO’s performance that Empire Ears hasn’t managed to improve, either through fine-tuning, better drivers (Weapon IX+), a more efficient crossover network, and of course the inclusion of Weapon X.

Soundstage is the first metric that’s audibly wider with EVO. While depth and, to a lesser extent height has also been improved, the added width gives EVO a spacious, elliptical-shaped stage with many instances of out-of-head sounds appearing from virtually nowhere. Listening to the right and left channel shakers in the intro to the Eagles live performance of Hotel California captures the sense of space in the venue, combined with the layered crowd effects. Meanwhile, Yosi Horikawa’s Bubbles are generously spaced out on a wide and, on this particular track, tall stage.

With Weapon X adding reverb to certain sounds in the mix, I’m hearing more space and ‘air’ around the vocals. Normally intimate vocals, like Heidi Talbot’s in Cathedrals, shrink the stage the closer they come to the listener, but instead EVO creates a void around the vocals so they’re almost floating in space, perfectly centred, with instruments and effects moving around and beyond them. Instead of creating silos on the stage, however, EVO somehow integrates them into a cohesive soundscape.

Imaging is the most obvious beneficiary of EVO’s fleshed-out stage, with instruments, effects and vocals precisely positioned – and sometimes not where you’ve heard them positioned before. The centre image is very solid, without any diffusion or confusion about where the vocals are coming from. Better yet, on some recordings where the singer moves around the microphone, like Meiko covering Crush in David Chesky’s binaural recording of Playing Favorites, it’s easy to follow her as she takes even a few steps to the left, right or backwards. This precision certainly isn’t unique to EVO, but I’ve only heard it presented this convincingly on the very best technical IEMs like Fourte and Traillii.

Separation and layering of the different sounds and elements are the third major quiver in EVO’s technical bow. Regardless of how complex the music becomes (with a few notable exceptions), no instrument, vocal, or special effect is lost in the mix. Even subtle details can be picked out from the crowd, and backing vocals two or three rows deep are distinct in their own space.

The soft backing vocals whispering behind the lead singer in Dadawa’s Sister Drum are never impeded by the main vocals or instruments, and Luke Doucet’s vocals are clear as day even though they’re tucked right behind Melissa McClelland’s lead (and a droning bassline) in Whitehorse’s Dear Irony.


Resolution is the glue that ties these technical elements together. I don’t think EVO would be able to pull off this level of technical acuity without top-tier resolution across the board, and the jump up in resolving power from the likes of Legend X and IE 900 is significant. It’s not just the clarity that’s been added by tuning tweaks, or the space created by Weapon X, this is raw resolution.

Plug into a highly resolving source, like an R8 or Hugo2, and you’ll be rewarded with inflections of vocal chords and the wet breath of singers standing way too close to the microphone. Play back the famous ‘clocks’ intro to Pink Floyd’s Time, and every gear shift, every hand movement, is clearly audible. You’ll even hear the PA announcer directing passengers to their seats in On The run, the preceding track on Dark Side of the Moon, all the while spaceship and laser gun effects zoom past your head, left to right.

Dynamics could be a descriptor for EVO itself. It’s an incredibly dynamic IEM, with an ability to shift from the quiet, monotone build-up to Hans Zimmer’s Mountains, for example, before exploding into life in a rousing, emotional wave of sound (2:02), an experience in-ear as much as it was on screen. Angel Olsen’s Lark is a more contemporary example, with bursts of powerful vocal crescendos mixed with quiet, contemplative passages and subdued instrumentation. As is the climactic conclusion to Daft Punk’s Contact, a crazy mix of crunchy sound effects and explosions that puts you inside the doomed space capsule.



The X-factor

This is where I’d normally end the sound impressions section for most reviews, but I’d be remiss not to mention the importance of bone conduction in general and Weapon X specifically when it comes to shaping EVO’s overall tonal landscape.

The way Weapon X affects what you’re hearing really depends on the information in the track. It’s not a blanket ‘filter’ that’s going to predictably make certain changes to the sound. The effect can be subtle, and most often is, but at times is also very obvious. For me, EVO’s X-factor, excuse the pun, is in how it blurs the lines between what’s heard and felt, which adds to the realism and accuracy of certain instruments and sounds.

Take the kick drum in the intro to Big Thief’s recently released single, Changes. Most of us have heard a real kick drum before, and when pedal hits the skin, it’s much more than just a sound you’re hearing. You can feel it, from the initial punch to the hardness of the hit, to the natural decay. Many IEMs with good dynamic driverssimulate this feeling quite effectively, but EVO adds a realism I can genuinely feel from my head to my torso. Of course it’s not the same full-body feeling you’d get from a live performance or actual speakers, but it makes it much easier for your mind to take you there.

Weapon X doesn’t just add to the realism of sound, it also adds to realism of stage. This isn’t limited to the bass frequencies either, although if you’re wondering how EVO manages to keep the thunder so separate from the lightning, so to speak, it’s because Weapon X is working on the resonance and reverb and other aspects of the sound that help place it on the virtual stage.


Angel Olsen’s pristine vocals in Chance, the closing track of her brilliant LP All Mirrors, don’t just decay, there’s an added echo that helps me see the size and shape of the space she’s singing in. This is a very specific Weapon X effect that affects vocals in particular, since I haven’t heard them presented in quite the same way with other IEMs. Another Weapon X feature affects the treble frequencies, predominantly in bell and chime sounds such as those in the mediaeval instruments of Angels of Venice’s Trotto. The last time I heard this type of sound reproduction was from a full-size silk-domed tweeter.

With its new Weapon IX+ drivers and re-tuned custom balanced armatures, EVO would still have been a worthwhile, if less substantial, revision to Legend X. Adding a full range bone conduction driver in Weapon X makes EVO a new class of IEM altogether, and something that I believe we’ll be seeing much more of in the not-too-distant future.


Simply put we’ve maximized and mastered the performance of current IEM driver technologies through air conduction. From here, our only goal was to elevate the listening experience, evolving it once again to redefine what’s possible with IEMs. [For example] EVO’s ability to effortlessly compartmentalize and layer lower bass without interfering with any of the other frequencies is perhaps one of the most challenging yet remarkable things we’ve achieved to date. It really just takes what the Legend X did well to an extraordinary new level.


Select comparisons

EVO and Legend X. Seeing how I kicked off this review with a preface about Legend X, and how EVO came to be, it’s only fitting that this is the most relevant and important comparison to make. It wasn’t too long ago that Jack hinted there was not going to be a Legend X successor, and from early EVO impressions, some are saying there indeed isn’t and that EVO is something entirely new.

For me, EVO is very much a Legend X successor, at least spiritually. The mantra that ‘you can’t go past Legend X if what you want is the best and biggest bass in the business’ has now unequivocally been passed on to EVO. That EVO grabs this notion and takes it well beyond the capabilities of Legend X doesn’t mean it’s no longer comparable, but rather that, like anything audio, some may prefer Legend X’s more restrained tonality and forgiving technicalities over EVO’s extension in every metric.

Design and fit. EVO is notably larger, thicker, and heavier than Legend X, although EVO’s nozzle makes it slightly easier for me to get a good ‘shallow fit’ seal than I do with Legend X. So, while Legend X’s shells fit more easily inside my outer ear cavity, EVO’s fit fine too, even though they fill out my ears completely.

Neither IEM ‘disappears’, to put it another way, and while I’m constantly aware of both of them while listening, it’s not to the point of distraction, and some may even prefer that ear-filling feeling. Both IEMs also share the same silky-smooth finish and classy all-black design that make them, to my mind, two of the better-looking IEMs currently available – yes, even better looking than flashy abalone or Bifrost, if you ask me – though EVO’s black shell is slightly less opaque.

The supplied accessories for both IEMs are visually the same, except for EVO’s Genesis cable being far superior in every way to Legend X’s entry-level Effect Audio Ares II – a decent cable in its own right but no match for the PW Audio alternative.

Sound. Tonally, both IEMs are variations of a W-shaped tuning, though it’s easier to push Legend X closer to an L-shaped tuning, especially with its stock tips and cable. I don’t hear EVO to have less bass than Legend X, especially since it’s much easier to power EVO’s Weapon IX+ drivers than it is to get Legend’s dual Weapon IX drivers to wake up, but quantity is neither here nor there; these are both unashamedly bass boosted IEMs, and proud of it.

Where they differ more drastically is bass quality. EVO’s bass quality is a step or two up from Legend X, its upgraded woofers more resolving, more controlled, more precise, more multifaceted. EVO’s bass is also faster, effortlessly keeping pace with quickfire EDM basslines, while Legend X has a warmer, more organic quality to its bass, with slower attack and decay making it sound more romantic than natural.

EVO’s boosted (upper) midrange is another departure from Legend X’s more recessed tuning. Legend X, with its thicker lower mids and warmer upper mids is also wetter and more organic than EVO, which is clearer, more resolving, more forward, and more neutral leaning in tonality. Most people I’ve spoken to who prefer Legend X’s tuning to EVO’s cite the midrange differences as the main reason.

Both EVO and Legend X have a relaxed approach to treble, at least in comparison to their elevated bass, though EVO’s is more extended, smoother, and less peaky than Legend X’s, which can sometimes be a touch spiky, especially because it rises further up from the relatively subdued upper mids. Where Legend has a touch more sparkle, EVO has more air up top, and also sounds more natural to my ears.

Technically, as I’ve hinted earlier in the review, EVO is a step up from Legend X, literally across the board. Wider, larger soundstage, more precise imaging, better separation and layering, more resolution, and better dynamics are all checkboxes in EVO’s favour. Where Legend X has excellent technicalities for a top-tier IEM, EVO stands shoulder to shoulder with some of the best technical performers on the market.

Jack and Dean consider EVO to be the Legend X successor, and I agree. Other than a relaxed midrange tuning, which is possibly better suited to more aggressive genres, and the sentimental value of owning the original, iconic audiophile basshead IEM, I can’t see any reason to keep Legend X and EVO in the same collection when the latter performs at a consistently higher level with most types of music.


EVO and IE 900. Why would I compare a diminutive single dynamic driver IEM with one of the largest 8-driver tribrid behemoths? Probably because anyone who’s heard Sennheiser’s flagship can attest to how far it punches above its equally ‘diminutive’ pricetag, for a flagship anyway, and how bass performance is one of its standout features compared to any current IEM, regardless of price. Other than Legend X, it also happens to be the only other TOTL IEM in my current collection, so there’s that.

Design and fit. If there’s one aspect where the IE 900 has EVO beat hands-down, it’s fit. Yes I know, some have tried and failed to find a good fit with this laughably small IEM and its basic set of stock tips, but slipping on my trusty Acoustunes I was floored at how simple, seamless and comfortable it is to wear, even with a slightly deeper fit than I’m normally used to. Unlike EVO, the IE 900 literally does disappear in my ears, and after a few minutes’ use, I almost forget I’m wearing them, which adds to the spooky effect of its massive sound coming from seemingly nowhere.

The IE 900 has a fold-over shape like many on-stage monitors – even though it wasn’t designed for stage use – that slips into my ear canals with only a small faceplate on the outside to show for it. It’s made of precision CNC-polished aluminium that weighs next to nothing yet feels cool to the touch, and will likely stand up to far more punishment than EVO’s shiny resin shells ever could, not that I handle it any less carefully than I do EVO.

Sennheiser’s choice of stock cable is also controversial, with memory wire ear loops that are thicker and heavier than the shells themselves, and a tendency for microphonics when rubbed up the wrong way. That said, in my opinion, the stock cable is a better fit for the IE 900 than Genesis is for EVO, and while I do get better performance out of my custom Cardas cable, it doesn’t warrant the change as much as it does with EVO. Sennheiser also supplies three cables, each with different terminations, while EVO ships without any adapters for Genesis’ Pentaconn plug to other common formats.

Sound. Sennheiser’s flagship was a surprising revelation when I first heard it, with a natural sound that kept everything in balance, an easy-listening tonality, and bass quality unlike anything I’d heard before in an IEM. Even with Legend X in my collection, IE 900 rendered bass in such a unique way that I started giving it more ear time despite my penchant for Legend X’s low-end wiles.

EVO turns the tables with a bass presentation that goes even further. Its bass is more visceral, physical and multi-dimensional, making IE 900 sound neutral by comparison, even though they’re not too far off each other in actual elevation. EVO’s bass is also more resolving, reaching deeper into the sub-bass, although both put more focus on sub-bass with a gradual rise to a flatter midbass, my preferred bass tuning.

IE 900’s midrange is airier and more diffuse. Lower mids are fuller and more present than EVO’s, giving gravitas to thicker male vocals and instruments in that region, while upper mids sit well below EVO’s and lower, relatively, than the bass, reducing the emphasis in the presence region and placing vocals slightly farther back as a result.

EVO’s treble is more relaxed than IE 900’s, where the Sennheiser has significantly more treble energy in the lower and middle treble between 5kHz and 10kHz. That said, IE 900’s treble isn’t harsh, sibilant or bright, but can, occasionally, colour the upper midrange harmonics with some added zing, whereas zing doesn’t exist in EVO’s treble vocabulary.

Technically, while IE 900 is a strong performer, EVO is in a different class altogether. It has a wider stage, comparatively, though IE 900 matches EVO’s stage for depth and, track-depending, height. IE 900 is more coherent, but EVO is in turn multi-layered, with more precise imaging, better separation, and higher resolution across all frequencies. EVO is also more dynamic, but IE 900 is lively in its own right.

Ultimately, I find EVO and IE 900 to be more complementary than competitive. IE 900 is an easier, safer, more balanced all-day listen, with its exceptional comfort and miniature dimensions, whereas EVO is better suited to shorter, more focused listens when nothing but the very best sound quality with maximum intensity will do.


EVO and Traillii. This is the big one, isn’t it? EVO compared to the summit-fi darling, the IEM that can do no wrong. I’m being glib, of course, because I really do love Traillii, and these two IEMs couldn’t be more different if they tried. But don’t let facts get in the way of a good dust-up, and let’s see what happens when the unstoppable force that is EVO hits the immovable object that is Traillii.

The elephant in the room, as is often the case with Traillii, is the sticker price. Traillii retails for twice as much as EVO, and even though it includes a much more expensive cable, its value proposition is ultimately nowhere near as attractive as EVO’s. Traillii also appeals to a very different audience, one less enthused by bombastic sound and favours a safer, more relaxed, and arguably more versatile tuning. Ultimately these two IEMs make better bedfellows than they do competitors, and if money is no object, make an almost ideal complementary pair for truly summit-fi sound.

Design and fit. Traillii and EVO are not entirely dissimilar in their build. Traillii’s clear, medical-grade resin shells and painted top plate are similar in feel to EVO’s, though I’m unsure if Traillii shares EVO’s protective lacquer coating. Size-wise Traillii is a fair bit smaller than EVO and about the same size as Legend X, with a shorter, thicker nozzle. Traillii’s nozzle notch makes it easier to keep silicone tips secure than EVO’s smooth, notch-less nozzle, but also harder to get many tips on in the first place. The thicker nozzle also limits the type of tip that fits.

In the ear, Traillii is the easier wear, and those with larger ears may need larger tips to fit them securely. And, as mentioned earlier, Traillii’s PW Audio-made cable is a more expensive variant of the company’s 4-wire ‘The 1960s’, a $2,000 cable that’s better performing but less ergonomic than Genesis.

Sound. While Traillii and EVO share a W-shaped tonality in theory, Traillii is more balanced and closer to neutral, while EVO is bolder, especially in the bass and upper midrange, with a more relaxed, tapered treble.

It’s difficult to compare the apples and oranges that are EVO’s and Traillii’s bass, the former powered by twin 9mm dynamic subwoofers and a 10mm bone conduction driver, the latter by two miniature BA drivers. Traillii’s bass makes a good case for the most realistic, and I daresay dynamic driver-like bass, in a BA-bass IEM, at least of the ones I’ve heard, but it doesn’t really challenge EVO’s powerful, deep-reaching, visceral bass in terms of quantity or, in my opinion, quality. That’s more preference than fact, and I know many people who actively seek out less bass than what EVO has on offer, for that very reason.

Midrange is a wash between the two, Traillii being fuller in the lower mids compared to EVO, and not quite as forward in the upper mids, giving it a lighter touch with female vocals. Traillii’s lower treble dip makes it sibilance-proof, much like EVO, and further up, its quad e-stat drivers deliver more sparkle and air compared to EVO’s neutral-leaning treble.

Technically, both Traillii and EVO are tour de force IEMs. Traillii’s stage is wider, deeper and taller, but only fractionally. Imaging on both is top-notch, with Traillii putting more air between instruments and revealing more layers in the music. Resolving power is on par, with EVO improving on Traillii’s bass and midrange detail and clarity and Traillii countering with more detailed treble.

Where EVO puts you on stage with the band, up close to the singer and right next to the drums and horns, Traillii seats you in the fifth row, close enough to enjoy every nuance and detail of the performance, yet far enough that nothing jumps out at you unexpectedly. As mentioned above, these two IEMs deserve a place alongside each other in any high-end collection, and work better together than apart to cover almost every genre, presentation and mood imaginable.


Final analysis and closing thoughts

Where does one begin summarising the strengths of an IEM that’s so different to anything that’s come before? Before I give you my verdict, here’s Jack’s take:


With a legacy born of Empire Ear’s class-defining icon that is Legend X, Legend EVO is the new dawn, giving us the first tangible glimpse of what the future holds for the brand and the sound. Bass is again the foundation, but it defines EVO far less than it did its predecessor, with a tonality that seeks balance over brawn, and technicalities that elevate it to the top tier of contemporary high-end monitors.

Emotionally and physically, EVO puts me in the front row at a live performance, sometimes even closer – on stage with the band. It’s a powerful, energetic sound that is more immediate than holographic but still has a unique 3D presentation that I haven’t heard with other IEMs. At the same time, its timbral accuracy is astonishing, rendering instruments and vocals so realistically I can almost touch them.

Key to EVO’s sound is a wholly-reimagined approach to presenting music, using specialised bone conduction technology in a new and unique way that goes beyond what was previously possible with traditional multi-driver air conduction techniques. Weapon X might be the first driver of its kind in an IEM, but it won’t be the last, and I expect the technology will filter down to the mainstream before long.

For now, EVO is a compelling prospect for any audio enthusiast for whom powerful, energised, dynamic, and emotionally engaging sound is a priority. It shirks safe for stupendous and does things with familiar music that sometimes takes several listens to appreciate and embrace. For me, it’s an easy recommendation, epitomising the state of the art and ticking almost every checkbox I have for a high-end musical monitor.

Full disclosure: Dekoni sent me the complete set of Elite HD800 pads to test and review on my own system with my own pair of HD800 headphones, without fear, favour or any expectation for preferential treatment or specific outcomes. The views and notes below are my own, and entirely reflect my own hearing, taste in music and sonic preferences in sharing them here.

It took me many years to warm up to the genius that is the Sennheiser HD800. Coming from unashamedly ‘basshead’ roots, the HD800 always seemed to me to be an over-hyped, overpriced headphone that appealed to audiophile ‘snobs’, with their hoity-toity classical and jazz-inspired playlists.

And yet with the years the HD800 just seemed to hold its own as a headphone that many aspired to emulate but only ended up poorly imitating. Even Sennheiser’s own HD800S, supposedly designed to address the few shortcomings of the original – namely a ‘nasty’ 6kHz spike and strident treble – split enthusiasts down the middle, with the likes of Innerfidelity’s Tyll Herstens boldly declaring the HD800S failed to measure up to its older brother in some key areas (bass distortion and muddled mids, for instance).

For everything the HD800 (and HD800S) had going for it, it somehow also spawned a sub-industry of modifications for beginners and enthusiasts alike (one of which, the SuperDupont Resonator or SDR mod, I wholeheartedly recommend as an essential upgrade). But, until recently, there was nothing that suggested the very interface between the HD800 and your head – the pads – needed tweaking.

Considering how ‘pad rolling’ is part and parcel of modern-day head-fi, you’d think this a little strange, until you realise that the HD800 is so sophisticated in its simplicity that even the smallest change can make a massive difference to how it sounds, and that most changes take the sound too far away from the HD800 ‘sweet spot’, the very sound that makes it so special and so preferable to so many.

Dekoni Elite – a pad rolling panacea

Dekoni Audio has built a well-deserved reputation for making high-quality replacement pads for some of the world’s most popular headphones. I reviewed their pads for Focal’s Elear here, and found them to markedly improve on both the sound quality and build quality of the original pads. That said, the Elear absolutely needs a pad change to sound its best; the HD800, as I’ve grown to appreciate, does not.

Not only is the HD800 one of the most ergonomically comfortable headphones I’ve ever worn, the pads strike an almost ideal balance between comfort and sound quality. The HD800 does what it does not only because of its massive dynamic drivers, expertly engineered cups, and optimised mix of materials, it’s about the sum of its parts. Change one, and the risk is you change everything else.

That goes for the pads too. There’s a reason Alex Grell chose the size, shape, thickness and materials for his pads. And yet in designing their range of Elite pads for the HD800, Dekoni unapologetically broke all the rules by changing not only the material but also the shape, thickness and construction of the original pads. Would it be one change too many, or have they somehow found a solution where no-one else had previously thought of looking?


Dekoni’s Elite series of pads almost always includes four different versions, and the HD800 family is no different. I received one each of their Elite Sheepskin, Elite Fenestrated Sheepskin, Elite Velour and Elite Hybrid pads in sturdy, well-constructed boxes. Each pad type is identical bar the construction materials, which, like all other previous Dekoni pads, are made from high-quality heat activated memory foam inners and real leather or plush velour outers. Along with the pads, Dekoni supplies a small plastic tool for removing the original pads, and a printed set of instructions showing how to mount (and unmount) the Dekoni pads onto the headphones.

Removing the original (OEM) pads is simple, made even simpler with the Dekoni tool. A few careful plucks, and the pads pop off from the cups with ease, exposing the original perforated Sennheiser dust covers in each cup. At this point I advise you remove the original dust covers, because the Dekoni pads have their own built-in, non-detachable covers, and in my listening, I found that two layers of dust covers were not only overkill but also added a thin and unwanted veil to some of the music.

Some have suggested the Sennheiser dust covers are integral to the HD800’s sound signature, and cut away the Dekoni covers instead. Not wanting to mutilate perfectly good pads, I decided to take the easier option, but the brave among you may want to experiment differently.

Installing the Dekoni pads is equally simple; line up the tabs on the back of the Dekoni pads with the indents in the HD800 cups, and carefully work your way around each pad, pushing in along the edge until it ‘clicks’ into place. In less than a minute the changeover was complete and listening could begin.


Before we get into comfort and sound impressions, a quick note on removing the Dekoni pads, because as easy it is to install them, removing them is anything but. If you’re like me and baby your HD800 more than you baby your babies (and for good reason, babies don’t come with paint that chips just by looking at it), then you’ll want to be extra super cautious when removing the Dekoni pads from your babies.

Inserting the tool and getting the first ‘pop’ is easy enough, but unlike the original pads that seem to pop off in one smooth motion, the Dekoni pads pop and then hold fast at every adjacent clamp point. According to the instructions, the trick is to grip the pads after the initial pop and then gently (and by that they mean firmly) twist the pads around and away from the cups without breaking anything in the process.

I believe bomb disposal experts have had less nerve-wracking experiences with far more dangerous equipment, but after some profuse sweating and less-than-profound language, I seem to have perfected the art of Dekoni HD800 pad removal. Still, I only attempted it four times – as many times as I needed to install and listen to each of the different pads for the purpose of this review – and I’m glad to say my beloved HD800 still looks good as new.

Look, feel and touch

The first thing you’ll notice about the fit of all four Dekoni Elite pads is how much thicker they are compared to the original pads. The face of each pad is fat and flat, unlike the round and shallow profile of the originals. Also, unlike the original pads that are filled with a squishy, semi-firm foam, the Dekoni pads are filled with a heat-activated memory foam that’s initially quite stiff and cold to the touch but quickly softens as it’s warmed up and ‘moulds’ to the contours of your face.

The extra size takes a bit of getting used to, both visually and physically. In my case I needed two or three further clicks on the headband to get the pads to sit flush with my ears on my very average-sized head, and while I love the look of the pads, they do make the HD800 seem a little less refined and more aggressive in appearance. Size-wise, take note, because if your head is larger than average and your HD800 headband is already maxed out, then you might find the Dekoni pads are just too tight for comfort. Conversely, if the HD800 has worn too loose on your head until now, the Dekoni pads will grip you like Goodyear tyres on a freshly tarred road.

Speaking of grip, one of the advantages of the HD800, for me, is its relative lack of clamp with the original pads. Due to the thickness and resulting slight change of angle of the cups on my face, the HD800 with Dekoni pads is both tighter and grippier. It’s not uncomfortable, it’s differently comfortable. The Elite Velour and Elite Hybrid pads are the most comfortable of the set, like two warm cushions on the skin, and while the leather pads are supple and smooth to the touch – and the leather is good quality real leather rather than the cheap pleather used on so many other aftermarket pads – they’re slightly harder and cooler, at least initially.


Sound impressions

All the comfort in the world doesn’t make a difference if the sound isn’t up to par, and on the whole, the sound quality of the HD800 with all four Dekoni Elite pads is excellent. It’s also different to stock, no matter what it says on the tin, so how much you love the ‘original’ sound (or in my case the HD800 SDR sound), and how far you’re willing to go for better fit or comfort (if indeed the Dekonis are more comfortable to you), will determine how much more (or less) you like them over the stock pads.

In designing the HD800, Dekoni founder and owner Tal Kocen said the one thing he tried to do was to smooth out the 5kHz (although most measure it as 6kHz) peak and by testing with different baffling materials. He also suggests the ‘openness’ of the HD800 design means that sound changes are far more subtle with a pad swap compared to pad rolling a closed headphone, and that “the biggest difference is that while they don’t necessarily change the frequency response much, they move the drivers away from the ear and create more space within the headphone.”

I took time to listen to each set of pads, taking notes using my tried-and-tested playlist to listen for particular nuances in the sound. Most of the pads were tested using most of the playlist, which includes (but isn’t limited to):

Amber Rubarth– Hold On (from Sessions From the 17thWard)

Heidi Talbot– If You Stay (from Love & Light)

Lana Del Rey– Video Games (from Born To Die)

Norah Jones– Come Away With Me (from Come Away With Me)

Thomas Bergersen– Gift of Life (from Illusions)

Def Leppard– Love Bites (from Hysteria)

Angels of Venice– Trotto (from Angels of Venice)

Jethro Tull– The Waking Edge (from Crest of a Knave)

Lorde– Royals (from Pure Heroine)

Max Richter– Winter 1 (from Recomposed by Max Richter – Vivaldi: The Four Seasons)

My HD800 listening aligns fairly closely with my preferred musical styles, those being acoustic female vocals, female-driven pop, light classical, cinematic scores, female vocal jazz, and soft rock. I listen to other genres as well, but in most cases anything that needs a heavier hand with bass or warmer, more intimate vocals is deferred to my second love, the ZMF Auteur.

It’s safe to say that if your listening tastes closely align with mine, you’ll find a lot to like, and much to love, with the Dekoni Elite pads. To keep it simple, I’ll cover how Dekoni measure and describe their own pads, and then compare what I heard with each of the pads on my own system.

Elite Velour

Dekoni: The biggest difference here is the Elite Velour pad will absorb a little more of the high frequency material and so you see a ~3dB dip between 10kHz and about 14kHz. It seems to take away some of the sparkle but causes the overall warmth to get accentuated a bit. Again, though, we see that 5kHz peak diminished and the high frequency material smoothed out.

My impressions: Easily the warmest of the pads, both in comfort and in sound. The opening sequence of guitar plucks on Heidi Talbot’s ‘If You Stay’ are as crisp and bassy as ever, but also a touch more resonant, with a slightly longer decay. That’s very possibly a factor of the added volume between ear and driver – something which also results in a marked decrease in volume over the stock pads. This applies to all the pads, not just Velour, so be mindful when making your own comparisons.

On that note, all the Dekoni pads will make your HD800 sound softer at the same volume setting, which could trick you into hearing differences in the sound profile that are only there because of the lower volume. Turn the dial up a bit to hear what the pads are really doing to the sound. I didn’t expect the volume drop to be as steep as it was, and to be honest is the change I liked least.

All that said, the change from stock sound, once volume matched, is subtle. With the SDR mod and mild EQ (I use SonarWorks religiously with my HD800 and don’t make any excuses for it), I never have an issue with treble spikes or glare, but the Dekoni Velour pads did take a hint of air away from the upper registers, and expanded the stage ever so slightly. Bass and mids, from what I could tell, were mostly unchanged.


Elite Sheepskin

Dekoni: This one makes the most sonic difference as the Sheepskin material by nature is thicker and less porous than the others. What this means is that the sheepskin does not absorb much of the material that hits it, it just keeps the material moving on through to your ear. The high frequencies don’t get absorbed at all and you maintain more material and ‘air’ to what you’re listening to. This pad is great for a little extra lift in the top end.

My impressions: oddly I found the Elite Sheepskin pads to have the least audible change from the original pads, probably because of all the pads they also had the least pronounced volume drop. It’s also possible that the music I listen to is generally well recorded with few glaring peaks, and I don’t have an extensive classical playlist, so perhaps the ‘strengths’ of this pad were lost on me.

Def Leppard’s cymbal splashes at around the 1:20 mark of ‘Love Bites’ can make or break a headphone for me, and if the extra ‘lift’ of the Sheepskin pads supposedly made this part any more strident, I didn’t hear it. Then again, I do have a particularly odd manifestation of hearing loss (called Cookie Bite, Google it), so it’s possible that the extra bite of the pads was cancelled out by the bite in my hearing, and the pads fit my hearing like a proverbial glove. Also I have a thing for leather pads, so of all the Dekonis, these were easily my favourite.


Elite Fenestrated Sheepskin

Dekoni: The frequency response on this one is almost identical to the Hybrid Pad, that is to say very little difference in the sound signature all the up to about 2kHz. The main difference between the two is comfort, depending on whether you prefer the feel of leather or velour on your skin.

My impressions: the biggest change for me with the Elite Fenestrated Sheepskin pads – which prior to receiving them I thought would be my favourite, given my penchant for the ‘fenestrated leather’ look – was the added airiness in the sound. Dekoni’s Fenestrated pads for the Focal Elear were easily my preferred choice for that headphone, and in hindsight that could be because of how well they balanced the Elear’s heavy-handed bass attack with the other frequencies. In the case of the HD800, I’m not sure the trick works as well, if only because the HD800 is not the world’s most bass-endowed headphone to begin with (which is also why my SonarWorks profile raises the bass level a few notches above neutral).

The heft of the mediaeval drums in Angel of Venice’s ‘Trotto’ was nowhere near as pronounced with these pads as it is with the stock pads, Sheepskin or Velour. Lorde’s ‘Royals’ also didn’t have the same aggressive thump that makes this track my litmus test for bass response. That said, if you prefer your bass leaner and more refined, the sound profile of the Fenestrated pads may be just the ticket. Strange as it seems I’ve heard the HD800 described by some as ‘warm’, especially with the SDR mod, and if you don’t like your sound too steamy, the combination of a bigger stage – even bigger than the stock HD800’s industry standard – and leaner bass will make for an appealing sonic cocktail.

Looks-wise I thought these pads would also be the most impressive, but unlike the Elear equivalent, the holes of the HD800 pads are larger, showing more of the yellow memory foam beneath, and giving the pads a less even appearance than I would have liked.


Elite Hybrid

Dekoni: Much like the Fenestrated Sheep, the Elite Hybrid does little to change the sound profile of the HD800 up to 2kHz. You will also notice a smoother transition out of the ‘conchal bowl’ and a nice arch over the peak while maintaining a little more of the higher 10kHz+ material which adds some air and a hint of sparkle to the sound.

My impressions: The Hybrids, like the Velours, were the most comfortable of the lot, but I have to say I find the combination of materials rather odd looking. This isn’t limited to the HD800 pads – I also found the Focal Hybrids rather odd. They have a ‘stitched together’ look that’s somewhat out of character with the pristinely precise construction of the HD800, but I guess the contrast could also make them oddly appealing to some.

In any case, the sound of the Hybrids tallies closely with Dekoni’s findings, although I did find them reducing the bass more than I’d typically want them to given the low base the HD800 starts you off with. If you do EQ your sound you may want to up the bass a touch along with the volume. The instrumental intro sequence to Jethro Tull’s ‘The Waking Edge’ covers almost the entire frequency spectrum, with some potentially piercing pings and razor-sharp guitar strings, and not once did I wince with the Hybrids on my ears. That a good thing for both my ears and the pads, and if you like the look, want the velour comfort and are happy to live with a slightly less hefty sound, these could be the pads for you.


Closing thoughts

You have to hand it to Dekoni: taking on an absolute classic headphone and tinkering with what many consider to be as close to perfection as you’ll get from a headphone is brave at best, reckless at worst. Fail and not only do you lose a sizeable investment in expensive materials, but your reputation among the Elite – excuse the pun – takes a solid hit.

On the whole, I think Dekoni have pulled it off very smartly indeed. They didn’t pretend to make a ‘better original’, rather going the route of ‘different original’. They put their cards on the table, clearly identifying the issues they wanted their pads to solve, and backing themselves with measurements that show where the differences – beneficial or otherwise – sit on the charts.

For someone like myself, who took a long time to fall in love with the HD800 but when I finally did, fell in love with it wholeheartedly, changing anything about this headphone was never going to be something I did without much trepidation. It took weeks of reading and convincing myself that a ‘serious’ mod like SDR was even fathomable (it turned out to be so easy and also so easily reversible as to seem rather insignificant after the fact), that a pad change was an order of magnitude more intrusive.

But Dekoni clearly did their homework with this set of pads. Even though removing the pads can induce a sudden bout of nausea, once you’ve done it successfully – by actually trusting the instructions – it’s all smooth sailing. Installation wobbles aside, the fact that Dekoni has created a set of pads that are not only better made than the originals but also use more expensive materials without actually being more expensive (not much anyway, and much cheaper if you’ve opted for Velour), makes them outstanding value and well worth a try even if, like me, you’re married to the original look and feel of the HD800.

Do I recommend them? Absolutely. There should be at least one of the set that most people will either find more comfortable, better looking or better sounding than the original pads. Whether or not I go back to using a pair of Dekoni Elite pads with my own HD800 remains to be seen. SDR aside, for now there’s just something about this headphone I never, ever want to change, and probably never will.

UTWS1: has FiiO made the world’s best true wireless IEMs?

64Audio are not renown for their wireless products, in fact I don’t think they make any wireless products at all.

Except thanks to Chinese audio giant FiiO, they now do. And by plugging my very-much-wired 64Audio U12t IEMs into FiiO’s new UTWS1 Bluetooth adapter, I may have found the world’s very best true wireless IEMs.

Ok, so the headline was (only slightly) misleading, and this review isn’t really about IEMs. Except it is, but not just my IEMs – any IEM. The beauty of the FiiO UTWS1 is that it works with just about any IEM with an MMCX or 2-pin connector, which means just about every IEM ever made.

But can this little wireless wonder really ditch the cable and keep the sound quality of a wired connection?



In the box

The FiiO UTWS1 is shipped in a small, unassuming square box, inside of which you’ll find the twin earpiece receivers inside a patterned zip-up carry case. Included in the case is a twin-headed micro USB cable, used to charge both earpieces simultaneously.



It’s a shame FiiO couldn’t figure out how to design a rechargeable case for the UTWS1, but then this is no ordinary true wireless device, and a case would have had to account for different sizes and shapes of IEMs.

The case supplied, and the earpieces themselves, are very well made, as you’d expect from any product bearing the FiiO logo. Each earpiece contains an elongated cylinder that fits behind the ear and houses the ‘smarts’ of the Bluetooth DAC and amplifier, along with a pushbutton and microphone.

A short, curved rubbery cable extends from each cylinder, designed to ergonomically fit around each ear. The cables are marked with red and blue rings around the MMCX connector version to denote right and left respectively, but oddly not on the 2-pin version.

They may seem a bit bulky at first, but the earpieces are very light, and the cable sits flush. Once in place the earpieces disappear behind the ear, and don’t cause any discomfort even after hours of continuous use.

Since I only have the 2-pin version, I can’t vouch for the quality of the MMCX connectors, but FiiO’s build quality track record is a good one. Overall, this is an impressive package, for what it is.






Features and functions

With Qualcomm’s QCC3030 Bluetooth 5.0 chip inside each earpiece, the FiiO UTWS1 supports Qualcomm’s ‘CD-quality’ AptX codec, along with standard AAC and SBC. I consider it a missed opportunity not to include support for AptX-HD and LDAC, though doing so would likely have resulted in significantly higher power consumption and licensing fees.

As an aside, this codec limitation isn’t unique to FiiO, but rather a marker on where we are with true wireless technology. Even Sony’s own true wireless IEMs don’t support LDAC – in fact they don’t even support AptX. That said, Bluetooth codecs are just one variable in the sound quality equation.

The UTWS1 works like most other true wireless systems in that each earpiece functions independently, but ‘syncs’ with the other earpiece when both are active, hence the ‘true wireless’ designation. The entire system works using low-powered and very efficient Bluetooth transmission, so despite the name, there’s no Wi-Fi involved.


Since they work independently, you can use the UTWS1 earpieces like you would any other single receiver walk-and-talk earpiece, the microphone and push button giving you call answer functionality when connected to a smartphone. Or sync them up for the full stereo experience, even with calls.

While not strictly part of this review, I tested the call quality while connected to my phone, and found it to be excellent, perhaps a factor of the noise cancelling features of the Qualcomm chip. The incoming call also paused and resumed the music I was playing, which is handy.

Pairing the earpieces was as simple as holding down the button on an earpiece for five seconds until the small LED light starts flashing red and blue, at which time it should appear on your device’s available Bluetooth list. Once paired with your phone or DAP, power up the other earpiece and it will automatically ask to be paired with your device. Once that’s done, both earpieces will be paired and ready to play.

The button on each earpiece is programmed to perform numerous functions: click once on the left and right to lower and raise the volume, twice on the right to pause/play the music, hold down the left for two seconds for previous track and right for next track, and hold down for three seconds to power off. For some reason I couldn’t answer a call by using the button on either side, nor pause/play the music by double-clicking the right earpiece, so perhaps these features aren’t universal and depend on your source device.

Lastly, should you want to take your listening outdoors, the earpieces have a nano coating that supposedly protects them from splashes and sweat, which makes them great for taking along for a run or to the gym. Forgive me for not putting this to the test with the U12t, though!




Sound quality

Let’s face it, there’s no substitute for wired sound quality. Bluetooth has come a long way since it was invented to transmit low bandwidth MP3 files, but even with the latest ‘hi-res’ Bluetooth codecs, there’s still a perceptible loss of quality with resolving IEMs, and they don’t come much more resolving than the 64Audio U12t.

But there’s a catch. You’re not always going to want to use your high-performance IEMs for Bluetooth music for this exact reason. The compression that’s only mildly apparent with lesser gear is suddenly blatantly obvious. Even if you’re getting anywhere near the maximum bitrate of AptX, that’s still well short of the bitrate of a CD-quality lossless flac file, let alone hi-res.

Throw in poorly recorded or mastered music and the cumulative result is a pale shade of what your IEMs are capable of. This is no fault of the UTWS1. In fact, with the right IEMs, it blows away just about any other true wireless IEMs available today. It’s purely a limitation of the Bluetooth protocol, combined with the far weaker amplifiers used as a necessity for wireless convenience.

That said, I found the sound quality of the UTWS1 surprisingly impressive. Being careful to select well-mastered music, I missed my cable far less than I thought I would, especially since I was able to untether myself from my phone and DAP and walk around the house without a worry.

If I have to be critical, it was immediately apparent how the smooth, pristine vocals in Lily Kershaw’s sublime “Unrequited Night” started to sound slightly wobbly in parts, and the electronic drums didn’t hit quite as hard or with as much texture on Lorde’s “Royals”. Switching to classic rock, Boston’s “More Than A Feeling” left me wishing the vocals sounded fuller and the guitars had more crunch, and the violins weren’t nearly as precise on Max Richer’s “Winter 1”.

Again, this is no real fault of the UTWS1. For a true wireless system, it performed well above what I expected. “Well obviously,” I hear you saying. You can’t compare a $2,000 IEM to your typical $200 or $300 true wireless set. Except with the UTWS1 you can do just that. If you already own high-performance IEMs, the UTWS1 will turn them into high-performance true wireless IEMs for the sum total of $45.



Closing thoughts

FiiO isn’t the first company to come up with a universal true wireless solution for third-party IEMs, but the UTWS1 is by far the most polished, capable and practical device I’ve seen on the market to date.

From the clever packaging to the well-made, lightweight, comfortable earpieces, the UTWS1 appears to be seamlessly compatible with almost any IEM, with just the right balance of features and functions to make it more than a one-trick wireless pony. It may not tick all the boxes when it comes to Bluetooth codecs, and FiiO warns against using super-sensitive IEMs that might pick up some noise from its powerful receivers, but with the right combination of earpiece, you can get a lot of utility for not a lot of money.

True to form, FiiO have delivered when it comes to bang-for-buck with a product that doesn’t look out of place alongside high-end IEMs, phones and DAPs. You’ll be paying significantly more for a ready-made set of true wireless IEMs without any guarantee of better quality, especially if you already own a pair IEMs you know and love.

Once in a while, I come across a product in this hobby that doesn’t quite fit into the normal boxes. iFi’s xDSD Gryphon (or just Gryphon if you’ll allow me) is a good example.

Combining elements from two previous products – xCan and xDSD – and adding some interesting new tech of its own, Gryphon is a new portable DAC and headphone amp platform that combines many different technologies introduced and perfected in other iFi products into a compact, advanced, and very accomplished performer.

In doing so, it ambitiously aims to cover multiple bases for multiple use cases. Whether you want hi-res Bluetooth input (including LDAC support), hardware MQA decoding, a proven multibit DAC with native DSD and DXD support, a fully-balanced amp architecture with 4.4mm inputs and outputs, Gryphon does it all, and much more.

In fact, it tries to do so much that it risks becoming a jack-of-all-trades, but as I discovered in the past few weeks, it pulls it off the juggling act remarkably well, making it far more than the sum of its many parts.


Spec sheet

Before we dive into the review proper, let’s take a bird’s eye view of everything Gryphon:

• DAC: Hybrid multibit Burr Brown
• Formats: PCM 768/DXD/DSD 512/MQA Studio Master
• Outputs (headphone): 4.4mm balanced / 3.5mm single-ended + S-Balanced (3.5mm balanced)
• Outputs (line): 4.4mm balanced / 3.5mm single-ended
• Inputs (analogue): 4.4mm balanced / 3.5 single-ended
• Inputs (digital): USB-C (up to 768kHz), SP/DIF (up to 192kHz), Hi-Res Bluetooth (up to 96kHz)
• Bluetooth (input only): v5.1 support (SBC, AAC, AptX Adaptive, LDAC, HWC)
• Battery: Up to 8 hours, separate USB-C charging port and dual digital input/charging port
• Power output (single-ended): >320mW @32 Ω (headphone); 3.5V variable (line out)
• Power output (balanced): >1W @32Ω (headphone); 6.7V variable (line out)
• Output impedance (headphone): <1 Ω
• THD: <0.005% (1V @ 16Ω)

A boxful of tricks

The unboxing experience is much the same as that of other recent and past iFi products, which is to say very high quality. Gryphon ships in a lidded box, complete with a colorful cardboard sleeve full of specs, features, and lots of pretty pictures. Inside, you’ll find Gryphon covered in a soft wrapper, along with a warranty card, fold-out user guide, a velvet-lined carry pouch, and three cables: two short USB-C to C and USB-C to Lightning cables for connecting to smartphones and tablets, and a longer USB-C to A cable for hooking Gryphon up to laptops and desktops.

I would have preferred a harder protective case (I have one on the way from my go-to case maker, Miter), which would have been a welcome addition for someone like me who babies gear against all manner of domestic household dangers. Also, since Gryphon is small enough to be used in a stack with a phone or DAP, I’m surprised iFi didn’t include any elastic rings to keep the stack together. Quibbles aside, the accessory list is more than sufficient, and any of the add-ons I mentioned should soon be available to buy separately anyway.


Build and design

On seeing Gryphon for the first time, I had two reactions: it really does look just as good in person as it does in the marketing material, and it also looks and feels substantially smaller than I expected it to be for such a full-featured device.

The last iFi DAC/amp I owned was the original Micro iDSD, and that was big, bulky, and rather ugly by comparison. Gone are the industrial lines of the iDSD, replaced by a flask-like two-tone shell with a premium-feeling (and importantly, fingerprint-resistant) space grey matte finish. The case itself is about the same size and thickness as a pack of playing cards, which is to say shorter than a modern oversized smartphone but more than twice as thick. It’s also fairly stocky at 215g, which is understandable given all the tech and components it crams inside the metal shell.

Inspecting the buttons, dials and knobs reveals high-quality, precision mechanical finishes with just enough tactile give for fluid movement and haptic feedback, but without feeling too loose or wobbly (I’m aware of some reports of rattling volume dials, but my unit has no such issues). Four slim rubber feet adorn the base, cleverly keeping it stable on a tabletop and safely raised off your smartphone or DAP when using them as a source.

For all the possible permutations, not a single space, button or knob is superfluous. Make no mistake, Gryphon is a brilliant piece of industrial design, and one that can serve as a blueprint for even more potential functionality in future iterations (more on that later).


Features and functions

It’s worth covering all the buttons and their associated features together, because of how interconnected they all are to each other.

Starting with the most visible of these, the volume dial, not so much a dial as a multi-function knob, acts as an on/off power switch, menu selector (when inside the settings menu), and most importantly as an analogue volume control. Did I mention it can also be used to mute the volume (single press) and, with the latest firmware, gives you full pause/forward/reverse track control when connected with Bluetooth?

The fit and finish of the dial is top-drawer. Turning the dial feels very satisfying and solid with perceptible click-click-click feedback in small intervals for fine (1dB) adjustments, but without ever feeling like it’s going to slip or skip multiple volume steps (unless you turn it faster). The way it’s been positioned slightly forward means you can set Gryphon flat on a desk or hold it in one hand and still turn the dial with a gentle one-finger push or pull, which is very well thought through.

While Gryphon features a variable brightness OLED screen, you can also eyeball the volume level by the colour of the LED ring around the volume dial and the LED light on the dial itself. There are six possible ranges, from mute (no light) through to -2db to +6dB (red). Visually setting the dial to magenta (-56 to -39dB) or green (-38dB to -21dB) is an easy and safe way to know you’re not going to blow your ears off when you hit play with sensitive IEMs or headphones plugged in.



There are two more mechanical push buttons on the front face – a smaller selector button (furthest right) that switches between input types (more on these later), and a slightly larger button that toggles between the built-in XBass II and XSpace functions (again, more on these later), and also activates the settings menu with a longer press. Opposite the buttons, on the left-hand side of the face, are the two headphone output ports, 3.5mm S-Balanced and 4.4mm fully balanced, sized the same as the adjoining buttons to create a neatly symmetrical layout on the fascia.


There are also two other levers on Gryphon: one on the base that lets you activate two different levels of iFi’s IEMatch technology for sensitive IEMs, and one at the back, which toggles between three different options for the XBass II feature.

Starting with IEMatch, the options are labeled 3.5mm, 4.4mm, and OFF (default), supposedly because the more powerful 4.4mm output requires higher output attenuation than the ‘weaker’ 3.5mm output, although both settings work with both outputs. Since I don’t use IEMatch I didn’t spend much time testing for quality differences between the two, but iFi have since confirmed this is the same IEMatch technology used on its standalone and well-received balanced IEMatch accessory, which makes it a great value-add for sensitive IEM users (notably any IEM from Campfire Audio).


The additional XBass II functionality is quite different, and as far as I know, unique to Gryphon. According to iFi, with XBass II ‘you can select ‘Bass’ and/or ‘Presence’ so that the upper midrange frequencies are correctly added back into your favourite recording’. This is something I would have missed entirely had I not checked what the back toggle was all about. It also means that XBass II is more than just about bass, because it can boost upper midrange independently of bass, a potentially useful feature for IEMs or headphones that dip the presence region but don’t need any bass correction.

Combined with XSpace, which mainly affects the treble frequencies to add more air into recordings, Gryphon now has limited but effective analogue-based EQ toggles for bass, upper-midrange and treble, either independently or together in different combinations. I can personally attest to using all three settings to add flavour to some recordings, and in different ways depending on the IEM or headphone I’m using. The fact that it’s so easy to do, and that the effects are never overdone, makes this a very powerful addition to Gryphon’s feature set.


Even more features

Given the smorgasbord of genuinely useful features packed into Gryphon, perhaps the best feature of all is the DAC itself. When I reviewed iFi’s other new portable Bluetooth DAC/amp, GO blu, I noted the ‘missing’ hybrid multibit Burr Brown DAC that iFi uses for almost all of its products. Thankfully, the BB DAC is back with Gryphon, and with it, the very respectable hi-res decoding numbers and formats I felt were lacking on the smaller dongle, including full PCM 768, DXD 768, and native DSD 512 support.

Admittedly these ultra-hi-res formats are only available with direct USB input, but the fact that they’re available at all is the point here.

The DAC is ably supported by a plethora of hardware and software features, including a customised negative feedback amplification design that iFi calls OptimaLoop, which apparently uses different types of negative feedback circuits for optimal performance. Another amplification tech iFi calls PureWave is meant to be a type of optimised dual-mono balanced topology (previously only found in iFi’s higher-end NEO and Diablo amps) for Gryphon’s balanced inputs and outputs, which in theory reduces distortion and improves linearity.

Switching to software features, Gryphon offers a choice of three DSP ‘filters’ (in fact two filters and one unfiltered bit-perfect mode), selectable via the settings menu from the OLED screen. STD is a moderate digital filter with zero pre-ringing and modest post-ringing properties, while GTO (Gibbs Transient Optimised) is a proprietary iFi digital filter that upsamples all content to 384kHz/352kHz depending on the clock source, with only moderate pre- and post-ringing, which, from what I understand, combines the advantages of oversampled delta-sigma processing without the associated ringing artefacts.


Whether or not you think these filters add anything useful is again entirely up to you to decide, but I have to admit hearing some added clarity and dynamics in the sound with GTO enabled, without the presentation becoming too digital.

Speaking of the OLED screen, this is yet another major feature that’s entirely new with Gryphon, and to my mind changes it from a dumb terminal-like DAC/amp (i.e., every other iFi portable product) to something entirely different, and better. Not only does the screen look really cool, it’s also dimmable, can be switched off, and offers a second, very visible and very easy way to check which settings, volume levels, Bluetooth codecs, and inputs and outputs are active at any one time.

The screen also makes it easy to visually make fine volume changes, and is a good way to double-check you’re not about to blow your eardrums with a CyberSync malfunction. iFi has also gone as far as using special low-power circuits for the screen that supposedly don’t add any interference (noise) to the sound. They’ve even given it a name, SilentLine, if you can believe that.

But aside from being a marketer’s dream device for cool-sounding feature names, Gryphon is undeniably packed full of genuine audio-optimised hardware parts from the likes of Alps, Kemet, MuRata, Panasonic, TDK and Diodes, and I believe the quality of parts reflects in the quality of sound.


Ins and outs

Okay, this is the last stop before we get to the good stuff about sound, but to me, the star of the Gryphon show is quite simply its versatility. By that I mean all the different ways it gives you to get your music in from different devices, and the simple yet powerful ways it lets you push it out again with exceptional quality.

Starting with inputs, Gryphon supports an almost full range of digital and analogue inputs, especially for a battery-powered portable device. These include 3.5mm single-ended and 4.4mm balanced analogue inputs, S/PDIF optical and USB digital inputs, and the piece de resistance as far as I’m concerned, hi-res Bluetooth digital input. There’s even a separate USB-C input port for charging the battery independently, letting you charge up while connected to any other input (though you have the option of charging while connected to the USB-C digital input as well).

For playback, Gryphon features four types of outputs: dedicated 3.5mm (single-ended or iFi’s 3-pole 3.5mm S-Balanced) and 4.4mm fully-balanced headphone outputs, and dedicated 3.5mm and 4.4mm line-outs. To save space, Gryphon’s analogue inputs cleverly double as line-outs, switching function automatically whenever you’re using a digital input (like Bluetooth or USB) at the same time.

Since most of the above is self-explanatory, I want to rather spend some time focusing on what I consider Gryphon’s biggest advantage over other similarly-priced (and even higher-priced) portable DAC/amps: Hi-Res Bluetooth. While Bluetooth input is nothing new, the level at which iFi has implemented and refined its Hi-Res Bluetooth input technology sets it apart from any other Bluetooth-equipped device I’ve heard to date. If GO blu surprised me with the quality of its Bluetooth sound – which was only marginally inferior to its wired input – Gryphon pushes Bluetooth quality even closer.

In fact, the difference in sound quality between Gryphon’s LDAC and USB inputs is so small, for anything but the most focused listening sessions, I don’t even bother to wire it up.


There is a small sting in this tail, however. I found a bug – not in Gryphon, but rather in some source devices, like the LG V60 smartphone and a few other smartphone models – that prioritise the AptX Adaptive codec over LDAC, and therefore won’t allow Gryphon to switch into LDAC mode. While this is a very niche bug that affects a very small number of devices, the solution is seemingly a simple one – allow users to manually enable/disable the various Bluetooth codecs in Gryphon’s settings menu. By disabling AptX Adaptive in Gryphon, the buggy sources will see it as an LDAC device.

Sadly, this is not possible, yet, but I’m reliably told that the feature request has been escalated, and hope to see it made available soon. It’ll certainly return Gryphon to optimal functionality for my use case.

There’s also one more feature I’d like to see added, either to the current Gryphon – if it’s at all possible – or to a future version: Bluetooth transmission. While it might seem counterintuitive to pack Gryphon full of dedicated, high-quality audio components designed specifically for analogue output – only to bypass all of them by switching to Bluetooth – there’s a case to be made for turning Gryphon into the ultimate audio interface with this one, simple tweak. Just a thought, iFi; you can thank me later.

Sound impressions


I mainly tested Gryphon using a pair of Sennheiser IE 900 IEMs, but I’ve also made notes on how it sounds with other IEMs and headphones, including Sony’s IER-Z1R IEM and MDR-Z1R headphone. Digital sources included HiBy’s RS6 DAP, LG V60 Thinq smartphone and MacBook Pro. I used a variety of test tracks that I’m very familiar with, including (but not limited to):

• Lana Del Rey – Dark But Just A Game
• BEYRIES – Alone
• Brandi Carlile – The Story
• Eagles – Hotel California (Live)
• Agnes Obel – The Curse
• Bjork – Hunter
• Daft Punk – Contact
• James Gillespie – What You Do
• Jillette Johnson – Bunny
• Jethro Tull – The Waking Edge
• Angels of Venice – Trotto

Tonality

I hear Gryphon to have a fairly neutral and linear tonality, with slight warmth in the lower registers, but overall a clean, balanced, and generally transparent presentation. It follows a similar tuning philosophy to GO blu, which again seems to be a departure of sorts from the company’s more pervasively warmer house sound that it still uses in the Micro iDSD series.

This is not neutral in the sense that it’s reference or worse, lifeless, but rather strikes a very healthy balance between overt cleanliness and musicality. It’s not overly analytical, though it won’t do much to change the analytical nature of IEMs that lean that way unless you make use of its sound-shaping features. Instead, I find it delivers quite a rich palette for IEMs and headphones to work with, excellent timbre throughout, and just the right amount of emphasis without oversaturating the sound.

It doesn’t make sense to break down the bass, midrange and treble response other than to say there’s no obvious boost or dip in any of these frequencies, other than a slight emphasis on note solidity and speed down low, and some added air up top. Whether or not that’s a good thing for you depends on what you’re looking for from a source, and what you’re pairing with it. Personally, I prefer linear and transparent sources that support rather than those which affect specific frequencies and run too warm or too cool.

In saying that, with XBass II (and its midrange-shaping capabilities) and XSpace, Gryphon can indeed ‘correct’ the shortcomings or enhance the qualities of IEMs or headphones that need some tweaking. More importantly, it does this in hardware, not software, so there’s no quality hit to the audio chain.

I found XBass II’s bass impact is more prominent than GO blu’s, but can be tempered down using the Bass + Presence setting. The Presence-only setting is also useful for restoring upper midrange bite to IEMs like IE 900, in cases where its dip in this region is too deep for your liking.

XSpace is less a treble bump and more a subtle spatialisation effect, still affecting mainly the treble region but less obviously so than GO blu. If you’re using IEMs or headphones with limited stage width, depth or height, it’ll give you some much-needed breathing room, but I mostly left it off since stage size is never an issue with my gear.


Technicalities

The key to Gryphon’s technical performance is its ultra-low distortion and noise floor, allowing the technical performance of the IEMs and headphones I used to shine through. I don’t perceive any drop in detail or resolution, and if anything, resolution is slightly improved over the R2R-based HiBy RS6 (I’m splitting hairs here, but the RS6 does cost almost three times as much as Gryphon).

Essentially, you’re not making many – if any – technical compromises to resolution, imaging, dynamics or layering and separation when switching from a higher-end source to Gryphon. Some may perceive a slight drop in stage width compared to higher-power desktop amps, but this really depends on what you’re driving, and how well your IEMs/headphones scale with more power. In every torture-test I put Gryphon through, such as the collision sequence in Daft Punk’s brilliantly atmospheric ‘Contact’, it didn’t skip a beat, keeping the different elements separate but cohesive, and keeping a tight grip on the drivers, be they 7mm in IE 900 or 70mm in MDR-Z1R.

There are caveats to this otherwise sterling scorecard, of course. You will hear a slight drop in technical performance when switching to Bluetooth input, especially when using lower-bitrate codecs like AAC or (shock-horror) SBC. Even with LDAC, with its support for almost 1Mbit of bandwidth, the soundscape will flatten, and the fringes of vocal and instrument transients may not be rendered quite as crisply as they would with a bit-perfect wired connection.

Gryphon is also, ultimately, a highly portable, hand-held source, and as such it won’t give you the same headroom as even a basic AC-powered desktop stack. But again, unless you’re driving large planars or similarly insensitive headphones, you probably won’t notice the difference, especially with easily-driven IEMs.

Even if performance is not 1:1 on par with similarly-priced desktop gear, the convenience and freedom of being untethered from a desk (or phone) outweighs any performance issues. Moreover, Gryphon is less affected by cable power noise issues that can be problematic on desktop sources, and sometimes cost more than the sources themselves to mitigate, so you may in fact find its performance exceeds your desktop gear in some aspects.


Select pairings and comparisons

Gryphon is one of three recent releases in iFi’s portable product portfolio, along with GO blu and hip-dac 2. hip-dac lacks GO blu’s Bluetooth input functionality, but compensates with added power and more robust format support with its Burr Brown DAC and higher-end audio components. Gryphon combines the best features from both devices, and ups the ante across the board: more power, better Bluetooth quality and range, higher-spec components, broader format support, more inputs and outputs, and an overall bigger, better user experience.

Compared to Go blu ($299), Gryphon refines both wired and wireless sound quality. You can step further away from your source when connected wirelessly, and take advantage of higher-res format support, and even questionable software features like CyberSync if you’re so inclined. Both devices are tuned similarly, with a clear, crisp but still engaging and musical presentation, but Gryphon adds more note weight, definition and stage size, and is able to drive bigger and less sensitive headphones. Its sound shaping features and DSP filters are also more robust.

Where GO blu wins hands-down is ultra-portability, and the simplicity of being able to connect-and-forget while on the go, and sound performance is close enough to leave Gryphon at home and take GO blu on the road, even for longer trips.


Compared to HiBy RS6 ($1400), Gryphon takes a different approach sound-wise, being more neutral and transparent compared to RS6’s warmer, fuller and more organic tilt. RS6 does sound more natural with certain genres, especially with vocals, by virtue of its discrete R2R DAC, although Gryphon’s hybrid multibit DAC and features like the GTO digital filter get Gryphon really, really close in terms of naturalness. Gryphon also has more output power and a lower overall noise floor, even though both devices are hiss-free and more than powerful enough to drive all but the most stubborn headphones. In terms of absolute SQ, Gryphon matches RS6 blow-for-blow and is even slightly more advanced technically, with a wider stage and better clarity.

I’ve actually found the two to be complementary in the time I’ve spent with them so far, often using RS6 as my wired and Bluetooth source for Gryphon, especially when I want to use Gryphon’s extra output power. Another benefit of using the two together is connecting them using a balanced cable, effectively combining RS6’s excellent R2R DAC with Gryphon’s powerful, low-distortion amp.

Since RS6 is a self-contained DAP, it has its own advantages over a DAC/amp like Gryphon, not requiring external sources for one, and being able to navigate and manage multiple music sources from the device itself. If you’re after a standalone device for music playback and want to keep your music player, phones and computers separate, then RS6 is an excellent Segway from devices like Gryphon, but if sound quality is your only measure, you won’t lose anything with Gryphon and it’ll cost you significantly less.


I can highly recommend iFi’s brilliantly-made 4.4mm interconnect cable if you’re planning on tethering Gryphon to a balanced DAP or desktop amp – easily one of the best-looking, best-built and best-performing interconnects I’ve had the pleasure of using.


It’s been a while since I’ve used any of iFi’s larger portable devices, and I haven’t had the pleasure of trying out the newer xDSD and hip-dac series for that matter, but I’m confident enough to say that I don’t really see a use case for myself with any of them. Gryphon’s Bluetooth support and quality, for instance, makes the thought of using a wired-only external DAC/amp or dongle unpalatable at best. We’re fast-moving towards a time when wireless source quality will match wired performance, and with Gryphon (and GO blu to a lesser extent), the differences are already too small to warrant wired sources most of the time.

What hasn’t changed is our reliance on wired IEMs and headphones for maximum sound quality. Pairing Gryphon with a good pair of IEMs is the optimal use case for me, and the synergy with both the IE 900 and IER-Z1R is exceptional. But Gryphon is just as adept at powering easy-to-drive full-size headphones, like Sony’s MDR-Z1R. Unless you need the absolute portable freedom (and advanced features) of true wireless IEMs or headphones, you’ll get maximum sound quality with only a small loss in portability using Gryphon as a Bluetooth streamer for your wired IEMs, and if you want to get even more portable, GO blu.


Verdict and closing thoughts

When I first read about Gryphon, I didn’t quite see how it would fit for me, having switched to using IEMs exclusively, and using them exclusively with a DAP. It was GO blu that opened my eyes to the usefulness of a Bluetooth-enabled source for my wired IEMs, especially when I wanted to use my higher-end IEMs on the go. That’s when I joined the dots and fully understood Gryphon’s potential.

In one compact and still (for me) very pocketable device, iFi has evolved the concept of a portable Bluetooth streamer, bringing along all the advantages – and sound quality – of its upmarket wired DAC/amps, throwing in a few extra new and improved features in the bargain. For much less than the cost of a high-end DAP, you can now buy equivalent sound quality, better versatility, and enough power to drive not only IEMs but also full-size headphones, and still be able to move about freely with your music.

From the very first time I used it, Gryphon started changing the way I engaged with my music. For one thing, I credit Gryphon with encouraging me to re-look at getting a full-size headphone as an alternative to my IEMs. Then, using a smartphone with more ‘smarts’ and speed than any DAP, meant I didn’t have to skip a beat between the music player interfaces I’m already familiar with (specifically UAPP on Android).

With its outstanding Bluetooth input quality, I also wasn’t constrained by having to wire up the phone, and in fact, could even use the DAP as a source if I needed the phone for other tasks. And, when I wanted to max out sound quality, Gryphon includes everything I need to wire up my sources in the box.

iFi may have been a bit ambitious in claiming Gryphon as the ‘birth of a head-fi legend’, but I will say it’s easily the best portable device I’ve used in all my time as a portable audio enthusiast. That includes the flagship Lotoo and HiBy DAPs I’ve used in the past (and still use today), both in terms of sound quality but, just as importantly, flexibility, functionality and versatility. It liberates you from worrying about how to get your music in or out, which sources you can connect to, or which IEMs, headphones, or even speakers you want to use, without having to worry that sound quality and driving power will be compromised.

Sure, it had some teething issues, CyberSync being the most obvious and one that I suspect will still take some time to fully resolve. It has some missing parts – a case would be nice, and some stack loops too while we’re at it – and if someone at tech central could please fix the annoying AptX Adaptive ‘bug’ for me that would be much appreciated!

But these are hair-splitting gripes. Gryphon is just about the complete package, and I believe it’s only going to get better as iFi fine-tunes existing (and potentially new) features in firmware. Where it goes from here is anyone’s guess, but knowing iFi, there’s an upgrade path in development, if not already in production. As a version 1.0, Gryphon sets the standard for what’s possible in portable audio today, and I keenly await to see how the platform evolves in the future.

If, like me, you prioritise portability as much as you do absolute sound quality, and don’t want or need the extra headroom (and potential benefits) of full-size desktop gear, then Gryphon is an unequivocal must-buy. Highly recommended.

Full disclosure: @iFi audio sent me a sample GO blu in exchange for my honest review, and the opinions expressed herein are entirely my own. My review unit was supplied by AudioExchange, South Africa's official iFi reseller.

Introduction

iFi is no stranger to the head-fi community, having established itself over the past few years with a range of well-received source gear for almost any use case and budget. The UK-based company is actually a subsidiary of Abbingdon Music Research (AMR), one of the UK’s largest manufacturers of high-end audio systems, so when it comes to pedigree, iFi is not just another niche player or nameless mass-producer vying for a share of the limelight.

GO blu is iFi’s first attempt at an ultra-portable ‘dongle’, but unlike the majority of cable-tethered dongles from other brand-name vendors, Go blu is first and foremost a ‘hi-res’ Bluetooth dongle. That means it supports the highest Bluetooth codecs currently available, including Sony’s LDAC, which theoretically has enough bandwidth to stream hi-res music files (up to 24/96), albeit using lossy algorithms.

I’ve spent the past two weeks getting to know GO Blu more intimately, using it as my main DAC/amp (with my smartphone as the source), and comparing the experience to the higher-end DAPs I’m more familiar with. To say it’s been an eye-opening fortnight is an understatement; GO Blu has so far been one of the more pleasant surprises I’ve enjoyed in the hobby. Read on to find out why.


Tiny but mighty

The first thing that struck me about GO blu was not the stylish metal faceplate, Swiss-like chronograph, or practical non-slip rubber surround, but rather how small it was. By small I mean absolutely tiny – 54mm x 34mm and only 13mm thick. It’s also light, so light that iFi claim an AA battery is heavier, which is true by the way.

As tiny and light as it is, it still manages to house two headphone output ports, including a genuine Pentaconn-certified 4.4mm fully balanced socket. The chronograph – or ChronoDial, as iFi calls it – is the other striking feature. As far as I can tell, GO blu is the only dongle that features a rotary volume dial, though the ChronoDial is more than that, doubling as a click-button for pause/play, next/previous, and call answer/reject controls too.

There are two other buttons, one below the ChronoDial that’s used to switch between GO Blu’s nifty XBass and XSpace features (more on these later) and Bluetooth pairing mode, and one on the opposite side for power on/off and Bluetooth pairing confirmation. At the bottom of the case is a single USB-C port that doubles as a charging and digital data port (for wired DAC functionality), a small LED light for power state, and two pinholes, one for factory reset, the other for the built-in microphone (yes, you can make and take calls while connected with GO blu, although I didn’t try out this functionality myself).

The packaging is neat and simple, typically iFi-like with lots of information all over the box. A slide-out tray holds GO blu in its own cavity, with a small separate box for the included USB-C to A cable and velour-style carry pouch. I would have preferred to see a USB-C to C cable included considering GO blu is most often going to connect directly to a smartphone, and most modern laptops feature USB-C connectors too.

For the asking price of $199 a USB-C to lightning cable wouldn’t have gone amiss either, if only so that iPhone users would have one less thing to complain about because let’s face it, who wants to fall back on AAC?

But I digress; GO blu ships with everything you need to get up and running in the box. Build quality is excellent, and not just for the price, and the styling is unique and, if I may say so, quite stylish, more so than iFi’s usual utilitarian designs.


Swiss Army dongle

At the heart of GO blu’s functionality is a compact Cirrus Logic CS43131 DAC, which according to iFi is going to form the basis of their ultra-mobile product lineup. I can only assume there’s a good reason that iFi decided against using the traditional hybrid Burr Brown DAC that powers just about all their current devices, and if I had to speculate it’s probably because they were aiming for a much lower power draw than was possible to achieve with the standard DAC.

As it is, GO Blu’s 450mAh lithium battery supplies up to 8 hours’ runtime, depending on the headphones used and processing requirements, which is plenty for all-day use, considering it only takes an hour or so to charge it back up to full. Since GO blu also uses its battery in tethered mode, you can maximise sound quality from your phone by wiring it up without draining the phone’s battery, something many other dongles don’t offer.

GO blu incorporates the same dual-mono fully balanced architecture common to many of iFi’s recent portable products. This not only helps clean up the signal, but also provides much more power to drive even demanding headphones – up to 245mW into 32 ohms to be exact. You’ll struggle to find this much muscle in any other dongle in this price range, and even more expensive (and less portable) amps generally don’t go this high either.


Ironically the additional power seems to have caused some teething issues for early adopters, with reports of some GO blu units emitting unacceptable levels of amplification noise, especially with sensitive IEMs. In my own testing, I’ve found no such issues with my particular unit and my IEMs, so it’s likely more a factor of quality control than it is a design flaw, or at least I hope that’s the case.

Other amplification features making their way into GO blu’s spec list include DirectDrive, which eliminates the coupling capacitor typical in many circuit designs to provide a more direct signal path that, supposedly, helps further eliminate noise and reduce distortion. The capacitors that are included are sourced from TDK and MuRata, much like those used in ifi’s more expensive desktop-grade devices.

Also adapted from other iFi designs is analogue DSP functionality, which in GO blu take the form of XBass and XSpace effects. XBass, as the name suggests, helps fill out the lower octaves with a subtle dose of extra weight, an effect I can heartily recommend even if you’re using bass-savvy IEMs or headphones. XSpace is less convincing, adding a touch of air and pseudo ‘space’ to the sound, which could be useful if you’re using intimate-sounding headphones. You can also use both effects together, but I tend to just leave XBass on and forget about it.

The last arrow in GO blu’s sizeable quiver is a Qualcomm QCC 5100 Bluetooth controller. This brings GO blu up-to-date with the latest Bluetooth 5.1 receiver spec and supports almost every conceivable Bluetooth codec, including AAC, SBC, aptX, aptX HD, aptX Adaptive, aptX LL, LDAC, and LHDC/HWA. Conspicuous in its absence is Qualcomm’s newly- announced AptX Lossless codec, although I don’t believe there are any devices that support this codec at the time of writing.


Sound impressions

With so many features and so much power in such a miniature space, iFi has taken a leap of faith that all these moving parts, figuratively speaking, will click together to deliver a quality audio experience on the go. The combination of hi-res Bluetooth and 4.4mm output makes GO blu particularly potent for users of higher-end and higher-power IEMs and headphones.

I decided to test GO blu by using it exactly how I expect most people to use it: first, with Bluetooth and a smartphone, and second, wired to a laptop. All tests were done with a pair of Sennheiser IE 900 IEMs using the 4.4mm balanced output.

My playlist included tracks by Lana Del Rey, Beyries, Angel Olsen, Ane Brun, Max Richter, Def Leppard, Brandi Carlile, Britney Spears, Linda Ronstadt, Eagles, Lola Marsh, Cranberries, Carpenters, and a host of other obscure indie singer-songwriters I won’t list here. I mention these only because my taste in music will likely differ from yours, and it’s important to remember that my impressions will be biased to my preferences accordingly.


As a Bluetooth receiver

To be honest, I was skeptical about using Bluetooth for serious listening. While I’ve experienced exceptional power and quality from tiny dongles before (EarMen’s Sparrow comes to mind), this is the first time I’ve gotten to hear just how far we’ve come with wireless in the mix.

The Sony WF-1000XM4 true wireless IEMs are my go-to for ‘casual listening’, with a smooth, punchy and inoffensive sound I can listen to with ease all day long. But when I want a more involved listen with better quality throughout the playlist, I generally turn to more capable (and correspondingly more expensive) IEMs like the IE 900.

Unlike TWS, GO blu relies on Bluetooth for input only, since all the digital conversion and amplification happens internally. That makes a Bluetooth dongle very different to TWS IEMs, which rely entirely on the tiny DACs and amps built into each earpiece for sound processing. It’s a distinction I feel is important to make, in case you’re thinking there’s little difference between the two, even though they both use Bluetooth in the chain.

Pairing GO blu to an LG V30+ phone was a quick and simple process. Switching the blu on for the first time automatically puts it into pairing mode (denoted by alternating blue/red LEDs on the top panel). Once paired, it’s important to select ‘Best Quality’ under the pairing’s Bluetooth settings – if your phone doesn’t select that option by default – else you may get paired using AAC or worse, SBC.

Note that if you’re an iPhone user, AAC and SBC are your only options, so this only applies to Android users. Most modern Android phones should support the LDAC and/or LDHC codecs, so make sure that’s how you’re connected before proceeding. If you’re unsure which codec you’re paired with, double-click the button on the left panel, and a sexy voice will reveal the codec and bitrate (‘LDAC 96 kilohertz’ is what you want to hear).


My very first thought at hearing the opening verses of Lana Del Rey’s Video Games though GO blu, streaming over LDAC from my trusty LG, was a distinct sense of familiarity. This was not the sweet but smoothed-out sound of the Sony TWS IEMs; this was very much the same tone, same texture, same quality I was used to hearing from the IE 900 plugged directly to my phone, to the Sparrow, or to just about any other excellent, amplified source.

Instrument timbre is as good as I know the IE 900’s timbre to be, and layers beautifully with Brandi Carlile’s smoky vocals in The Story. Overall tonality is neutral with a hint of warmth, very much as I expected from an iFi device. This has been the ‘house sound’ since my first encounter with the venerable Micro iDSD more than four years ago, although I find the GO blu to be slightly more transparent and airier by comparison, if memory serves.

Male vocals are delivered just as deftly as female, Don Henley’s iconic performance of Hotel Californiaperformed live on the Eagles’ Hell Freezes Over a case in point. GO blu takes firm control of the IE 900’s powerful dynamic driver, pushing punchy, bouncy bass notes that hit with authority, and more complex passages like crowd noises and guitar duets are never muddied or overwhelmed, even though I can pick out a hint of smoothness that probably shouldn’t be there in some raspier vocals.

While not the most technical high-end IEM I own, the IE 900 is still very technically adept, with a generous stage, excellent layering and separation, and fairly precise imaging. To my ears none of these are hamstrung to any significant degree by GO blu as a Bluetooth dongle. It may not drive the IE 900 as precisely and expansively as the HiBy R8, for example, but the difference is far smaller than the $1800 difference in price between the two would suggest.


As a wired dongle

I have to take issue with iFi for ‘crippling’ the Cirrus DAC by limiting its maximum supported resolution to 24/96, not enabling native DSD support, and not even contemplating MQA support. I suspect these were conscious choices made by the company to either maximise battery life or reduce size and cost, but at the very least the very capable DAC should have been allowed to do its thing with PCM?

Regardless of the reasons, when I connected GO blu to my MacBook Pro, these limitations were clearly displayed in Audirvana’s control panel. However, it didn’t stop GO blu from continuing to show off with its crisp, clean delivery. Linda Ronstadt’s evocative vocals in Dreams to Dream made me tear up like a baby – as they always do when the delivery is spot on – and with GO blu, it was absolutely on the mark.

Switching to something more modern and poppy, Britney Spears’ If You Seek Amy was a bassload of fun, complete with sketchy sample quality and imperfectly recorded vocals. If nothing else this speaks to GO blu’s transparency as a source, because it’s exactly how I know this track to sound with the IE 900. The slight injection of warmth is welcome, and I could swear this is some of the best bass weight I’ve heard from the IE 900.

Replaying some of the tracks I heard wirelessly, I could try to make a distinction between the two, but I’d probably be off-target half the time. What struck me more than anything was how much fun it was to work and play with the MacBook Pro delivering insanely good sound quality with nothing more than a little dongle dangling from the USB port. I could AB and pick out minor differences here or there, but really, why?

It’s not all roses though. For example, I struggled with figuring out how which device – GO blu or MacBook – ultimately controlled volume. Turning the volume of the ChronoDial changes the volume on the Mac, but sliding the volume up or down in Audirvana leaves the ChronoDial setting as-is. Also, I can only raise the volume about 10-15 percent on Audirvana before the IE 900 becomes too loud. There’s probably a setting in Audirvana or the Mac itself that I haven’t studied properly, but out of the box, it’s unnecessarily complicated compared to Bluetooth mode.

Also, it seems I can’t pause/play or skip tracks using the ChronoDial when in wired mode. I’m not sure that’s even an option, but if it’s not, that’s one less useful feature you lose when you wire up.


Closing thoughts

GO blu appeared out of the blue, so to speak, not really aligning with anything iFi has done in the past, and yet when you use it, it makes perfect sense. It’s the ultimate expression of iFi’s portable DAC/amp philosophy – an ultraportable device that gives up very few features iFi users almost expect by now, like analogue DSP, sophisticated amplification, and a well-tuned, well-specced DAC untethered from the desktop and able to drive almost any mainstream headphone.

The killer feature, for me, is Bluetooth. It’s such an obvious feature I’m actually surprised so few of the many dongles flooding the market right now actually offer it. Considering how good GO blu sounds in Bluetooth mode – so good, in fact, that wiring it up makes a small but arguably insignificant difference to sound quality – and it almost doesn’t make sense that dongles don’t offer wired mode as an option instead of default.

That said, GO blu isn’t perfect either. While my own unit, with my IEMs, has no audible hiss or hum during playback or between tracks, but there are enough reports out there that suggest it’s not ideal for all IEMs, and that QC could be an issue. It also lacks many features that iFi have either purposefully withheld to optimise battery life and performance, or perhaps ‘cleverly’ withheld so as not to cannibalise other products. After all, if they gave us IEMatch and their famous Burr Brown DSD-capable DAC, there wouldn’t be much sense in spending twice as much on a device twice the size and harder to carry around, right?

But cynicism aside, I’m excited by GO blu, even if it is version one-point-oh. It’s already ‘better’ than any other dongle I’ve used by virtue of its ultimate Bluetooth portability and infectiously-good sound quality. It’s well made and seems to be fairly stable, and with any luck, iFi will see fit to add to the current features with future firmware updates. Best of all, it takes the IEMs I know and love, and drives them with a steady hand, infusing its own very subtle character but really just allowing them to do what they do best.

I can think of no better endorsement than the fact that, for two weeks, I’ve been using a $200 dongle instead of a $2000 DAP and haven’t for a minute felt poorer for it. GO blu is an easy recommendation from me.

Full disclosure: I received an IMR R2 Aten in exchange for my fair and honest opinion, with no expectation of a favourable review. The views expressed are my own, based on my personal sound preferences and taste in music, which may well vary from your own.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. It appears that IMR’s Bob James isn’t insane, because at the third time of asking, he’s created one of the best looking, best sounding dynamic driver IEMs I’ve ever had the pleasure of using.

Based on an evolved version of the original R1 and R1 Zenith (reviewed here) ‘hybrid’ beryllium and piezo ceramic driver, the new R2 Aten tweaks the design of both earpiece and driver to deliver a consistently excellent performance with almost any genre of music.

It comes as no small relief, too, because the hype surrounding the first two IMR IEMs was, to my ears anyway, overdone. The Zenith, while occasionally hitting the mark, was frequently too harsh in the highs, too boomy in the bass, or too meek if you tried to switch up its filters to correct the obvious ‘errors’. With a refined two-filter system (a bottom filter for bass tuning and a top ‘nozzle’ for treble), the Aten not only gives you more options for adjusting the sound to your liking, but – as you’ll soon read – delivers a far more consistent sound with a much smaller selection of filters than you actually get.

What’s in the bag?

Before we get to the sound, though, let’s look at the overall package, because that’s changed too – and for the better. The Aten comes housed in a large canvas-type hard shell zip-up case, with the different accessories and earpieces securely wedged into custom foam cut-outs.

Along with the earpieces you get a large selection of silicone and foam eartips, so you’re almost guaranteed a good fit out the box (although I always recommend buying aftermarket tips anyway). Like the Zenith, the Aten comes with two cables – one terminated with an angled 3.5mm single-ended connector, the other 2.5mm TRRS – an absolute must at this price point. Unlike the Zenith, however, both cables have been given a major upgrade, with custom-made single crystal braided copper and conveniently shaped arches around the ears, and are of much higher quality than the thin, rubbery cables that were included with the R1 and Zenith.

The new filter system means two sets of aluminium filter holders are now included as standard, instead of just the one with the Zenith. Whereas I felt that the Zenith left me wanting a little more in terms of package quality for the price, the Aten does not. Perhaps the inclusion of a smaller case to house just the earpieces and cables would be welcome, but the larger case is small enough to be portable.


Fit and comfort

There was always something a little odd about the shape of the Zenith that made them just a bit too unwieldly when worn. Though the steampunk look was ‘cool’, the Zenith’s twistable knob (used to open or close the port behind the drivers) meant the overall look was not only bizarre, but made it all but impossible to use them lying on your side or under a beanie or hat that covered your ears.

The Aten, in comparison, eschews the twisting knob and cover for a stainless-steel mesh grille that not only looks more appealing, but also takes away the nagging desire to constantly open and close the port to find the ‘perfect’ sound. Surrounded by a yellow gold frame, the Aten is more Bumblebee than Mad Max, and in a good way too. It’s immediately more modern and stylish, looks far less conspicuous when worn, and even though not the smallest fit-wise, I can comfortably lie down with them and almost forget they’re there.

Some of the sharper edges of the Zenith earpieces have also been smoothed over, and the slightly longer nozzle (a result of the new two-part filter system) means it’s easier to get a good seal without jamming the earpieces into your skull. Along with the round-the-ear cable guides that make a big difference to the ease of fit, I’d say the consistent improvements make for a much better experience than simply the sum of the new parts.

Sound impressions

I suggest you read my Zenith review, because much of what I’m about to say about the Aten’s sound uses that review as context. As such, my impressions here won’t be as exhaustive, simply because they don’t need to be.

That the Aten is a better sounding IEM than the Zenith was obvious to me even before the mandatory 140-hour burn-in period was done (and if you don’t believe in burn-in, the way the Aten’s sound evolves in that first week of listening might just change your mind). Even with the default black-on-black default filter and nozzle combination, gone was the bombastic bass of the Zenith and cavernous ‘gap’ between the bass mountain and midrange valleys, replaced by an equally powerful but far more nuanced presentation that seemed to fill out the entire frequency landscape without any notable dips or spikes.

I spent a good while going through the different filter combinations – as you probably should as well – so what I’m about to say might seem strange, but hear me out. Don’t stray too far from the default. Yes, it seems to be Bob’s way of doing things to give users as much choice as possible when it comes to fine-tuning his IEMs, but invariably he’s tuned them with a signature in mind that, in my experience, doesn’t stray too far from how he ships them configured.

For example, while previous reviewers of the Zenith (and more recently the Aten) have tended to pick the red or purple/pink filters for bass, I feel that not only is the amount of bass with the black filter not excessive, but is also of higher quality than the other options. Likewise, all the new treble nozzles bar blue use dampening to attenuate both the highs and mids, and as Bob himself suggested, using the blue nozzle – which lets the sound through unaltered – also presents the Aten in its purest form.

So, try the different options (and wonder, like I did, why anyone would voluntarily use the oddly-tuned gold filters), but I guarantee you that spending some time with the original black/black or black/blue combinations will ultimately win you over because they maximise the strengths of the design.


Bass
Let’s not pull any punches: the Aten, like its older cousins, is a bass monster. I’d expect nothing less from a 14mm dynamic driver sat a few millimeters from my eardrums. But unlike the Zenith or R1 before it, the Aten’s revised driver shows more control, texture and nuance to the bass, something you’ll instantly pick up on when listening to bass-laden electronica from Daft Punk or bass-infused live instruments.

The glorious bassline that kicks in at the 20s mark of Daft Punk’s ‘Doin’ It Right’ can rattle your jaw if you’re not careful. The sub bass rumble is palpable, and the mid bass punch is equally intoxicating, but neither overwhelm the robotic effects or human vocals. This speaks to the control the Aten exhibits while wielding such a potent weapon, elevating it above much cheaper implementations of dynamic driver bass typical of budget mid-fi IEMs that seem to be flooding the market.

That the subtle midrange and treble details aren’t obscured in the face of its explosive bass delivery is a sign that Bob has learned from both his previous attempts and knew exactly what needed to be done to get the balance just right. This is not boomy Beats bass, demonstrating very natural attack and decay that makes it feel more lifelike than forced. Listen to Diana Krall’s ‘Temptation’ and you’ll hear all the texture and nuance of the double bass without any overt colouration.

Of course, by that I don’t mean that the Aten is a ‘balanced’ IEM, but its mild V-shaped tuning with my preferred filter combinations is both rich and rewarding, neither overdone like the thick, bloomy sound of the FiiO FA7, or bizarrely wonky like the Zenith (regardless of filter choice).

Be warned: if you’re one of those ‘audiophiles’ that only want to hear – rather than feel – their bass, or believe that bass, like butter, is only good for you in very small doses, give the Aten a wide berth. Yes, you can switch filters and nozzles to the point where the Aten’s balls – er, bass – are all but neutered, but seriously, why would you do that?

Mids
Normally where bass is as big as it is with the Aten, something has to give, and often that something is the mids. But you only need to hear Rosie Thomas’s exquisite vocals to the sound of guitar strings and harpsicords of ‘Why Waste More Time’ to know that the Aten is only a distant relation to its predecessor in this regard.

Whereas I felt the Zenith butchered large sections of the midrange in its presentation, the Aten somehow keeps the mids intact. Both the lower and upper midrange are represented in their totality here, perhaps not with as much resolution as you’d hear from a hybrid balanced armature IEM like the FiiO FH7, but with more than enough detail to satisfy all but die-heard detail obsessives.

Male vocals are sublime with the Aten. David Elias’s heartfelt rendition of ‘Vision of Her’ is full of subtle emotion, as is Chris Jones’s impeccably arranged version of Alan Taylor’s ‘The Tennessee Waltz’. Going even lower in the octave register, the presentation of ‘These Bones’ by the Fairfield Four is an absolute revelation on the Aten, the mix of upper bass and lower midrange deliciously satisfying.

Female vocalists make up the vast majority of my music library, and the Aten holds its nerve as the notes start to hit higher. Holly Throsby almost whispering to the tune of ‘An Evening Stroll’ sounds as soft and sublime as I can only imagine her to be, Brandi Carlile is utterly believable in her emotive telling of ‘The Story’, and Angel Olsen is absolutely mesmerising in her rendition of ‘Chance’ off her recently-released ‘All Mirrors’ album.

As a side note, the recording quality on All Mirrors is questionable, and if there’s one ‘criticism’ I can level at the Aten (especially with the no-holds-barred black/blue filter combination) is that it won’t do anything to hide recording flaws. More on this when I talk about the highs, where recording flaws can be deadly.

Highs
Using a piezo ceramic tweeter in an IEM is a brave choice, and one that I felt caused more problems than it solved with the Zenith. While the Aten goes some way to controlling the spiky tendencies of the driver, you’ll really want to be careful with the music you choose (and the filters and tips you use to play it).

As mentioned earlier, the blue treble nozzle won’t hold back the good, or the bad. Poor recordings are often fraught with nasty peaks, sibilance, splashy highs, grain. You’ll hear all of that, in high resolution, if it’s there to be heard. Jethro Tull’s ‘Budapest’ (like several other tracks on their masterpiece ‘Crest of a Knave’ album) can err on the bright side if you let the tweeters run loose, so using foam tips instead of Spiral Dots does make listening to this album less wincing.

Naturally, if you love your treble and can’t get enough of the highs, use any wide bore silicone tip and the blue nozzles and let it rip. The Aten is both more resolving and more refined than the Zenith, which can be a double-edged sword when it comes to treble, especially when the recording runs particularly hot. I’ve heard more pleasant interpretations of Adiemus’s ‘Tintinnabulum’, for example, but a track like this would have been downright painful to listen to on the Zenith.

Not being a heavy rock or metal fan I’m not one to tell you how well the Aten renders the relentless screech of electric guitars amid screaming vocals, but I’ll take an educated guess and suggest that if you enjoy a good ear bleed, the Aten won’t disappoint.

Seriously though, while I fully admit that I prefer my treble a touch more withdrawn, any issues I might have with how the Aten presents the highs is down to my choice of music and my refusal to continually swap out tips and filters with every other track change. This goes back to my point that you’re more likely to pick a filter combination and stick with it, and in doing so, that’s how I’ve used and reviewed the Aten.

Soundstage and other stuff
I keep comparing the Aten to the Zenith, but there’s a reason for that: the improvements I’m hearing are almost a mirror of the issues I had with the Zenith. Soundstage (or, more accurately, headstage) is another one I had on the list.

Where the Zenith presented a fairly wide stage for an IEM, it was also flat as a pancake, which made a mess of complex tracks by bringing too many instruments too far forward in the mix. Likewise, sparse recordings – especially binaural tracks like Meiko’s ‘Playing Favorites’ – have a great sense of depth and direction with the Aten.

The Aten keeps the width while adding a good amount of depth and height, giving instruments more room to breathe and introducing subtle layering that was sorely lacking in the Zenith. The deeper stage also helps with imaging and separation, and while the Aten isn’t exactly holographic as some of the best (and far more expensive) multi-driver IEMs, it’s excellent in its own right.

Pink Floyd’s intricate intro to ‘Time’ and David Chesky’s binaurally-recorded ambiance of Amber Rubarth’s ‘Strive’ off ‘Sessions from the 17thWard’ are both presented in a fairly realistic space that’s as deep and wide as you can hope for without spending the price of a small car on an IEM.

The Aten also sports a more natural and realistic timbre compared to its predecessor. The strings throughout Max Richter’s recomposed take on Vivadi’s ‘Four Seasons’, for example, are no longer thin and glass-like, but fuller, more present, and less grating.

All in all, the Aten is not one or two steps but several giant leaps steps ahead of Bob’s previous IMR incantations, and while I understand the sentimental appeal of those IEMs to users who took a chance on Bob, his new company, and his earlier experimental designs, the Aten makes them all redundant.


Closing thoughts

In the same way that an artist’s concept sketches and first attempts at a finished painting take on their own personality and are collectible in their own right, they only have value because of the finished work.

The Aten, in its totality, is IMR’s finished work. From a generous package that upgrades several key components, a better looking and fitting earpiece design, an improved filter and nozzle system, and an across-the-board improvement in every aspect of its sound, this is the IEM Bob set out to make from the very first sketch. He’s taken this driver, now in its third iteration, as far as it can go, and love it or hate it, I believe this is about as good as it’s going to get.

Not only is the Aten a great IEM, it’s also a great value, fully justifying its $500 retail price (though you can get it cheaper as a B-stock from IMR or as a sale item on Drop from time to time). That it’s not a mass-produced product (only 300 units were made, not all of which have been sold at last check), only adds to its appeal.

Some will make a song and dance about issues that are totally unrelated to Bob’s current work or products, and I won’t harp on that here (you can Google it if spurious gossip is your thing). My own impressions of IMR and the man behind it are nothing but positive. Despite the fact that I felt the Zenith fell well short of the hype – and said as much in my review – Bob didn’t take my criticism personally, and instead invited me to try the Aten.

What I found is a boutique IEM that holds its own against much higher priced competitors. The IMR R2 Aten is very much the real deal – a perfect example of what can be achieved if you take a good idea and keep making it better and better until it finally reaches its true potential.

PS. One more thing. The Aten isn’t quite the end of the road for this design. Coming soon is a hybrid that combines the best of the Aten's dynamic driver with a crossover-less planar driver said to infuse the subtlety and microdetails that only a planar driver can produce. Called Rah, it’s another limited run product that’s all but sold out, and I’m hoping against hope that I’ll get a chance to review the next chapter in IMR’s sonic journey. Stay tuned!

An extended review with more images and information is also featured in the Headonist.

Full disclosure: @EffectAudio sent me an Axiom review sample on loan, without any expectations other than my honest opinion and write-up. The opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own, based on my personal preferences, music selection, and mood swings.

Singapore-based boutique cable maker Effect Audio has been a very active company of late. Between new Roman-themed gold-infused cables (that literally cost their weight in gold) and interesting takes on modular connectors (at both ends of the cable), it seems Effect Audio is looking to seriously broaden its horizons.

What better way to do that than release your own set of IEMs? Enter Axiom, a pair of premium IEMs that not only bucks the trend when it comes to what you’d expect to get in the box for a premium price, but also advances the theme of perpetual modularity.


The pitch

Axiom is billed as a reference-quality hybrid IEM, featuring one 12mm magnesium dynamic driver for lows and mids and twin Knowles balanced armature drivers for highs.

But Axiom is also different to most other IEMs by virtue of the new Modular Unit (MU) system, user-swappable modules that let you switch between MMCX and 2-pin connectors on the IEM shell itself, and promise to add sound tweaks and improvements to the base configuration with future modules.

The reason for the connector choice: Axiom is only IEM I’m aware of that ships without a cable, ironic considering Effect Audio is first and foremost a cable maker. I get the reasoning here; most IEM enthusiasts, especially at these price points, either have their own collection of cables, or will likely roll whichever cable would have shipped with Axiom anyway.

This follows on from Effect Audio’s stated intention to build more environmentally sensitive products, if you read the marketing verbiage anyway, which means reducing the number of superfluous accessories and packaging extras that ship with Axiom.


But to say that Axiom’s packaging and accessories, nevermind the missing cable, are spartan would be an understatement. For a $1,500 IEM, what you’re getting in the box – goodwill aside – is positively barebones. One type and set of eartips (S, M, L silicone), one set of MU adapters, and a screwdriver to affect the module change.

That’s it. No case, not even a raw hessian-milled pouch made of biodegradable compost. You get two plastic info cards (recyclable, I hope!) with QR codes to the user manual and other information, and, wait for it, a bag of exotic tea leaves, for when you’re finally ready to sit down and relax with a cuppa.


Look and feel

Make no mistake, Axiom is very well built, using smooth anodised aluminium and featuring a fascinating, highly-polished He Tian jade inlay on the faceplate. What spoils the whole look, for me, is the bulbous MU module that sticks out the back of the IEM like a tack-on, although it appears to be seamlessly integrated into the shell. The result is a rather odd-looking half-moon shell that’s a lot bigger and fatter than a two-driver hybrid would otherwise be; heck I’ve seen eight-driver IEMs with less bulk before.

Despite the bulk, Axiom’s shells are fairly light and admittedly quite comfortable in the ear. The nozzle is on the thick side, but short enough that it doesn’t try skewer your eardrums, and can be worn with a shallow or deep-fitting eartip depending on your preferences. For the purpose of this review I used Axiom with my go-to Acoustune AET 07 and JVC Spiral Dot tips, and had no issues with the fit or seal with either.


Each nozzle is protected with a mesh inlay to prevent wax getting into the IEM cavity, and the nozzle base is shaped like cookie batter being poured into a tray, for no apparent reason other than to make it look more interesting.

On balance, then, this is a delicious-looking, well-fitting, well-made IEM, as it should be for the asking price. The only issue I have with the overall design circles right back to that bulbous MU module, and it’s not so much the look but the concept.

A conundrum of concoctions

I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of modularity, at least not when it comes to a finished retail product. To me, modularity, especially in audio gear and specifically in IEMs, smacks of wastage – the exact opposite of what Effect Audio has supposedly set out to achieve with Axiom.

In pitching for convenience and choice, trying to cast a wide net to match as many tastes as possible with a single product, what ultimately happens is that you land on a favourite combination and stick with it, at which point any possible benefits of modularity go out the window. Not only does this add to the cost, it also adds to the complexity, and as far as I’m concerned, complexity needs to stay as far away from the end-user experience as possible.


The very notion of giving users a choice of different connectors and sound profiles, while possibly being attractive to the indecisive among us, is a solution looking for a problem. It gets worse though – try as I may, I couldn’t figure out how to switch out the MU connector, which seemed intent on sticking firm despite me taking care to remove and not lose the tiny screw that secures it in place (a small storage case for the MU units and spare screws would have been useful here). I’m sure it’s easy enough once you’ve figured it out, just as I’m sure someone, somewhere, is going to end up with broken connectors.

And as for swappable connectors, why? Yes, this lets you use your own cables regardless of termination, but why is Effect Audio not taking the opportunity to promote and upsell their very own, very excellent ConX system, which takes care of any termination issues you might have, even with your own cables?

I’m sorry to say but in my opinion, this ‘simple’ idea is an over-engineered mess that this user could have done without. At best it’s an attempt to reduce waste, but more likely it’s a clever way to get people to try different cables without adding to the base cost of the IEM, and at worst it’s just a strongarm way to get you to buy more cables (but not ConX cables, which are made redundant by the swappable modules).

I can only think that somewhere along the line, everyone in the design department put up their hands with an idea for a new IEM, and in the spirit of inclusiveness, environmental advocacy, and peace on Earth, no idea was left behind.


The right stuff

Thankfully, Axiom is more than just pie-in-the-sky and strangely missing accessories. It’s a damn fine IEM, and performs at a level I’d expect at this price range. Is it competitive against similarly-priced IEMs? I’ll answer that later; first I want to cover what you’re actually getting for your money, sound-wise, and then you can decide whether it’s the right IEM for you, cost and conundrums aside.


Tonality

Axiom is stacked in the bass department, with a ton of low-end weight and presence. This surprised me actually, as I was expecting a more balanced tuning, but to be fair, the bass, while big, didn’t crowd out the other frequencies, especially where the bass isn’t baked into the track.

There’s plenty of sub-bass rumble in Lorde’s The Louvre from the big 12mm dynamic driver, but an equally generous amount of midbass. This is not the fastest bass I’ve heard, not the most textured, but it’s not the slowest or flattest either. It doesn’t quite keep up with the bass benchmarks I compared it to, smoothing over some of the tense sub-bass-driven buildup in Hans Zimmer’s Mountains, for example, but it’s better than many others I’ve heard at this price. You might be a cable short, but you definitely aren’t going to be shortchanged by the bass.


The midrange is where things get a bit trickier. I’m not an authority on what constitutes a great midrange by any measure; what I generally listen for is vocal purity, vocal clarity, and instrument presence and timbre (or at least realism), and Axiom didn’t fail on any score. Mind you, it didn’t ace them either. Vocals, both female and male, were forward and clear, but Ocie Elliott’s Jon Middleton sounded a touch thin and sibilant on Slow Tide, and Rebecca Pidgeon was a touch more wistful and airier than I’m used to hearing her on The Raven.

There is also a dryness to Axiom’s vocals that will please some people and displease others. I Personally prefer my vocals a touch more organic and natural, and if you’re someone that doesn’t listen to lots of vocal-driven music, the point is probably moot for you anyway.

On reflection, this could be more a factor of Axiom’s BA treble poking around where it doesn’t belong and infusing the DD mids with some glassiness. There’s definitely a hint of the lower treble vocal harmonics being a hair too sharp here, like static on the trailing edge of the high notes. The liveliness up top is also apparent in instrumental tracks, where Daft Punk’s Within delights with its full and rich piano strikes – dampened slightly by the warmth in the bass – but the zing in the ‘tss’ of the hi-hats is a touch too tizzy for my liking.

Overall I hear Axiom to have a steep U-shaped (bordering on V) tonality, with elevated bass, neutral mids, and at least two upper-midrange/treble peaks I could pick out (looking at @crinacle's Axiom graph, these appear to be at 5kHz and 8kHz respectively, with some added air infusion above 15kHz too). It’s not bright per se, but brighter than I’m used to. If like me your tinnitus is triggered by zingy treble, just don’t pump the volume too high and you’ll be fine.


Technicalities

Axiom is a competent technical performer at this price point. Stage is fairly wide and spacious with the relative recession in the mids lending more space for the notes to live in. The many overlapping layers in Owl City’s Saltwater Room, for example, never got overwhelming to my ears, and vocals were neatly separated from the electronic effects.

Detail retrieval is also very good, but maybe a touch overdone and unnatural with some sibilance creeping in from the overenthusiastic treble. Still, nothing I found too fatiguing. To explain myself better, it’s the type of detail that I find to be forced rather than real, with highlights getting extra shimmer and ‘spittle texture’ (for want of a less colourful phrase) being a little too coarse. It’s all there in the track, but it sounds like details are pushed towards you in some instances, rather than letting you pick and choose what to listen for. Once again, your own preferences will determine if this presentation is a pro or a con for you.

Overall, I’d say Axiom mixes up musicality with technical acuity quite well. I personally hear it as being more analytical than musical in its execution – generous detail, separation and dynamics but lacking some fluidity and smoothness – which will suit some more than others. I find this to be a disconnect between its bass and midrange tuning, which is very good, and its treble, which is not as good, leading to some coherency issues – and I generally never pick out coherency issues in an IEM.

Select comparisons

Sennheiser IE 900. While not exactly a 1:1 comparison, given the single-driver design of the IE 900, Sennheiser’s flagship IEM comes in at $200 cheaper than the Axiom, including two excellent cables and a case. Where Axiom makes it easy to interchange almost any cable, IE 900 makes it harder, with proprietary recessed MMCX connectors that, ironically, are perfectly suited to Effect Audio’s ConX system. In fact, it was the Sennheiser’s cable that I used for testing Axiom.

Sound-wise, I hear Axiom to be fuller but also slower and less articulate in the bass, with more midbass emphasis than the sub-bass-focused IE 900. I’ve often said IE 900 has one of if not the best bass presentations I’ve heard in an IEM, and that still holds despite Axiom’s bombastic bass bravado.

Axiom’s midrange is more forward than Sennheiser’s, but also drier and more abrasive, whereas I hear IE 900’s vocals and midrange instruments to be more natural, if slightly recessed. Some take issue with IE 900’s treble, finding it a bit too bright and distended, but it’s positively laid-back compared to Axiom’s zing, at least to my ears. IE 900 is smoother and more linear by comparison, but some will prefer Axiom’s liveliness up top.


Sony IER-Z1R. I’ve had the Sony in my stable for about the same amount of time as I’ve had Axiom, and in that time I realised there’s not really any contest here for my preferences. So, I’ll stick to describing the differences I hear and let you guys decide which is preferable. Price-wise, Z1R retails for about $300 more than Axiom, but comes with two stock cables that don’t need rolling, a massive selection of tips, a luxury case, and a premium presentation fit for jewelry. That it can be bought used in mint condition for far less than Axiom is also something to consider.

For sure the Sony is a bigger, bulkier IEM than Axiom, and yet feels far more premium and sophisticated with its mirror-like Zirconium finish and pearlescent faceplates. Fit is hit-and-miss for Sony (it fits me like a glove, but it doesn’t for everyone), so on fit alone it’s much easier to recommend Axiom.

Sound-wise, Axiom again has more bass elevation than Sony, but is also bloomier and less refined. Considering Z1R is now the standard by which I measure all IEM bass, Axiom didn’t really stand a chance here, but for many who prefer the added midbass heft and resulting warmth in Axiom’s signature, it may prove to be a preferable tuning to Sony’s sub-bass-focused, speaker-like bass presentation.

Like IE 900, Z1R is often criticized for its ‘recessed’ midrange, which to my ears doesn’t really add up. I hear Z1R vocals to be far more fluid and natural than Axiom’s, with none of the grain or sibilants in the latter, even though Axiom is more forward and on balance more ‘clear’. Treble-wise, it’s a no-contest. Sony’s combination of custom-BA and super tweeter dynamic treble is silky, extended, airy and incredibly polished, whereas Axiom’s is more lively, zingy and strident. You may indeed prefer the latter, but I can’t say I do.


Verdict and conclusion

Axiom is a fascinating IEM. It bucks the trend of set-and-forget IEMs because unlike most IEMs, it expects you to do a fair amount of work before sitting down to listen.

With Axiom, every component matters – you need to find the right cable, and makes it easy enough to cycle through an entire collection if you already have one. You need to find the right tips, because the base tuning might not be to your liking and tips are a sure way of tweaking that. You also need to find the right source; it’s easy to drive with anything, so your phone might be enough, but it’s also sensitive enough to be influenced by source tonality, output impendance and other factors.

In short, Axiom is a high-end tweaker’s delight, which should come as no surprise given it’s made by a company that sells tweaking for a living. If you’re the type of person that revels in variety and choice, and wants every product to give you as much of that variation and as many configurable options as possible, you’ll find lots to like about Axiom.

I’m not that type of person. I prefer my IEMs to be intricately designed from the ground up to give me a very specific experience, even if I have to pay more for the privilege. I find an abundance of choice paralysing and counterintuitive. So perhaps I’m not the right demographic for Axiom, but I can certainly appreciate the intention, and give credit where credit is due for what it does really well.

As such, despite some tuning choices that don’t quite match my preferences, quality is high, harshness is low, and if you love your bass and treble in equal measure, this is an IEM I’d add to the list. Cost no object – it can’t be when you have an IEM this costly that demands even more investment in peripherals – Axiom gives you a malleable base to work with, and if you like the look, feel and overall sound signature, can potentially outlive many other IEMs by virtue of its evolving MU options.


TL;DR Effect Audio made some bold choices here, not least the idea of developing an IEM in the first place. Whether it’s more of a sales tool for their range of excellent cables or a serious attempt at creating a new market niche for modular IEMs doesn’t really matter, because if nothing else it adds something new and different in a market fast reaching saturation point. I’m not convinced Axiom is competitive enough at the price point yet, but as a blueprint for future designs, it may be just that.

It’s not often that one gets to meet a real celebrity; someone whose fame cuts right across cultures and households. In the real world, names like George Clooney and Julia Roberts come to mind. In the head-fi world, few are more famous than Utopia.

Focal’s flagship dynamic headphone has only existed for about two years, and yet ask most headphone devotees to name the headphone that sits right at the top of the tree and many, if not most, would say Utopia. That’s partly a consequence of the hype train that rolled into town when the French audio maker unveiled the double-whammy of its high-end dynamics, the ‘mainsteam’ Elear and flagship Utopia, and partly because of Utopia’s eye watering price tag of $4,000 at a time when most statement headphones were still selling for half that, or less.

Fast forward to today, and the Utopia is still the headphone I associate with the exclusive ‘summit-fi’ tier of head-fi audio equipment that only a select few enthusiasts can afford, let alone experience. As an enthusiast myself, I could never have imagined my climb up to the higher echelons of this devastatingly expensive but supremely enjoyable hobby would be so swift, and yet the headphone gear I now use and consider my ‘endgame’ is probably sat at Camp 2 or 3 compared to Utopia’s Everest summit.

The Utopia in person

As an Elear owner I am intimately familiar with Focal’s headphone design and ergonomics, so seeing the Utopia for the first time was pleasantly unsurprising. I’ve read reams of reviews and participated in many discussions with Utopia users, but there was still a feeling of privilege handling and opening the large display-style box the Utopia was housed in. Not dissimilar to the Elear’s box, it was black and bulky, but finished with a matte black skin and red trim that imparted an understated sense of prestige.

The Utopia itself was, as expected, very Elear-like, though it felt slightly lighter in the hand. The leather finish of the headband and earpads is uber-soft, clearly made of a much finer grade of leather than the excellent Dekoni Elite sheepskin pads I use with my Elear. The memory foam is also much softer, though not as soft to the touch as the suede-like Elex pads I use as an Elear alternative (more on that later). The Utopia’s carbon fibre yokes have enough flex to sit the cups comfortably on your ears, but unlike the Elear the yokes and headband don’t creak when twisted.

The latter isn’t an issue for me personally - there’s no creaking when the Elear is worn - but it does show the extra level of detail and build quality that went into the Utopia’s design, despite the similarities of look and feel with the Elear, that bestow it with its flagship status.

On the head, the softness of the Utopia’s leather translated to added comfort, and despite not having a suspension strap (an oversight in heavier headphone designs), the headband didn’t immediately leave any hotspots on top of my usually sensitive scalp. It doesn’t exactly ‘disappear’ when worn, but it also doesn’t feel like you’re wearing a motorbike helmet, a-la the Audeze LCD-3.

First impressions

I’ve been anticipating Geoff’s visit all week, and so diligently prepared a list of test tracks I was hoping to hear through Utopia, running the gamut of my musical preferences from girl with guitar to male crooners, modern pop, classic rock and electronica.

First up was Heidi Talbot’s intimately beautiful ‘If You Stay’ (watch here) from her Love+Light album, a track I’ve listened to countless times with almost every headphone I’ve owned and auditioned. Heidi’s innocently sensual voice and breathless delivery lend the song an ethereal quality that can sound edgy with the wrong headphone and compressed when the source is too digital. There was never any risk of that happening with Audio-gd’s exemplary R-28 all-in-one ladder dac and headphone amplifier, and even though the Utopia was using the amp’s single-ended output (I unfortunately did not have balanced Utopia cables to experiment with), the analog-like qualities of the source were immediately apparent.

‘If You Stay’ starts off with a series of lower register guitar plucks that should, ideally, reverberate and resonate around your head, and give the simple intro a sense of palpable weight and warmth. That’s exactly how Utopia delivered it, with every nuance of the guitar clearly and crisply articulated. Heidi’s opening verse was perfectly separated from the instruments that continue to play around her, and I could immediately get a sense of both depth and intimacy, as if she were sitting in the same room, singing her song to me.

Having said that, the Elex is no slouch, and so having ‘calibrated my brain’ by first playing the track through the Elex, I was left a little underwhelmed when the Utopia hardly deviated from what I’d just heard, minutes before. In a blind test I would be hard pressed to tell which headphone was which, other than the obviously cooler Utopia pads around my ears.

Similarities aside, the reason I keep going back to this expertly-mastered track is because good gear will almost always render it correctly, and any deviation is a solid strike against. So far, so good, but the first view from the summit was one I’d already seen before. Also, you may have noticed I used Elex to describe the Elear above, because having switched to Elex pads, that’s exactly what the Elear becomes. Since the Elex has a very similar FR graph to Utopia - and is often described as a ‘baby Utopia’ - I wanted to compare apples with apples, rather than use the more strident, dynamic and punchy Elear.

Change of pace

Strident, dynamic and punchy was exactly what I was looking for from the second test track, AC/DC’s seminal ‘Thunderstuck’ (watch here). Again a gorgeously mastered track, with good gear you should be able to get a real sense of stage width and space as the iconic guitar riff slowly builds up and around you, followed by the ‘kick’ of the kick drums - even before Brian Johnson’s unique delivery is heard over the backing vocals. Being treble sensitive, I use this track to test for glare in the higher notes of the screeching guitars, and as a bass aficionado, I want to feel the drums in the mix, not just hear them. This isn’t always an easy trick to pull off with headphones, but the really good ones will find just the right balance, even at higher volumes, without causing fatigue.

The three most obvious qualities immediately apparent in Utopia’s presentation of the track was its remarkably clean highs, superb instrument separation and ink black background. The sound appeared ‘out of nowhere’ and disappeared from the stage with equally stealth-like speed. I’d read all about the Utopia’s fabled ‘speed’, but didn’t really understand what that meant until I heard this track. You could almost slice the details with a scalpel, but at such speed that it would be humanly impossible to do so. The fastest headphones I’d heard prior to this was a higher-end Stax electrostatic, and this was every bit as fast if not faster.

Speed isn’t the only trait the Utopia seems to share with electrostatics. Not known for moving much air, ‘stats specialise in the delivery of tight, clean and detailed bass that often lacks the weight of real instruments or the rumble of electronic drums. This was a disappointment when hearing my first Stax, and likewise when hearing Thunderstruck through the Utopia. While not specifically a bass-driven track, I’ve heard the kick drums in the intro and the cacophony of drums in the body of the track conveyed with a real visceral impact on the likes of ZMF’s Atticus and the LCD-3, and even the Elear has a certain dynamic punch that makes Thunderstruck’s kicks stand out in the mix. The Utopia, while perfectly articulate, just didn’t do that for me. It was almost a sanitised rendition of bass, like one might expected from the likes of a Sennheiser HD600 or HD650, albeit a touch fuller than Sennheiser’s midrange models, and certainly more detailed.

But where you sometimes want to let your hair down and rock out to a track like Thunderstruck - or similarly styled tracks like Joe ‘Satch’ Satriani’s ‘Always With Me, Always With You’ (watch here) off his ’Surfing With The Alien’ album - you’re more likely to sit and clap to the beat while tethered to the ‘oh so polite’ Utopia. And that’s ok; the Utopia is not, as far as I can tell, a balls-to-the-wall headphone, and that’s by design. There’s just too much detail, nuance, and subtlety in its approach to really bring on the grunge. For many audiophiles that’s a plus, and my penchant for tastefully elevated bass isn’t something these folks will lose much sleep over.

It all comes together

Normally when I audition a headphone, lack of impact is one of the first things I notice, at which point I generally lose interest. But the Utopia was doing too many things too well for me not to pay attention - including the way it described rather than viscerally delivered the bass in the mix. Owl City’s electronically layered ‘Saltwater Room’ literally invited me to walk in and explore the different points of sound emanating all around the space Utopia created. Every layer was separated like an onionskin at the hands of a master chef, and expertly arranged so that the parts were never removed from the whole. On brighter headphones that lack a sense of nuance or control, the sweetness of Breanne Duren’s supporting vocals - which really steal the show from lead singer Adam Young - can be lost in the mix. Instead, the Utopia let me meander through the treble-laden track as if it were lush and rolling midlands, with Adam and Breanne walking with me and around me. It was quite magical really, and prompted me to write in my notes: “best treble I’ve heard in a headphone.”

Cohesiveness is probably the defining character of this headphone. Whether your leaning is more synthesised like Owl City and Daft Punk, or soft rock like Def Leppard, the Utopia presents you with a sound that is both richly detailed and highly musical, without favouring any parts at the expense of others. It’s impossibly smooth, lush and clinical all at once; and unwaveringly musical to my ears. Unlike other high-end headphones that specialise in doing some things well - the space and resolution of the HD800, the speed and transparency of the Stax, the warmth and weight of the LCD-3, the natural realism of the Auteur - the Utopia takes all these elements and melds them together into its own unique sound.

Of course it’s not without its faults, small as they may seem at these dizzying heights. Daft Punk’s ‘Contact’ (listen here) from their masterpiece album ‘Random Access Memories’ is a typical slow-burning, quickly building piece of artful electronica that goes from spartan emptiness to crazy mayhem in a few short minutes. There’s a frantic energy conveyed by the sudden advance and attack of the ‘aliens’ that Utopia’s measured approach somehow fails to grasp. With all the elements neatly intertwined, it almost holds itself back from giving any of the crazy effects prominence over another, but that’s exactly what you want to hear, and many less poised headphones will give you just that.

Utopia is also too fast, in my opinion, at conveying decay, which can make it sound a little dry at times. The droning decay of the deep drums that softly underlie Katie Melua’s ‘Red Balloons’ is a case in point, as are the big, bold booms in Dadawa’s ’Sister Drum’. In both cases Utopia lets you know what you’re hearing - heck it’s so detailed you can probably read the label on the backing material of the drums used in the track - but the size is all wrong. Perhaps it is Utopia’s expensive and exotic Beryllium drivers at play; the Elear and its equally sized drivers doesn’t seem to have too much trouble with the drums in those tracks. It could just be that a buttery smooth rather than hard edged articulation is exactly the sound Focal was seeking, in which case they’ve nailed it.

Back on terra firma

Later that day, after my climb down from the summit, I was reflecting on the experience with my brother, who’d extensively listened to the Utopia in days gone by. In his own words, “the Utopia’s refinement has an incredible way of dissecting the music yet presenting it in an incredibly musical way, so it is articulate all the while being delicate and pleasing, and not sanitised like so many ‘audiophile’ headphones.”

I couldn’t have said that better myself, so I didn’t. What I will say is that, combined with the right system, the Utopia earns its praise and position among the very best of the best. While I consider my system to be of a very high standard, there’s no question a headphone like Utopia will benefit more - and give you more - from a system more commensurate with its price tag. That’s not to say the system I’m using was necessarily a limiting factor, but that there are more gears to be shifted if you have the means to do so. Add to that the mysterious effect that synergy may yield with different components, which Utopia is undoubtedly transparent enough to respond to.

Closing thoughts

Which brings me to the reason I decided, in the end, to take leave of the summit, regardless of how stunning I found the view. Truth be told, the difference between high-end and summit-fi is not nearly as large as you’d imagine based purely on how much it will cost you to walk those extra few steps to the top. If, like me, you’re willing to spread your listening between two or more headphones, each of which does something different or better than the other and is therefore more suited to different types of music, then putting all your eggs in one very expensive basket like Utopia is not necessarily the best way to spend your money.

Then again, if money is no object, and the price of Utopia doesn’t make your palms sweat and eyes twitch, then few headphones I’m aware of can elevate your music to extreme levels of fidelity like Utopia can. It may not get you up and dancing, but it will make you cry - and not because you had to sell your car to buy it.

The HEDDphone was tested and reviewed at the premises of newly-launched South African online Head-Fi company, Lumous Audio. I was not incentivised to write this review, and the opinions expressed are entirely my own.


Introduction

I’ve been wandering around the cavernous headphone rabbit hole for more than four years now, experiencing many of the fascinating creations it has to offer, to the point where there’s little that genuinely surprises me now when I listen to it.

That changed recently when I finally got to hear for myself one of the most talked about headphones in recent history, the HEDDphone. Simply named after its founding company, Berlin-based Heinz Electrodynamic Design (HEDD), the HEDDphone is the world’s first headphone to feature a full-range AMT (Air Motion Transformer) driver, an audio transducer technology invented by Oskar Heil and perfected by German physicist Klaus Heinz (yes, the self-same Heinz in HEDD).

Without getting into details that are probably better covered elsewhere, AMT technology is not new, and in fact has been used in speakers and some headphones for years. Until the HEDDphone, however, AMT was primarily used for tweeter designs, popularised by the famous ribbon tweeters in Adam Audio studio monitors.

As a tweeter technology, AMT’s claim to fame is speed and precision. Made from an ultra-thin mylar ribbon and suspended between two dipole magnets, the drivers have a surface area up to 80% larger yet significantly lighter than traditional dynamic driver speaker designs, and so can move air much quicker when activated by an electrical signal.

HEDD uses what it calls VVT (Variable Velocity Transform) technology to vary the depth and geometry of the driver, thus expanding the narrower frequency range of AMT tweeters to produce full range (10Hz – 40kHz) sound.

For every clever technology, however, there’s always a downside. In the case of HEDD’s full-range drivers, the downside is size – and weight. Each driver is hand-assembled and placed into a protective box made of (what appears to be) stainless steel, not only to protect the sensitive diaphragm, but also allow for the correct sizing needed to produce the desired sound quality in headphone format.

The driver canisters are then suspended inside the solidly-built leather-padded metal shell of the HEDDphone, resulting in what has to be one of the largest and heaviest headphones on the market today. It’s worth watching this video to get a good idea of what the process entails (trust me, it’s fascinating).


This is not a headphone for sissies; a few gym sessions and some serious neck muscle toning is strongly advised prior to tackling this beast. Jokes aside, the HEDDphone has actually been very cleverly designed to balance most of the weight strategically around head and shoulders. The thickly-padded headband is kinked right in the middle, preventing the painful hotspots typically associated with heavier headphones like Audeze’s LCD series (although that problem has since been alleviated with Audeze’s new suspension strap design).

A suspension strap would actually be a useful add-on to the HEDDphone, and I’ve already seen photos of users retrofitting their own straps to help lighten the load. Most of the weight, however, is literally cushioned by the giant pads that not only serve to soften the clamp of the headphone against your face, but also distance your ears from the gravitational pull of the giant magnets inside each of the cups (that last part about the magnet isn’t strictly true of course, but it was fun to write anyway).

Truth be told, I had a harder time wearing an unsuspended LCD-3, and even a Focal Elear, than I did with the HEDDphone. Make no mistake, this is not a portable headphone, and I wouldn’t even suggest walking around with it. But lying back in a comfortable recliner, you’ll soon forget you’re wearing helmet-sized headgear, and just get on with the business of loving your music.

I’ll link to other reviews at the end of this article that dive deeper into the packaging and unboxing experience, in case any of that interests you. If, like me, you’re more interested in what the HEDDphone can do, and how it compares to other headphones in and around its not-unsubstantial price point, read on.


Sound impressions

Let me not keep you in suspense through the next thousand words of flowery sound descriptions: simply put, the HEDDphone is the single best headphone experience I’ve had in all my time using, testing and reviewing headphones. It conveys music in such a powerful, immediate yet delicate and refined way, that it’s as close to a full-size high-end speaker setup I’ve heard without using actual speakers.

I tested the HEDDphone using a wide variety of tracks from my playlist, from my staple female singer-songwrites, to modern and classic pop, jazz, classical, EDM, and some light rock. If you want impressions of what it sounds like with heavier stuff than, say, Def Leppard, I’m the wrong guy to ask, but I can only assume that its mastery over just about everything else I threw at it bodes well for a clean sweep of genres.

Tonally the HEDDphone is all about clarity. The first thing I noticed is how crystal clear every nuance of sound seemed to be, emanating from an ink black background and an almost infinitely deep stage. This is probably unsurprising given that AMT drivers are best known for their ultracrisp treble quality, but even so, the clarity, air and sheer detail delivery was surprising.

As a big fan of the HD800 I’ve heard my fair share of bright-leaning treble, but here was something different. It had brightness, yes, but it was brightness without hardness, so the details, while there, were never forced on me.

Listening to Gheorghe Zamfir’s The Lonely Shepherd, I could almost hear the air moving up from his lungs into the panpipes. The subtle guitars in left channel were so clear, so perfectly separated from the pipes, I could almost see them being plucked. Delicate sounds were being played on different layers and levels, an impossible feat without impeccable lower and upper treble control and definition.

The HEDDphone’s treble response was also my first clue that, great as it can be, it very much depends on proper amplification. Whereas the piano in the intro to Daft Punk’s Within was very tight, it was also brighter and thinner in tone before I switched over from a built-in headphone amplifier to a dedicated high-powered amp. Only then did this track go from clinical and edgy to a more refined presentation.

The same can be said of HEDDphone’s bass response. Whereas I initially felt the bass was slightly lacking on some of my tracks – the kick drums in Brandi Carlile’s masterful The Story didn’t have quite the kick I know them to have – I later discovered that amplification quality is crucial if you expect the HEDDphone to perform at its peak.

Once properly amped, the bass hits hard and true, and although I wouldn’t rec the HEDDphone to bassheads, there was more than enough quantity for this reformed basshead, and the quality was nothing short of sublime. I was even greeted with impressive sub bass rumble in the intro to Dirk Elhert’s Elements, and the kick drums to Def Leppard’s Love Bites had a punch I could feel in my cheeks, not something I’ve heard too often with open-back headphones.

Compared to Meze’s Empyrean, a hybrid planar flagship headphone that retails for a solid $1000 more than the HEDDphone, the bass is more linear, digging deeper into the sub bass without any bloating in the midbass. It’s perhaps not quite as aggressive and sustained as the brilliant bass response of Audeze’s LCD-3, but is tighter and more detailed, and notably faster to my ears.

Both Empyrean and LCD-3 tend to favour a warmer tonality, the Empyrean even more so with its bloomy midbass that veils over the fundamentals of the midrange, and while the HEDDphone isn’t strictly neutral, it’s definitely closer to a reference bass tuning than its more coloured compatriots.

Speaking of midrange, this was perhaps the star of the show for me as far as tonality is concerned. Almost every other headphone I listened to alongside the HEDDphone emphasised one or other frequency over the others, to the point of distraction. The Empyrean’s midbass and slightly rolled treble, the LCD-3’s dominant sub-bass and smoothed over upper registers, and the HD800’s aggressive treble and rolled off bass come to mind.

With the HEDDphone I didn’t feel it compromised in any one area, and whereas the midrange of the three other headphones was almost an afterthought, on the HEDDphone it was front and centre, neither recessed or too forward, and perfectly balanced with the extremities.

Vocals and instrument fundamentals were particularly natural and lifelike, not quite organic – as that would suggest a warmer tilt – but far from thin or analytical. Imogen Heap’s vocals in the spritely track Between Sheets are sweet, clean, sibilance free and ultra-realistic. I could hear every inflection in her voice, while the sense of stage and separation from the instruments allowed me to almost walk around the song (yet also sit back and take it all in).

Holly Throsby’s sweet vocals in What Do You Say played off perfectly with Mark Kozelek’s warm, reassuring baritone on the same track, resulting in an incredibly palpable presentation that felt as if there was nothing between the singers and my ears. Switching pace, the vocal trance of Fragma’s You Are Alive was smooth and absolutely sibilant free, nicely separated from the effects dancing around the vocals, with echoes and reverbs creating a massive sense of space.


Technically the HEDDphone is easily at flagship level, and I’ll go as far as say this is a new standard for headphones in this price range. Neither the LCD-3, at around the same price point, or the Empyrean costing significantly more, can compete with the HEDDphone for sheer technical acuity. The only headphone I’ve heard that goes toe-to-toe technically is the HD800, although I much prefer the HEDDphone’s tonality to the HD800 (sans SDR and EQ).

Stage in a headphone is a controversial topic, especially compared to live sound and speakers, but the HEDDphone presents one of the biggest stages I’ve heard in a headphone to date. It’s not quite as wide as the HD800, but significantly deeper and taller, and gives a better sense of size to the music.

Made in Heights’ Hors D’Oeuvre is a track I often use to test space, and indeed I heard sounds appearing out of a jet-black background that gave this track a natural sense of space, with endless decays. Lily Kershaw’s Always and Forever was more spacious yet also more cohesive than I’d heard it before, with minutae details floating around the 3D space created by the HEDDphone.

This track also exemplifies the inch-perfect imaging this headphone is capable of, so when Lily’s vocals split into three at the two-minute mark, I could almost see where each ‘voice’ was standing in the space relative to the centre image.

But of all the technical highlights, detail retrieval has to be the most impressive trait of this headphone. Every single subtle sound can be heard exactly where it’s been placed in the mix, and throughout my audition I never stopped delighting at how the details seemed to appear so vividly, as if from nowhere and everywhere at the same time.


Considerations

Be warned, all this quality doesn’t come cheap, and doesn’t come easy. I already mentioned how heavy the monstrous frame of the HEDDphone can feel on your head, and this bears repeating. You’ll want a quiet, comfortable, well supported place to rest your body and head before embarking on a proper listening session.

You’ll also need power – and plenty of it – to drive the HEDDphone to its full potential. Voltage isn’t really an issue, and it’s not difficult to get the HEDDphone to loud enough volume levels. But without enough juice, enough current, you’re going to hear a steep dropoff in dynamic range, and wonder where all the sub bass has suddenly disappeared.

This is not a headphone you’re going to be happy connecting to a basic portable source – definitely not a phone, and not a midrange DAP either. You’ll want something with muscle, like a HiBy R8 or iBasso DX300, or better yet a powerful portable amp like Cayin’s C9, if you’re even thinking of taking this headphone off the desktop.

As for desktop power, only when I had the HEDDphone connected to an Eddie Current Black Widow did I get a proper understanding of what this headphone can do, technically and tonally (and if anyone knows the story of this rare and unique solid state amp you’ll know how special it sounds). That’s not to say you have to splash the same money on amping the HEDDphone as the headphone itself, but doing so will give you a far better return on your investment.


Closing thoughts

Listening to HEDDphone was a wild ride for me, especially since I’ve switched my listening almost entirely away from full size desktop headphones to IEMs. It was a reacquaintance of sorts with the type of sound that set me on my head-fi journey more than four years ago, and in many ways, is a reaffirmation of just how incredibly rewarding the sound of a truly great headphone can be.

For all its wizardry and world-first technology, the HEDDphone at its core is all about recreating music exactly as it was recorded, with very little in the way of ‘gear’ in the way. It’s not a headphone that sets out to colour the music, or to wow you with unconventional staging, gratuitous bass or scalpel-like detail. It hits the highest possible level of fidelity almost from the off, and then maintains it throughout your listen, track after track.

Even though I consider the HEDDphone to be close to a so-called ‘reference’ tuning, it still maintains a sense of musicality that’s fun to listen to and is about as far from dry or clinical as you can get in this hobby. Yes, it asks for some skin (or rather, muscle) in return, and demands as much power as your wallet can muster, but it will reward you handsomely if you give it what it wants.

In closing, I’ll leave you with this: the HEDDphone is a headphone for the headphone connoisseur. It sacrifices some of the comfort of an Empyrean, the brute strength of an LCD-3, and the clinical precision of an HD800 to create a sound as close as possible to life itself. It gives you everything without forcing anything, and in doing so, allows you to lose yourself in the music in the best possible way.

Without question the HEDDphone gets my highest recommendation, and represents the best value of any high-end headphone I have personally has the pleasure of hearing.

The HEDDphone is available in South Africa from Lumous Audio. More information available here.


Further reading

This review didn’t cover several aspects that some of you may be interested in, like packaging, accessories and comparisons to different headphones. Feel free to peruse some of the other excellent reviews of this headphone available online, including:

• Headfonics
• Headfonia
• Headphones.com
• Headphone Check

I received a review unit of the VE Elysium EXTended (EXT) as part of the official VE South African Tour, which also included the new all-BA Phönix flagship. The tour was made possible by Marcel and Jonas at @Vision Ears, and I’d like to once again EXTend my thanks to the VE team for their generosity of spirit and enthusiastic support of our far-flung community.


Introduction

While I haven’t been fortunate enough to hear the original Elysium for myself, that IEM’s reputation preceded it. Famed for its ‘peerless’ midrange, I was less enthused with the idea of Elysium’s bass playing only a small part in the sound signature, with a single, sad and lonely BA driver left to do bass duty while the mids and treble got all the good stuff.

So, when VE announced a ‘new’ Elysium, that ‘course corrected’ with a full-blown 9.2mm dynamic bass woofer to go with an improved 6mm midrange dynamic driver and second-generation Sonion treble electrostatic drivers (four instead of Elysium’s original two), excitement levels hit fever pitch. In fact, it was only because of my interest in EXT that I got to hear its maternal twin Phönix, and if you read my Phönix review, you know how glad I am that I did.

But I digress. EXT, from what I understand, is about as far removed from the original Elysium as chalk and cheese. Yes, the hearty midrange was retained, but everything from bass to treble to tuning to form factor (more on that zany form factor later) was changed. You’ll find numerous reviews comparing the two, so if that’s what you’re looking for from me, you may want to look elsewhere.

What I will be doing in this review, however, is pitting EXT against my current all-time favourite IEM, the Sony IER-Z1R, mainly because on paper the two IEMs compete for a similar audience – someone like me who demands the very best in DD bass with a healthy dollop of midrange goodness thrown in for good measure.

But before I do all that, let’s take a closer look at EXT, what it comes with, how it’s made, and how well (or not) it fits the ear.


Presentation, fit and finish

As I mentioned in the Phönix review, the tour samples of both EXT and Phönix didn’t ship with retail packaging, though from what I’m told, EXT’s unboxing experience is spectacular. I can believe it too; seeing and holding EXT for the first time, it’s clear that a lot of attention has gone into its design and construction.

The shells themselves are quite small, though not quite as small as something like Sennheiser’s single dynamic driver IE 900. Each earpiece features an aluminium faceplate anodised in a custom ‘Vision Ears’ deep purple colour. The faceplates are grooved with a striking ‘X’ design that reveals a silver-finished acoustic aluminium mesh, which does double-duty as a protective cover and dynamic driver vent.

On the flipside of the faceplate is where things get funky. The nozzle and driver housing are made of a seamless opaque black acrylic, with a flat base and an odd-looking bulb just below the thick, oval-shaped nozzle. The reason for the bulb is the four Sonion estats that VE decided to place close to the nozzle opening, most likely because two sealed dynamic drivers and a three-way crossover take up the bulk of available space, and expanding the shell cavity would have made the EXT unyieldingly large.


There’s also a small ‘clear’ section in each nozzle that reveals some of the wiring and VE’s proprietary second-generation HALC (High Precision Acoustic Leveling Chamber) that helps tune the dynamic drivers to spec. Unfortunately, while the final design and aesthetic is one of form as well as function, it’s not ideal – at least not for me.

I have fairly small, narrow ear canals, and generally use small or medium-small tips with ‘traditional’ IEM nozzles of regular length and thickness. EXT’s are neither traditional nor regular, shaped more like a semi-custom IEM that requires some acrobatic counter-clockwise twisting to slide and ‘lock’ the bulbous, angled nozzles inside your ears.

With a little practice, they slide and lock very neatly, and if my ear canals were a millimeter or two wider, there would be plenty of room for both the bulbous acrylic shaft and its accompanying eartips. However, even with the most comfortable eartips I have (JVC Spiral Dots), I can feel the pressure of the nozzles and eartips inside my ear canals almost immediately, and while it’s not uncomfortable per sé , I’m constantly aware that I’m wearing silicone plugs in my ears (and yes, before you ask, I tried different sizes, with one size down being too small and not sealing properly).

It's all good and well if I insert them once and leave them be. If, on the other hand, I remove the earpieces regularly, as I had to do during testing, the constant chafing of the silicone from the in-out twisting motion hurts my ears, to the point where they become red and painful after an hour or two, and I have to stop listening for the day. So, while I can live with the pressure of the fit for shorter listens, I’m yet to find eartips that would allow me to wear them for longer sessions.

To be clear, I can really only talk about the fit from my own perspective and have read plenty of impressions from those for whom EXT fits like a glove, so don’t let my experience dissuade you from trying EXT for yourself. It took me almost four years to finally muster up the courage to buy Z1R despite all the negative reviews of its ‘atrocious fit’, which turned out to be anything but, and I ended up missing out on its spectacular sound quality for way too long.


There’s a lot to like about EXT too, as you’ll soon find out, but before I get to that, a quick comment on accessories. The stock cable is an 8-wire silver-plated copper design, which, like the Phönix cable, is terminated with 0.78mm 2-pin connectors on the earpiece side and a 2.5mm balanced connector on the source side. The retail box comes with a 2.5mm to 4.4mm balanced adapter, though I used a DD Hi-Fi connector for the review as the VE connector didn’t ship with the tour kit.

Two different types of silicone tips are also included in the box: Azla Crystal and Spinfit CP-155. I preferred the SpinFits to the Crystal, which were almost impossible to fit onto the thick nozzle (eventually, with some practice, I managed). Neither were particularly comfortable though, which is why, after cycling through about a dozen different tips, I settled on the Spirals for both sound quality and, more importantly, comfort. This brings us to the part most of you probably skipped to anyway…

Sound impressions

I’ve been listening to EXT on and off for about three weeks now, mainly using HiBy’s R2R-based RS6 DAP, which I found to have excellent synergy as a pairing. I also used iFi’s xDSD Gryphon, though most of the review impressions – including the Z1R shootout – were made with the HiBy. EXT needs about the same amount of power to get to the same volume level as Z1R, and with almost 700mW into 32 ohms, the RS6 has plenty of power on tap for both IEMs without breaking a sweat, delivering a clean black background with zero hiss and ample headroom.

The following section will be slightly different to my usual sound impressions in that I’m not going to reference specific tracks but will instead talk more generically about the sound, and leave the music mentions to the shootout section that follows.


Tonality

I hear EXT to have a warmer-than-neutral tonality but with extreme clarity as its defining attribute. Even though it has a powerful bass driver EXT can have a bright and forward sound, but again not in the way you’d typically think of a bright-leaning monitor. Its brightness comes from an elevated and very extended midrange-to-treble plateau, especially upper treble, which gives the sound plenty of shimmer and lightness. This lightness feeds back into the midrange and balances out any bass ‘heaviness’ that would have been there, were it not for that treble infusion.

If I had to describe the tonality as a shape, it would be closest to a W, but without the typical ‘peakiness’ that some W-shaped monitors suffer from. EXT is generally smooth across the board, with almost zero harshness, but depending on the recording, there can be some residual sibilants or glassiness in some vocals (mainly female vocals) because of the sheer amount of air and clarity in the signature. As such, I find EXT to be less forgiving of poor recordings than its more refined sibling.

Overall, I’d say EXT’s presentation is one of power, dynamism and energy, but with the ability to resolve even the finest feathery nuances in each of the main frequency ranges. It’s a ‘bright daylight’ type of tuning that exposes your ears to all the details and textures in the music, but for all its liveliness I find it sometimes leans more cerebral than musical, especially because the overall tone is drier and lighter rather than organic or earthy. On the whole, it still sounds very natural, but if you’re looking for rose-tinted romanticism in your music, this is probably not the monitor for you.


Bass is the biggest change from the original Elysium, both in tuning and the hardware used to deliver it. The large 9.2mm driver is put to very good use to dig deep into the lows, though the balance is tilted slightly more towards midbass than sub-bass. There’s no midbass ‘hump’ to thicken the music, but the elevated midbass does subdue the sub-bass energy on some tracks, and so while there’s plenty of rumble where there should be in the music, it’s not a warbly, subwoofer-like rumble but rather a tighter, more measured physicality.

Where EXT really shines is bass texture, delivering subtle shades of bass that are usually the domain of nimbler BA drivers, only this time with the air movement that makes dynamic driver bass so much more visceral and natural sounding. While it doesn’t quite have the full range of tactility because of its slightly muted sub-bass response, the details that are felt rather than heard are all still there, but maybe not as obvious as they would be with a monitor that puts more focus on sub-bass weight.

This is not the world’s fastest bass by any measure, but I don’t find it slow either. Decay is actually very fast for a large dynamic, and on some tracks, I hear it to have more BA-like characteristics, in terms of decay at least, and attack is even faster. EXT has a real talent for keeping pace with even the fastest basslines, but is not as adept at sustaining the decay – something many would no doubt see as an advantage because it prevents the bass from bleeding and helps expose more detail in the midrange.

Overall, I find EXT’s bass exceptional, among the best I’ve heard from a dynamic driver IEM in terms of detail and texture. That said, it’s a fairly reserved bass, even though it’s elevated above neutral, and doesn’t punch quite as hard or rumble quite as low as class leaders like EVO and Z1R. It can also go missing altogether on bass-light tracks, and therefore may not satisfy the die-hard bassheads among us.


Midrange is what made the original Elysium famous, and while I’ve already confessed to having never heard the original, listening to EXT I get a sense of how that reputation was forged. Lower mids, in particular, are awash with texture, male vocals presented with their full chesty tone, but they do lack the lushness of some other monitors (even with a lush vocal-oriented source like RS6).

Upper mids aren’t quite as forward, and female vocals that sit closer to the upper midrange definitely reflect the treble elevation up top. Like male vocals, they tend to be on the drier and lighter side, with notes not quite as full or weighty as I’d like, but not fluffy or brittle either. Some female vocals can suffer from a hint of hollowness, which I personally feel is the result of the overabundant air up top, and the higher-pitched the vocals, the wispier and more ethereal they sound as a result.

Instrument tone and timbre is spot on; strings ooze with texture and piano strikes shimmer with detail and realistic weight. EXT has this way of creating three-dimensional images of instruments that give them a realism I’ve rarely heard before. It also helps separate instruments on the stage and sets them apart from vocals, and although these are more technical than tonal attributes, I find it relevant to mention them here because of how big a part the tuning plays in the overall midrange presentation.


Treble is where EXT might split opinion. I’m still undecided on whether or not I like the elevated treble tuning, but there’s no question its airiness and speed are what contribute to EXT’s overall clarity and tonal spaciousness. The upper treble elevation helps create pitch-black spaces between instruments and vocals, but also contributes to their lightness of tone.

As far as estats go, this is one of the best implementations I’ve heard, right up there with standard-bearers like Traillii. There’s so much shimmer to the music you’ll want to reach for your sunglasses, but this isn’t a glaring treble, nor is it peaky or harsh. It’s silky, but not in the sense of sounding organic and relaxed like Phönix or Z1R.

There’s a smoothness to the treble I really like, even though it lacks some bite in the lower treble region, but that can be a good thing too, depending on your preferences. This also makes it more consistent with the overall smoothness of the tuning elsewhere, and makes for a cohesive and coherent sound despite the different driver types.

Overall, while some consider EXT’s a bass-dominant signature, I somewhat disagree, finding that treble plays a bigger role, at least with the music I listen to. Thankfully treble quality is outstanding, so this isn’t an issue, and despite the prominent treble, bass is very well balanced and in the signature as a whole.


Technicalities

There’s a sense in the community that EXT isn’t the most technically proficient monitor around, and while that’s true, it has to be taken in context. I find EXT performs at a very high technical level, with excellent resolution and detail retrieval across the board. It may not have the microscope-like resolving power of Traillii or Fourte, but it also doesn’t have the BA driver tech designed specifically to extract that insane level of detail in a monitor, especially in the midrange.

Stage is wide and natural, with a decent sense of depth but not much height. On the right tracks, sounds can stretch beyond my ears, but the stage generally lacks the sense of holographic staging I get with other monitors like Traillii or Z1R. As I mentioned earlier, EXT has an uncanny ability to render 3D instruments but lacks the tonal weight to make them sound life-size.

Imaging is very precise, and I always get a good sense of where individual instruments and vocals are placed on the stage. Separation is also excellent, as is layering, although again we’re not talking class-leading but still in touch with top-shelf monitors. I certainly don’t feel shortchanged by EXT’s technical ability, and any more would push the overall presentation too far towards clinical for my liking.


Select comparisons

I originally intended this review to be a shootout between EXT and my current favourite IEM, the Sony IER-Z1R, but felt that would be too narrow a focus and do both IEMs a disservice. I’d already written more than 5,000 words’ worth of track notes, however (yes, that’s more words than this entire review) so, instead of throwing all that bedtime reading material away, I’m going to use this section to summarise my findings between the two IEMs and let you decide if you want to sift through the track-by-track, blow-by-blow details.

If you do, you’ll find them all in the Track Notes – EXT vs Z1R spoiler below, complete with YouTube and Tidal links, so you can listen along and come to your own conclusions:



If it’s now three days later and you’ve managed to wade through all my track notes, congratulations and thank you! For the rest of you lazy buggers, here’s the executive summary.

While I consider EXT to be competitive with Z1R, it’s only in the sense that it competes for the one spot I have in my IEM ‘collection’ for a TOTL multi-driver IEM. This is the IEM I personally use for focused listening sessions, when I want the absolute best quality that aligns closest to my sound preferences. Z1R took that spot last December, and since then no other IEM I’ve heard has come close to replacing it. To give some more context, prior to Z1R, the mantle was held by Empire Ears’ EVO, Legend X before that, and 64 Audio’s Tia Fourté before that.


I hear Z1R to have a slightly warmer, fuller tonality than EXT. This stems from Z1R’s peerless sub-bass weight and extension, which, as those who have heard it will attest, creates a cavernous sense of space that makes instruments and vocals sound almost life-size, or as close as they can be to life-size from miniature drivers.

EXT’s sub-bass is more subdued and lighter in feel by comparison. I don’t get the same abyss-like sense of height and depth with EXT that Z1R creates with its slow, sumptuous sub-bass decay. EXT’s midbass amplitude is higher than Z1R’s by comparison, and neither EXT or Z1R’s midbass is thick enough to veil the midrange. EXT’s midbass decays faster relative to Z1R, while the Sony has a slower, more natural decay to my ears, and consequently warms up the signature more than EXT, at the expense of EXT’s greater sense of clarity.

The midrange presentation of the two IEMs is also quite different, EXT being fuller and more textured in the lower midrange, Z1R being slightly more forward and wholesome in the upper mids. Unlike many, I don’t find Z1R’s lower mids problematic, nor do I find male vocals scooped or distant, but vocals, in general, are set a row or two further back with Z1R than they sound with EXT. EXT also brings out more contrast, clarity and texture to the midrange, with a drier and lighter note weight, while Z1R has fuller notes and a more earthy, organic sound to midrange instruments and vocals.

This plays out in how the two IEMs present stringed instruments, for example, EXT with more definition in attack, Z1R with a slightly softer attack and a longer decay. Male vocals are slightly chestier with EXT, while female vocals are wispier and lighter. Z1R doesn’t have EXT’s male vocal weight, but still sounds natural to my ears, and female vocals sound fuller and more organic with Z1R. I personally don’t hear the vocals or midrange of either IEM as recessed, but objectively speaking they do sit slightly behind – or at least closer in line – with the bass.

Subjectively I don’t see this as better or worse, and in fact, it’s my preferred presentation in many ways. Too forward and vocals become shouty, especially female vocals at higher volumes, and EXT is more prone to this than Z1R in my experience.


Treble is where EXT and Z1R diverge even further. With four estats to Z1R’s one custom BA (which is only partly responsible for treble) and a 4mm dynamic ‘super tweeter’ driver for ultra-high frequencies, the two IEMs approach treble from vastly different perspectives. I’d actually go as far as saying EXT’s is fractionally more of a treble-focused signature, while Z1R with its powerful but narrowly-focused woofer is more bass dominant overall.

EXT’s mid-and-upper treble elevation also balances out its bass response, more so than Z1R’s relaxed (but very well extended) upper bass. Z1R has more energy in its lower treble, by comparison, with a 6kHz peak that adds some spice to electric guitars and female vocal overtones – minus the sibilants – while EXT’s has far more upper treble energy that infuses its entire signature with plentiful air and crystalline clarity. EXT, to my ears, is, therefore, brighter, mainly on account of its treble, and although Z1R is not a dark-sounding IEM by any means, it’s warmer and comparatively darker, with a more liquid sound overall.

Technically I find each IEM to have its own strengths. EXT is the more resolving of the two, with the clarity of its midrange and treble in particular making fine details easier to hear. Z1R doesn’t skimp on those details, but they’re not as apparent, and sometimes partially hidden behind the longer decay of a bass guitar or kick drum.

Both EXT and Z1R have wide stages, Z1R maybe a fraction wider, but Z1R pulls away when it comes to stage height and depth. In tracks where the sub-bass lends weight to the music, Z1R’s sense of spaciousness can be jaw-dropping, while EXT doesn’t do anything to excite in this department. Imaging and separation are neck-and-neck, with neither IEM lacking nor class-leading.

On the whole, technicalities are still very much TOTL, in my opinion.

If you’ve read my track notes, you’ll know which IEM I ultimately prefer overall, but I want to make it clear that this preference is very much based on what I consider to be important, specifically with the music I listen to.



If you love your sub-bass, and get a deep (excuse the pun) satisfaction from feeling the weight of a bass drop or drum rumble against your ear canals and down to your chest, few IEMs come close to Z1R, which captures that sensation almost perfectly. If you predominantly listen to female vocal-driven music, and prioritise vocal purity and feminine sweetness above huskiness or the chestiness of male vocals, Z1R is tuned to deliver.

On the other hand, if your checklist starts with midrange clarity, detail and texture, especially for male-driven vocals or instrument fundamentals, EXT is close to the top of the pile, to my ears. It literally has a dedicated dynamic driver expertly tuned to deliver that and only that. If you like your midrange partnered with a solid dose of midbass and a fair amount of sub-bass extension, but don’t want it to dominate midrange clarity and treble, that’s exactly how EXT is tuned.

Genre-wise, EXT is ideal if your library is mainly made up of instrumental music such as big and small band jazz, classical, acoustic and ambient, or if you’re into classic rock, pop and folk – especially with male vocal leads. It’s also superb for electronic music, and EDM if you like your EDM to sound relatively faster and tighter.

Z1R would be my pick for female singer-songwriter, especially if the music has bass drum or string bass elements to it. It’s also my pick for modern female vocal pop, indie pop, dream pop, shoegaze, new age and folk, along with bass-driven EDM, electronic and ambient music. Movie soundtracks and epic/trailer music are also given more gravitas and emotional impact with Z1R in my opinion.

Both IEMs are great all-rounders though, despite their individual strengths, and both play every type of music I listen to exceptionally well – especially when I wasn’t focused on comparing them. They will serve you equally well in a single or small IEM collection, and complement each other nicely in a larger collection too. Ultimately, if you have to choose, pick the one that speaks to you more with your music.

Oh, and that’s that for comparisons, sorry. I compared EXT to Phönix in my Phönix review, so if that’s of interest, click on the link. You’ll find more in @Damz87's, @Barra's, @SLC1966's and @davidmolliere's excellent reviews below too, along with notes on numerous different source and cable pairings.


Closing thoughts

Living where I do, it’s not often I get to hear not one but two top-tier, luxury IEMs while they’re still new on the market, but thanks to the guys at Vision Ears, I’ve now had that privilege. EXT follows hot on the heels of Phönix as a high-performance monitor designed to be as flashy and boisterous as its sibling isn’t.

Where Phönix aims for understated elegance, EXT goes for fun, with a clear, clean sound that’s balanced with solid bass at one end and silky treble at the other. At heart, this is a midrange lover’s dream IEM, with detail and texture in both male and female vocals and outstanding timbre when reproducing live instruments.

Extremely well made using premium materials, EXT follows a very different, edgy design motif based on VE’s distinctive colour, both visually and sonically. It’s a monitor that’s been expertly tuned by masters of the craft, and while it doesn’t always match my preferences, I respect how cohesively it presents the signature it’s going for.

Unfortunately, EXT’s unconventional shape is also its Achille’s Heel as far as comfort goes, and I’m not the first and won’t be the last person to find the fit more than a little testing. I’m generally fine when it comes to conventional nozzle shapes, and even some unconventional fits, like Z1R, seem to somehow settle neatly in my ears. But having to twist and fit EXT’s nozzle deeper inside my rather narrow ear canals – especially since my left ear won’t allow any but the smallest tips to pass – is a challenge, and one that despite my best efforts, I haven’t fully overcome.

It's a testament to how much I enjoy EXT’s sound that I persevered, despite the fit-related struggles. Its midrange mastery is something you have to hear for yourself, and combined with powerful bass that partners rather than merely supports the delivery is a masterstroke. Personally, toning down the treble would have thickened up the midrange and elevated the bass weight just enough for me to like it even more, but I appreciate how the treble tuning boosts the cleanliness the designers were clearly going for.

Given time, I would have liked to try EXT with different sources, and I don’t doubt there’s a set of tips out there that would not only make the experience more comfortable, but because the sound is so tip-sensitive, also get it sounding closer to my preferred tonality. I’ve read that EXT scales with desktop power, for example, giving it a more forceful bass response, and that’s one place where I feel it can use a tweak. A cable swap could possibly also add a touch of weight and warmth to the midrange, especially when listening to female vocals, which is another area where the warmer, fuller Z1R one-ups EXT for me.

All that said, I have no hesitation in giving EXT my highest recommendation, with the proviso that I strongly suggest you try before you buy. Minor sonic characteristics can be fixed with hardware and software, but a poor fit is generally a deal-breaker. That said, if you can get a comfortable fit with EXT, you’re in for a very special treat indeed.

When FiiO first teased a new DAP in the lead-up to their ‘Spring Launch’ event in March this year, it seemed as if we were about to witness the world’s first submergible music player with phone functionality and some sort of otherworldly power source.


As it turned out, the DAP in question – the FiiO M11 – wasn’t quite all that, but in a market split between inexpensive barebones music players and a number of increasingly pricey, premium devices, it somehow still managed to be different enough and affordable enough to make many people rethink the meaning of value.

My DAP Journey

This review is intentionally going to be a little different to your run-of-the-mill product review. There are already a few of those on the M11 online, and @audiophilefan's excellently comprehensive review is a great starting point if you’re mainly interested in the nuts-and-bolts. You can also get the official marketing fluff and specs directly from www.fiio.com/M11.

Instead this review is written from a user’s perspective – my perspective – based on my own DAP journey and the decisions that lead me to the M11 after many years of denying the need for a dedicated music player in the first place. If that doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip over this section.

For the last two years I’ve been happily using Cayin’s excellent entry-level N3, the first DAP I bought having previously been mostly satisfied with cheap IEMs and my iPhone. However, like many iPhone users who’ve come around to the sonic benefits of better audio gear and, importantly, better (lossless) audio files, I found my options with Apple’s hardware quite limited. Apple’s insistence on doing away with physical cables was another nail in the iPhone’s coffin, at least as a serious music player, and so I hesitantly dipped my toes into the DAP market.

Fast forward two years, and my immersion in higher-end head-fi started piquing my interest in mobile audio quality, and while the $150 N3 paired with a cheaply delicious pair of $15 Rock Zircon IEMs was a whole lot of goodness for the price, it just wasn’t cutting it when I switched back to my desktop gear.

At about the same time, FiiO was coming out with a new family of DAPs (the M-series), and a new range of advanced multi-BA and hybrid IEMs to match, all priced not too far from what I still considered very good value for a part-time mobile rig. With its balanced output, touch screen, high-res Bluetooth support and customised Android OS, the M9 – at double the original cost of the N3 – looked to be exactly what I wanted from the ‘next step up’ in DAP technology. Paired with the FH5 IEMs, it seemed like an ideal package that, for $500, would give me the quality I wanted without going overboard.

For a short while at least, it was. After all, I mainly used my mobile rig to occasionally listen to music around the house, and for travel (for business and holidays). For everything else I had far better (and far more expensive) desktop gear. But the M9 started to change how I viewed mobile audio. With on board Wi-Fi, suddenly I was potentially able to disconnect from the desktop and listen to my main music library from anywhere. As a Tidal user I was also able to stream lossless music on the go, without having to piggyback off my phone. I found myself using the mobile rig more and more; the quality was there to the point that I didn’t miss my desktop gear as much, and the convenience factor was palpable.

It was almost the perfect setup – almost. For all its potential, the M9 fell disappointingly short in some very important areas. Equipped with an underpowered smartwatch CPU and barely a gigabyte of RAM, the UI was slow if not sluggish, available Android apps were limited to a very short whitelist, and the single-band Wi-Fi was too weak to survive moving more than a room or two away from the router. It was still an excellent standalone player for local music files, but then so was the N3. I wanted – and now needed – more than it gave me.

Which is why I was so excited when I saw that first teaser back in March, and even more so when FiiO finally took the covers off the M11, barely two months after the M9 showed up at my door.


What You Get

If you read through my journey above, thank you. I think it’s important to understand what I was looking for in a DAP, and how those needs changed, because it says a lot about what I personally found valuable and necessary. If you didn’t, that’s fine too. Either way, let’s get straight to the point: the FiiO M11 is probably the most-feature packed DAP you can buy for less than $500 today, and will likely stay that way for what remains of 2019, maybe even longer.

If that sounds like a bold statement, consider the shopping list of hardware features that come standard:

• A pair of AK4493EQ dacs configured in a balanced array along with separate amps for each channel, but also used concurrently to improve single-ended playback.
• A 6-core Samsung Exynos 7872 CPU with 3GB RAM, giving you a previously unseen level of raw performance in a music player.
• A cinematic 5.15-inch bezel-less IPS touchscreen with a movie-friendly 1440x720 display resolution.
• A choice of three headphone outputs, including 2.5mm and 4.4mm balanced options, and a 3.5mm single-ended output that doubles as a digital SPDIF source for external dacs.
• Dual MicroSD sim-type slots with support for next-generation 2TB cards for a total of 4TB of additional storage over and above 32GB of included internal storage.
• Dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi with a larger antenna array for improved range and connection stability – at least compared to smaller DAPs like the M9.

Out of the box, the M11 is both substantial and robust, if a little thick compared to the marvel of modern slimline smartphones. That’s understandable given the bulky digital audio and amplification components stuffed inside, but despite the weight it feels well balanced and reassuringly angular in hand. With glass on both front and rear panels, it’s understandable that FiiO saw fit to fit a clear silicone cover and tempered glass screen protector as standard, though I immediately put mine into a leather-bound sleeve ‘borrowed’ from a portable hard drive to give it more protection against accidental knocks.

Also included and probably worth a mention is the USB-C cable for fast charging, file transfer (unfortunately limited to USB 2.0), and digital audio out, and a 3.5mm to SPDIF adapter. The M11 doubles as a balanced dac for your PC, Mac or phone with 32-bit 384KHz support, or as a digital coax source, but since I won’t be using it for either, I didn’t test this functionality.

On the software front, the M11 sports a highly-customised version of Android 7 Nougat that allows for multitasking and does away with whitelisting to give you access to thousands of potentially useful apps.

Due to licensing issues more to do with Google than FiiO, the M11 is not Google Android-certified and therefore doesn’t have access to the Google Play Store for the full-blown Android experience. On the one hand this limits your choices of apps that are only available on the Google Play Store and require Google Play services to run properly, but on the other it makes for a more streamlined user experience with less clutter and background processes eating up valuable CPU cycles.

Whether or not the lack of Google Play is detrimental to your experience of the M11 largely depends on what you want from a DAP. From a hardware perspective it has all the raw power you’ll need from today’s and future apps, but could be hamstrung if those apps are tethered exclusively to the Play Store.

From my perspective, it effortlessly supports all the current streaming apps – including Tidal with offline functionality – and even more importantly supports apps like Plex and Netflix that allow me to make full use of my personal high-res audio library and gives me access to high-res video streaming from the same device, anywhere in the world.

Couple all that with a doubling of the balanced power output of the M9, and the M11 gives you all of this with some of the meanest audio capabilities ever seen at this price point, not only with IEMs but also with full-size desktop headphones and LDAC-capable Hi-Res Wireless headphones and IEMs as well.

Other software highlights include FiiO Link, which lets you control the M11 with your phone via Bluetooth (or your phone via the M11, though I’m not quite sure why you’d want to do this). FiiO Link only works with the FiiO Music app, and at the time of this writing is only available for Android devices, so again it’s not something I personally tested.

That said, the Cayin N3 had similar functionality, and aside from the initial novelty value, I didn’t see the point of connecting my phone to the DAP when the whole point of the DAP was to untether from the phone.

Ready Player One

With such a vast smorgasbord of features (I just touched on the big ones above), you’d be excused for thinking the M11 is much more than your average music player. Still, there are many people that are interested in a DAP for one reason only – music playback. If you’re one of those people you might want to skim over this next section, or jump straight to the next one, where I’ll specifically talk about sound quality.

One of the first indications of the processing power and software agility of a modern DAP is bootup time. Whereas my first impression of the M9 was somewhat clouded by the laborious (40 second-plus) boot sequence, the M11 is ready to use in less than 10 seconds, from power on to playback. By comparison that’s faster than my iPhone 7, which has a more powerful processor, and vindicates the first reason I switched from the M9 to the M11: to get performance parity with my smartphone.


Before you start using the DAP you get to choose your preferred language (unlike some very expensive DAPs that limit your language choice to the sales region – I’m looking at you Lotoo and Sony). You can then choose whether you want to use the traditional Android button-based navigation bar or a series of smart gestures (I chose the latter), complete with a short interactive tutorial on which gestures do what.

As a side note, whereas the M9 was my first-ever Android device, the M11 is the first I’ve used extensively, to the point where I now miss some of the smart gestures used to navigate around the M11’s UI. No amount of upward swipes on the iPhone will take me to the home screen, and side-swiping my iPhone doesn’t take me back a step – very disappointing!


Once you’re up and running, the M11 gives you an initial selection of three apps (FiiO Music, ES Explorer and Google Chrome) in a dock-like array, with a status bar at the top of the screen and smaller icons for indicators such as volume level, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth status, battery level and the current time.

Depending on your settings, you’ll also have a larger digital clock showing time and date on the main screen. A side-swipe or press of the middle dock icon reveals a second page with the rest of the preloaded apps, which in my case (my M11 was imported directly from China) contained repeats of the dock apps and a few Asian music streaming services.

What you won’t see is the very different array of icons, wallpaper and colourful apps in the screenshots above and below, because almost as soon as I fired up the M11, I began customising it to my liking.

Without Google Play, there are two ways to load apps onto the M11: sideload them by downloading the .apk files from various sources (direct from FiiO or from apk resource websites like apkpure.com), and by using third-party app stores like Amazon, Aurora and APKPure. With the latest iteration (1.0.4) of the M11 firmware, FiiO have also provided their own app store ‘app’ called FiiO Applications, although for now this is limited to a few streaming services like Tidal and other apps you’re better off sourcing elsewhere.


Speaking of firmware, the M11 makes full use of its Wi-Fi capabilities for ‘over the air’ (OTA) downloads. A popup notification lets you know when a new firmware version is available, and a few clicks gets the download process underway. In my experience this is seamless and relatively fast, although a weak Wi-Fi signal or slow Internet access could stall the upgrade process and make you start from scratch. Best be prepared to leave your M11 in a strong signal area and enjoy some coffee and biscuits in the 20 minutes you have to wait for the update to complete. Annoyingly, the M11 won’t update to the latest firmware in one step, but instead forces you to upgrade to every next version until you’re current. I was three versions behind, so do the math.

But again I digress. The first thing I changed was the launcher. A fellow forum member and M11 user suggested to try Nova Launcher from the Aurora store, and sure enough, it noticeably improved how I was able to configure and use the M11. Not only could I select the layout of icons, I was also able to change the icons of individual apps that weren’t to my liking, and hide apps I couldn’t uninstall but didn’t need (like ES Explorer).


Finding and loading new apps was a simple process, with Tidal, Plex, Netflix, Solid Explorer and TuneIn Radio quickly joining the list of pre-installed apps. I then spent several days finding, testing and discarding numerous music apps, looking for an alternative to FiiO Music (more on that later). Currently Poweramp is the best of the rest, despite some reservations on its ability to make the most of the M11’s advanced audio hardware (again, more on that later).

I’ve always been very big on UI cohesiveness, simplicity and cleanliness, and in my experience, stock Android isn’t quite as polished or consistent as iOS. A few clicks and switches in Nova, and I quickly got the M11 looking and working just the way I wanted.

Sound impressions

The M11 is first and foremost a music player. From the precision-machined volume dial, the play/skip buttons, array of output options, and fatter-than-a-smartphone heft, you’re unlikely going to mistake it for anything else. While it doesn’t ship with a music-only mode like its predecessors (the FiiO X5 Mk III and FiiO X7 Mk II), FiiO Music is your first-choice app.

Not only that, the M11 has very obviously been musically upgraded from its current and previous-generation siblings, both in hardware and software. With a far more powerful processor and more onboard RAM than all the X-series DAPs (including the X7 flagship), FiiO Music is quicker to load, smoother to run, and visibly nimbler. Inserting an mSD card with more than 100 lossless albums (many of them high-res rips), the M11 scanned and populated the FiiO Music library in minutes. I could even switch apps and surf the web or play a trailer in Netflix while this was happening, and it didn’t skip a beat or slow down at any point.

Once loaded, navigating the various categories in FiiO Music – tracks, artists, albums, genres, folders – is almost instantaneous, as is scrolling through long lists of songs. One click, and the chosen track begins to play without pause, clicks or skips.


FiiO Music is a simple, spartan app with a fairly limited menu of configuration options, so aside from a tweak here or there, there’s not much you can do to change how it looks or behaves. That’s a pity really, because as-is the app is sometimes clumsy, often restrictive, all depending on how demanding you are of your music software. For example, the home page of the app is oddly split into three sections, with a gallery-like display of current album tracks up top, a midsection of source choice (local, playlist or DLNA), and a bottom section that lets you toggle between Recently Played, Most Played, and Recently Added tracks.

You can’t swap out one section for another, assign any other category or function to the home page, or change the type of list in the bottom third. What you see is what you get, like it or leave it.

The single biggest advantage of FiiO Music, however, is that for all its quirks, it’s currently the only app that I’m aware of that can bypass the default Android music stack and play high-res music at native bitrates without upsampling. That means that for now, FiiO Music is your best option for getting the best possible sound quality from your high-res music files on the M11.

The good news is that the quality is there in spades. Straight out the box without any ‘burn in’ (if you believe in that pseudoscience), the M11 is immediately more neutral sounding and more resolving than the M9 I used before and the Cayin N3 I used before that. I’m no engineer or expert, so whether that’s because the M11 sports twin dacs and newer generation AK dacs than the AK4490EQ in both my previous DAPs, I can’t really say. It’s likely a sum of its parts – newer dacs, more and better amps, better audio circuit components (if you believe the marketing specs), a more powerful and efficient CPU, more RAM headroom, better power management. Whatever it is, the M11 just plain sounds better, using the same IEMs (the FiiO FH5), than does the M9 or N3.


Better still, the M11 is powerful enough to drive my high-impedance desktop headphones – the 300-ohm Sennheiser HD800 and ZMF Auteur – not only loud enough (90 out of 120 on the volume dial and both headphones are louder than I’d usually listen to them), but also with enough control that I’m not left wanting. Does it drive them as well as $1200 4-watt desktop amp/dac? Of course not, but you wouldn’t expect it to. The HD800 choked on the M9, and I didn’t even bother trying it with the N3.

The point here is that the M11 will comfortably drive lower impedance and more sensitive desktop headphones, of which there are many (including the likes of Focal’s Utopia and Meze’s Empyrean), as well if not better than some similar-spec desktop amps. Remind yourself that this is a $450 do-it-all DAP and you’ll get where I’m going with this. The M11 can, if you want it to, serve as a desktop replacement. I don’t want it to, but the option is there if I ever did.
Want specific examples? Let’s see: Heidi Talbot’s hauntingly beautiful ‘If You Stay’ from her Love + Light album. The opening sequence of guitar riffs tells me everything I need to know about the bass response of my headphones – and by extension how well they’re being driven. That’s followed by the first passages of Heidi almost whispering into the microphone, so close you can hear the nuances in her breathing. Or at least you should, and it shouldn’t sound sticky or sibilant. The detail the M11 pulls out of this sequence, and the control it has over the FH5’s variable bass response (it can sound slow or muddy with the wrong source) is exceptional. Tight and controlled is how I’d describe it, the vocals soft and far less forward than the FH5 is often inclined to render the upper mids.

One reason I really enjoy the FH5 is its ability to project a stage far wider than you’d think possible with IEMs. On some tracks you’d swear you’re wearing open headphones. Angels of Venice’s ‘Trotto’ from their ‘Angels of Venice’ CD is a perfect test for staging width, layering, imaging and separation. The various mediaeval instruments jostle for position across a wide stage, appearing first here, then there, then everywhere at once. The drums, when they hit, should sound and feel deep and textured, and project a sound consistent with their size. The highs of the whistles should be crisp, clear and easily identified in their space. The M11 renders the soundscape of this track perfectly. I don’t hear any sense of soundstage restriction, or rolloff at either end of the spectrum. The bass is big when it needs to be, but never boomy. Again, the word control comes to mind. With only 40 points on the volume dial – a third of its full range – the FH5 is more than loud enough and perfectly clear. The power here is visceral, but the control of that power is what’s most impressive.

I could go on – I have notes on at least a dozen more tracks, including Rosie Thomas’s quirky ‘Why Waste More Time’, Katie Melua’s ‘The Love I’m Frightened Of’, Def Leppard’s ‘Love Bites’, AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’, Lana Del Rey’s ‘Young and Beautiful’, Brandi Carlile’s ‘The Story’, Neil Diamond’s ‘Hello Again’, Allen Toussaint’s ‘St James Infirmary’, Anna Nalick’s ‘Wreck of the Day’ and Pink Floyd’s ‘The Final Cut’ – but we’ll be here all day if I had to review them here.

The takeaway is this: the M11’s sound profile is, for want of a better word, accurate. With a reference headphone like the HD800, everything sounds like I know it should, perhaps missing only the last few percentage points of speed and verve of a far more powerful amp and the smoothness of a NOS R2R dac (my desktop setup of choice). It drives the FH5 IEMs with the power and authority the spec sheet suggests, perhaps with a little less of the ‘fun factor’ I found when using them with the slightly thicker sounding M9, but truer to the reference sound of the tracks (which to me means more neutral). That’s not to say the M11 will turn your fun headphones into reference headphones, but it may sacrifice some thump for finesse, so keep that in mind when pairing.

Is this consistent with FiiO’s ‘house sound’? Honestly, I don’t know, nor can I tell you how it compares to the ‘house sound’ of its competitors like HiBy, Cayin, Cowon and iBasso. But I’d venture that any differences in the sound between the M11 and its peers, some of which cost up to twice as much, is more a difference in the tuning of those players rather than the raw sound quality as an objective measurement.

As a source, is it comparable to a good desktop-grade amp and dac? Of the ones I’ve personally owned – ifi’s Micro iDSD, and Audio-gd’s R2R-11 and NFB-11 – I’d say very much so, albeit with less amping power to drive more demanding headphones like LCDs.

It’s easily better – more refined, resolving and powerful – than the two less advanced DAPs I previously used, as it should be, best demonstrated by how far the same IEMs and headphones scaled upward with the M11. If you’re wondering whether upgrading to the M11 from one of the lower-end FiiOs is worth it purely from a sound quality basis, then yes, it is. Throw in all the other features and functionality, and it’s a no brainer.


The other stuff

The M11 represents good value at the current asking price of $450 (give or take a few bucks depending where in the world you buy it) even if you just bought it to play music with FiiO Music. Except you’d be wasting so much of the M11’s potential if that’s all you bought it for.

That’s because a modern marvel like the M11 is not just a DAP, just like a modern SUV is not just a car. It’ll play your music as beautifully as any DAP at this level and price point should, but what sets it apart from all those other DAPs – and many that cost significantly more – is all the other things it can do.

As a full-featured Android device (minus Google Play, of course), you can almost infinitely tweak how you play your music. Want an app with a slicker, sharper UI, dozens more features, and far better library management than FiiO Music: get Poweramp. Try before you buy for 15 days, or buy it for small change, but either way, it’s what I now use as my daily music software despite the claims by some that playback quality suffers and that it can’t play high-res files at their true bitrate (the second part is fact, at least until Poweramp’s developer releases high-res support for the M11, while the jury is out on the first part).


Or use any number of alternative music players: Neutron (which does reportedly support high-res playback, but the interface leaves much to be desired), Rocket Player, AIMP. The only recognised player you can’t currently use is USB Audio Player Pro (UAPP) because it’s only available on the Google Play Store and won’t run without it, nor will its developers cede to the requests of many on this forum to make it available independently.

I use two other music apps alongside Poweramp: Plex and Tidal. Both let me stream my high-res music through the M11, Plex from my local network, Tidal from the cloud. Whether or not the music I’m hearing is downsampled to 16/44.1 as many suggest is par for the course on Android devices, I can’t say. Do I hear a significant difference listening to music with these apps on the M11 compared to my Mac? No, I don’t. Make of that what you will.


Then there’s all the other stuff, the non-music stuff. With no accelerometer or gyroscope, the M11 won’t automatically switch from portrait to landscape mode by rotating it. Play a movie and the display switches to landscape. Stop the movie and the display stays in landscape until you switch apps or gesture back to the home screen. Awkward, but not a train smash. The fact that you can even play movies at an enjoyable resolution on a retina screen with all the benefit of dedicated audio hardware already makes the M11 more useful as a media player than many smartphones. The same goes for games, but I’m not a gamer, so I’ll leave it there.

Multitasking and apps that continue to run in the background is another big plus – especially compared to DAPs like the M9 that tease it but can’t offer it. One of the shortcomings of the M9, for example, was the inability to run a system-wide EQ, so that tweaks made to the sound in one app would carry over to others. Another Aurora Store find – RE EQ – does just that, sounds great, is highly configurable, and works seamlessly in the background, whether I’m listening to music in Tidal or watching a Netflix movie. It’s even configurable per-app.


Then there’s the simple stuff, like web browsing, that is par for the course on a smart device, but not always on a DAP. With the M11, you can do all the surfing you like while your favourite tracks play flawlessly in the background. You can even control playback using the side buttons and volume wheel without leaving the browser.

This review is fast approaching 5,000 words and I haven’t even touched on features like Bluetooth. The M11 can receive and transmit high-res wireless audio using LDAC and HWA (for now it can transmit, with an upcoming firmware update it’ll also receive), one of the only DAPs to offer this functionality at the price. It can also receive Airplay from an iPhone or other Apple devices for true lossless playback, and that’s before we get to its Wi-Fi features that enable full high-res wireless support via UPnP and DLNA.

I feel like I’m saying my thank-yous at a wedding, but let’s not forget fast charging, all-to-DSD upsampling, Wi-Fi file transfer, and QC fast charging. For sure I’ve forgotten something that’s going to be important to someone, so like at a wedding, I’ll just say to the features I haven’t mentioned in this review, you know who you are, and thank you.


Faults? I’ve mentioned a few along the way, but they bear repeating here. FiiO Music is basic at best. The lack of Google Play will irk some. A gyroscope – or at least a software switch for screen orientation would have been useful, especially with such a great screen asking to be swiveled. There are some typos scattered across the UI, though far fewer than those on other Chinese-made daps (at least I don’t feel obliged to rewrite the English language firmware like I did for the Cayin N3). AAC Bluetooth support is conspicuous by its absence, and for no apparent reason either. Some compatibility issues have been reported with the first mSD slot and a small number of cards (if in doubt, use slot 2, but I use both slots with Adata 128GB cards without any issues).

I’m really nitpicking for negatives, but even the ones I’ve mentioned are frivolous at best. Guys, we’re talking about a $450 DAP that can do ALL THAT. This level of quality and feature blowout was frankly inconceivable before the M11, and now that we have the M11, it’s still inconceivable. Goodness knows what treats we’re in for at this price range in the future when the M11 exists today.

TL;DR

The FiiO M11 is the best sounding, best featured DAP you can buy for $500 or less. It is better built, better specked and more powerful than some DAPs costing twice as much or more, and raises more questions than answers for so-called ‘premium’ daps that deliver far less for more money. That said, it’s not a DAP for everyone. It’s thicker and heavier than a large smartphone, and nowhere near as pocketable. It’s based on Android but won’t give you the full Google Play experience. It’ll last all day on a fast charge but not all week like some DAPs. Yet despite the downsides, the M11 is easily, unequivocally, and inarguably the best value DAP on the market today, this year, and for who knows how much longer beyond that. Highly recommended.

Edit: as luck would have it, at around the same time I posted this review, FiiO posted Firmware 1.0.5 for the M11, which adds LDAC receive capabilities, fixes some of the typos I pointed out, improves the boot up animation, and squashed numerous small playback and display bugs. That’s four full firmware updates in the three weeks I’ve had the M11 - and it hasn’t even been officially released in the US and Europe yet (current ETA has been pushed back to early June for some reason - probably because they can’t make enough to meet demand). Hats off to FiiO for the ongoing product support and refinement, and for listening to their customers (though I know a few sour X5iii and X7ii users that may not share the sentiment).

I would like to thank @Andykong for providing a review sample of the RU7 and additional technical information as required. This review is an extract from the The Superdongles feature in The Headphone List.


I have a real soft spot for Cayin, even though I haven’t owned a Cayin music player since my very first DAP, the Cayin N3, several years ago now. I briefly flirted with Cayin’s RU6, given my preference for ‘analogue’ R2R DACs, but found it redundant alongside the more powerful R2R DAPs I used at the time (and still do), nor the most resolving dongle I’d heard with my IEMs.

When Cayin first introduced its N7 DAP earlier this year, I was intrigued by the inclusion of a discrete 1-bit (DSD) DAC in a portable player, a first of its kind. Well, Cayin has done it again, only this time shrinking its 1-bit DAC design even further for the dongle format.

Cayin’s RU7 ($290 at Musicteck) features the world’s first discrete 1-bit DAC in dongle format, following closely on the company first 1-bit DAC-in-a-DAP in the N7. It’s a sign of the times that you can now get native DSD audio up-sampling from a low-power portable dongle the size of a matchbox – a feature that was previously the preserve of some serious desktop computing hardware. Not only that, the RU7 isn’t far behind the N7 when it comes to driving power, especially with IEMs, despite the $1,700 price difference between the two.

It has other interesting features too, like a dedicated, albeit basic, line out mode, and an All-To-DSD engine that I’ve only seen in seriously expensive players before now.


Packaging and accessories

RU7 ships in an small, understated box with a matte black satin finish and a glossy silkscreened image of the dongle from two different angles. Inside the box you’ll find the dongle in a custom foam tray, and separate tray with a USB-C to C cable and USB-C to A adapter.

There is no USB-C to Lightning adapter or cable included, Cayin opting to sell its $20 CS-L2C cable separately for some reason. Cayin does include a protective green leather case as standard, however, along with two matching leather stick-on magnetic patches to connect the dongle to a smart device in case you want to stack them.

Design and use

RU7 has a ‘conventionally’ rectangular design, coated in a silky-smooth matte-black aluminium finish with a glossy glass top. A small OLED screen is built into the glass panel, offset to the left of the player rather than centred in the frame.

There are three slightly raised buttons on the topmost long side of the dongle, two volume toggles and a menu/function button. Outputs include 3.5mm single-ended and 4.4mm balanced headphone ports, which double as true line-out ports for connecting RU7 to external amps without double amping.

One usability issue I have with the input buttons is that they’re flush with the case, and although the case is slightly indented around the buttons, I often end up lowering o raising the volume when I want to do the opposite, or accidentally changing the volume when I want to change settings.



Specs

• DAC: 1-bit discrete resistor fully-balanced 4-channel DAC
• Volume control: discrete resistor 100-step linear volume control
• FPGA: No
• SNR: 114dB (3.5mm) 112dB (4.4mm)
• Power output: 160mW (3.5mm) 400mW (4.4mm)
• THD+N (32-ohm): 0.006% (3.5mm) 0.008% (4.4mm)
• Dynamic range: 115dB
• Screen: 0.91-inch OLED
• Audio formats (PCM): 16/24/32-bit 44.1-384KHz
• Audio formats (DSD): DSD64-256
• Dimensions: 66mm x 24mm x 12mm
• Weight: 25g

Settings

• Gain: choose between low and high gain, for sensitive to less sensitive loads.
• All to DSD: choose between up-sampling PCM audio to DSD64, 128 and 256.
• Output: choose between PO (headphones out) and LO (line out).
• Backlight: choose between permanently on, to auto off in 10-second increments between 10 and 60 seconds.

Notable features

World’s first dongle-based 1-bit discrete resistor DAC. Made up of 128 pieces of 0.1% 25ppm high precision thin film resistors, the custom-made 1-bit DSD DAC features an All-To-DSD engine that up-samples incoming PCM signals to DSD64, DSD128 or DSD256. The higher the setting, the more precise the conversion with higher resolution. The up-sampling level also has a perceptible effect on tonality.

Parallel dual phone amplifiers. Cayin has implemented dual parallel amplifiers in the RU7, boosting amplification current by as much as 80% from the RU6. They’ve done this without significantly increasing the noise floor of the amplifiers, resulting in a near-silent noise floor with all but the most sensitive IEMs.

Shared line out ports. It’s rare to find a line out function in a dongle because of the limitations on the hardware needed to provide a separate line out circuit. Cayin circumvented this limitation by folding line out functionality with the headphone ports.

This does limit line out quality and output levels – 1.2V for single-ended and 2.4V for balanced (compared to typical 2V and 4V outputs in dedicated DAP line outs), but it’s apparently a user-requested feature and so Cayin made it happen.

Be warned – selecting line out is not automated, and the dongle won’t switch back to headphone mode after a line out session, so be careful when you use this feature to switch back to PO, especially when using sensitive IEMs.

Discrete digital volume array. RU7 uses three banks of resistors and switching relays to provide 100 steps of precise volume increments.

Separate digital and analogue circuits. The digital and analogue sections of the RU7 are split into two separate PCBs, shielding the analogue amplification signal from digital clock and DSP noise.



Sound impressions
Tonally, RU7 has a rich, slightly warm, and subtly coloured tonality that emphasises some frequencies over others. Bass gets a moderate bump, more midbass than sub, which makes certain instruments and lower midrange vocals sound fuller and warmer than they would from a neutral source.

Midrange is fairly linear, though lower mids ‘benefit’ from the thicker bass density, if that’s your preference. That’s not to say any part of the midrange is veiled; on the contrary, I find RU7 to have an excellent degree of clarity through the mids, without any veil whatsoever, but the midrange notes are sweeter and sound quite organic, especially when up-sampling to DSD64.

Treble also gains a subtle boost to my ears. It’s not peaky, and I definitely wouldn’t call RU7 a ‘bright sounding’ dongle, but there’s plenty of energy here when the music calls for it. Overall, I find RU7’s tonality to be quite ‘musical’, which is to say warm of neutral with a natural, organic and full sound through the midrange, and enough shine in the highs to sparkle even when the bass is pumping.


Despite its obvious musicality, RU7 delivers excellent and occasionally outstanding technical performance. I’m hearing a decently wide stage with most IEMs, not quite as wide as I do with more powerful and expensive sources, but I don’t feel staging is compromised in any way either.

Other staging elements, like imaging, separation and layering, are all very good, and consistent with the highly technical levels achieved by the higher-end IEMs I used for testing. I did come across the odd track the sounds a touch more congested than I’d like during very complex passages, but that’s to be expected given the limitations of the format, and it’s only apparent in comparison to larger sources.

I thought for sure that noise would be a bigger problem than it is; I’m yet to hit any significant noise floor with any of my IEMs, even when turned up loud, and even with super sensitive IEMs where noise would sometimes be an issue. This is even more impressive given RU7’s powerful and very dynamic sound, that would normally show up any issues with signal noise, but to my ears, there is none.

Overall, I feel RU7’s ‘superpower’ is its ability to deliver such a rich, coherent and lively sound with a high degree of technical polish. From memory (and copious notes) this alone sets it apart from its predecessor, the RU6, and is possibly reflective of the technical advantage of its 1-bit DAC compared to the latter’s R2R derivative.



Select pairings

FiR Audio Rn6. RU7 warms up this already warm-of-neutral ‘reference’ IEM a touch, making it sound fuller, wetter, more cohesive but slightly less resolving. It’s musical but not muddy, with a punchy bass and vocals I can usually describe as earthy. Stage can is wide on some tracks, but with busier music it can get a little congested. An excellent pairing, and easily driven, with low-thirds volume in low gain.

FatFreq Maestro SE. With RU7, MSE comes into its own, offering up a warm, pleasantly even tonality with standout bass when called for. RU7’s slight midbass bump works well with MSE’s rather linear midbass tuning. It also works nicely with MSE’s neutral midrange, adding a touch of warmth and weight to vocals, though female vocals are still quite airy and occasionally wispy. Treble is nicely extended, and not too elevated, but sparkles and shines where it needs to without getting in the way or taking over the performance. Another excellent pairing, with a comfortable listening volume at 55/100 in high gain – not bad considering how difficult MSE is to drive.



HiBy Zeta. With RU7, Zeta takes full advantage of the slight bass lift to deliver a bold presentation that somehow doesn’t bloom or spill over into the lower midrange. While vocals (and the midrange in general) isn’t as resolving as it is with MSE or Rn6, it holds its own with just enough detail to satisfy and never too much to fatigue. I like how RU7 controls Zeta’s occasional upper midrange peak, and so is never shouty or sibilant, even with poorly recorded material. Easily driven at low volume in low gain, this is another excellent pairing, and shows off RU7’s versatility with different IEM tonalities and sensitivity.

Sony IER-Z1R. With RU7, Z1R has more midbass heft, and more bass in general. Vocals are well separated, and treble is clean and distinct, giving the sound a deeper U tonality. If you like your Z1R warmed up, RU7 will do that, though the famous Z1R stage will sound slightly more compressed and not quite as deep. Another IEM that loves power, and RU7 delivers impressively at 45/100 in high gain.



Compared to L&P W4

RU7 is notably warmer-sounding than the more neutral W4. RU7 bumps the midbass region ever so slightly, thickening the note weight of the lower frequencies. W4, by comparison, is more sub-bass focused, with a tighter bass punch and not quite as much weight or decay in the midbass notes.



Increasing the DSD rate on RU7 has the effect of stretching out the lower frequencies, or at least relative to the increase in midrange and treble detail, but the bass never becomes a tight as with W4. Even though bass is still nicely controlled on RU7, it’s also ‘bigger sounding’ than W4, mostly due to this subtle bass lift.

I hear similar differences in the midrange of these two dongles. W4 shoots for clarity and transparency, with a neutral and fairly linear midrange that’s more revealing, while RU7 mids are a touch denser and more euphonic. The lower the DSD sampling rate, the ‘wetter’ the RU7 mids become, although at no point do they get as warm and full as the midrange of a typical R2R DAC like RU6 or HiBy’s RS6.

RU7’s lower midrange sounds slightly fuller to me, but also a touch more recessed compared to W4, whereas the upper mids are mostly on par between the two. That’s not to say W4’s mids are thin. Both dongles dig deep into the musical information in the midrange, and neither come close to sounding overly analytical. RU7 leans slightly more musical than W4 in the midrange, however, but W4 in turn sounds more accurate, with a lifelike, natural timbre to instruments and vocals.

The upper frequencies of both dongles are also quite linear, without any notable peaks or dips, and excellent extension. I’d hazard a guess that RU7’s treble is ever so slightly lifted compared to W4’s crisp and neutral treble response, but it would be just that, a guess.

Combined with the bass lift, slight lower midrange recession and subsequent treble rise, you’d be forgiven for thinking RU7 has a V-shaped tonality, but it’s much closer to a gentle U. W4, in contrast, is even flatter by comparison, about as close to true neutral without ever crossing into stale, cool or analytical territory. Both dongles are naturally musical, but RU7 is musical with a warmer, fuller tilt.



The technical level of both these dongles is nothing short of impressive. I’d be hard pressed to pick out the difference between either dongle and a really good mid-to-upper tier DAP based on technical performance alone.

That said, and since I won’t be comparing these dongles directly to actual DAPs other than in passing subjective comments, there is a limit to how technically-accomplished and refined you’ll hear them yourself, especially if your weapon of choice is a higher-end DAP or desktop system.

The stage size of both dongles is very similar; neither dongle projects the largest stage I’ve ever heard, but neither is staging too intimate. Width, height and depth are just about even, with W4 maybe edging RU7 in depth and RU7 sounding a hair wider. Both are what I consider natural, projecting sound ever so slightly out of head with my largest-stage IEMs, but not quite as holographically as I know them to be capable of.

Where W4 does take the lead is in separation and layering, aided perhaps by its mildly leaner tonality. Sounds emanate more distinctly from the blackness of the background with the W4, and are also more spaced out from each other. Imaging is excellent with both, neither coming off as too diffused, especially in light of their average stage size.



Speaking of background, both dongles are essentially noise-free. RU7’s thicker notes and closer spacing might give the impression of a less inky backdrop, but I don’t think that has anything to do with noise. Regardless, W4 does sound cleaner. It also sounds more detailed, and while RU7 is at least as resolving as some higher-end DAPs and desktops with the same IEMs, W4 is even more so.

Dynamically, RU7 is the more exciting of the two. That said, depending on the setting, RU7 can also lean more relaxed (DSD64), and switching W4 to Tone 01 has a similar effect on the sound.

Overall, both RU7 and W4 have set a new benchmark for technical performance for dongles, at least of the many dongles I’ve heard. Both outclass their predecessors, for example, sounding cleaner, more precise, less noisy, and more resolving. Where they differ more is tonally, which in turn affects the perception of the subtle intangible technical differences I’m hearing.

The only cap on performance is the cap imposed by the physical size of these devices. Sadly, not even the most ingenious DAC designs or amplification circuits can defy the laws of physics, and as such expecting dongles – even these Superdongles – to match and exceed the performance of larger, more complex, and more computationally-powerful devices is fanciful. It’s not about price, it’s about size.

But, on their own terms, the sound quality they have already attained is about as good as we’re going to get in this format with current technology.



Closing thoughts

Cayin’s RU7 continues the company’s hot streak of breaking new ground in DAC design for the dongle format, and I won’t be the first to say the all-new 1-bit DAC in the RU7 is even more impressive than the R2R DAC in its predecessor. Not only that, the new parallel amp design has proven itself with some of the hardest-to-drive IEMs I’ve ever used, and in doing so, RU7 is no longer hamstrung by piddly power output, the usual Achille’s Heel of most dongles.

With a smooth, rich and musical tonality, RU7 is also the most versatile dongle I've used with the selection of high-end IEMs in my collection, and is probably my pick of the new crop of 'superdongles' if I could only choose one. Highly recommended.

Full disclosure: HiBy sent me a review sample of the RS6 in exchange for my honest feedback and a comprehensive review. No other expectation was made of me, nor any deadlines set to deliver. They were also fast on the draw to sort out some technical issues that befell my particular unit, and I’d like to extend a special mention and thank you to @Joe Bloggs who was instrumental in making it happen. That said, the opinions expressed in this review – for better or worse – are entirely my own.

If you haven’t read my first impressions overview of the RS6, please take a few minutes to do so now, as I’ll try not to repeat too much of what I already wrote.



Preface

Without pulling any punches, the HiBy RS6 heralds a new dawn for DAPs.

It is the first-ever DAP built on relatively current hardware and an open Android software platform that features a fully discrete non-oversampling resistor ladder (R2R) DAC. This is a significant technical achievement given the inherent difficulty of engineering discrete R2R technology into a device the size of a deck of cards – especially considering all the other components that need to fit in alongside the actual DAC.

But overcoming technical hurdles is one thing; what most DAP buyers care about is how good it sounds, and how well it performs the various tasks a modern Android DAP should be able to perform. In that regard, the achievement is arguably even more impressive, because frankly, the RS6 aces both.

You may already be familiar with other HiBy DAPs like the R8 and R6 2020, both of which have essentially the same hardware and software platform (other than the new R2R-related stuff), in which case feel free to skim over the big chunk of the review that covers the software, and make your way to the Sound Impressions section.

But if you’re entirely new to Android DAPs in general and HiBy in particular, I encourage you to read through the Setup and Software and Personalising the RS6 sections in more detail, as I feel that’s where a large part of the value of the RS6 ‘experience’ resides. We can always debate the importance of the experience of using a DAP later, but in my opinion, it goes hand-in-hand with sound quality and IEM pairing.



Introducing the RS6

The RS6 is the first in a new series of DAPs based on HiBy’s so-called ‘DARWIN’ architecture. I’m not sure why that particular name was chosen, or what it stands for, but I assume it’s meant to evoke the idea of evolution. While R2R is not new, and in fact predates the more commonly used Delta Sigma DACs used in most modern DAPs, DARWIN is less about R2R and more about the flexibility and configurability of the system as a whole.

DARWIN’s biggest selling point seems to be how easily it allows users to tweak the sound to their preference. This is enabled by a series of technologies, including:

A 256-tap adjustable finite impulse response (FIR) filter. This is the core technology used to configure different aspects of sound, including noise-shaping filters, oversampling of the input signal, and tweaking the sound to suit different brands and makes of IEMs. In a nutshell, it provides a nifty way of tweaking the sound with various filters without any loss in sound quality.

Switchable Non/Oversampling. The ability to convert digital signals to analogue sounds without oversampling is – theoretically at least – the most accurate way to preserve the musicality of what you’re hearing, for a more, er, analogue presentation.

DSD bypass for native DSD decoding. By their very nature, R2R DACs cannot process 1-bit DSD signals (that’s the preserve of Delta Sigma DACs). Most R2R DACs either don’t provide any support for DSD formats, or internally convert DSD to PCM before sending them to the DAC for processing.

The RS6 has a separate dedicated 1-bit DSD processor that natively handles DSD files before sending them to the amplification stage for output. Whether or not it completely bypasses all R2R circuitry is unclear. Most playback software will also allow you to convert DSD to PCM on the fly, and therefore make full use of the R2R DAC and its features. I’ve done some testing to at least validate what I’m hearing in the Sound Impressions section below.


Everything else about the RS6’s software platform is basically a copy/paste of the Delta Sigma-based R6 2020 released last year. This includes:

• Full 16x hardware-based MQA support, the highest MQA level of any current DAP;
• HiBy’s Direct Transport Architecture (DTA), which now includes Android bypass for bitperfect output via USB;
• HiBy OS, a highly-optimised UI and underlying OS based on Android 9 with full support for Google Play Services; and
• HiByLink, which gives you full control of HiBy Music software via the same software on your smartphone.

Powering these technologies is the same hardware platform that remains, at the time of writing, the fastest available on any DAP at any price:

• Snapdragon 660 SoC, based on a 2.2GHz 8-core Kryo 260 CPU and an Andreno 512 GPU,
• 4GB RAM and 64GB solid-state internal storage;
• Dual wideband 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi;
• Bluetooth 5.0 (transmitter and receiver) with UAT, LDAC and AptX HD support, among others; and
• Full-speed USB 3.1 connectivity.

Externally the RS6 is a facsimile of the R6 2020, at least by way of form factor, screen, and input/output ports:

• 1080P (443ppi) 4.97-inch IPS screen;
• 3.5mm single-ended and 4.4mm balanced headphone ports and a separate set of matching size line-outs;
• USB-C power and data port;
• 4500mAh battery (up to 8 hours playback, less when playing back hi-res files and DSD);
• Angled back, pause and previous buttons;
• LED indicator that changes colour based on charging state and playback bitrate; and
• Micro-SD card slot supporting cards up to 2GB.

It also features the same knurled volume dial on top of the player, which I must say is irritatingly small and fiddly, especially with the leather case in place. At least the dial turns with discernible clicks, unlike the R8’s smooth yet somewhat laggy volume dial.


What has changed with the RS6 is the build material, switching from the R6’s aluminium frame to a copper or copper alloy material supposedly better suited to heat dissipation. The copper has been plated in a rose gold finish that at first was a bit too feminine for my liking, but over time has grown on me. I still prefer the all-black matte finish on the R8 though. One result of the switch is an increase in weight to 315g, about 100g heavier than the R6 2020 but still significantly lighter and slimmer in dimensions than the R8. If you’re after a pocketable DAP, the RS6 will fit very nicely indeed.

Both the back and front of the RS6 are made from Corning Gorilla Glass to prevent accidental scratches, but HiBy provides pre-installed screen protectors on both sides just in case. The back also features a new carbon fibre inlay pattern, which good as it looks, disappears the minute the leather case slips on.

Speaking of which, HiBy includes a free tan-coloured leather case that appears to be slightly better designed than the cases provided for the R6 2020 and R8, but not nearly as nice as the limited edition Dignis case supplied with early editions of the R8. I got my unit with an emerald green case that HiBy sells separately for $80, which is probably worth it if, like me, you prefer the green to the tan (though I admit $80 for a case is excessive).

There’s also a much cheaper ($22) third-party aftermarket silicone case that’s become popular among R6 2020 users and which is said to provide a better grip and an overall better fit. I’ve ordered one myself from here, although it hadn’t arrived at the time of writing.

The only other accessories in the box are two cables: a USB-C to USB-A charging and data cable, and a custom HiBy USB-C to coaxial cable for digital output to an external DAC. Both cables look to be of very high quality indeed, as does the overall packaging presentation. I covered the unboxing in some detail in my first impressions overview so won’t repeat it here, except to say that you should take care when opening the box for the first time as the top part of the package (housing the cables) tends to fall straight out as soon as the two halves of the box are pulled apart.


Setup and Software

The RS6 is a full-featured open Android DAP, meaning it’s based on the same software ecosystem that powers most modern smartphones. While it’s not a smartphone, and isn’t intended to be used as one, it can perform many of the same functions, using the same apps.

The first time you switch on the RS6 you’ll be asked to specify a language, then a time zone, and a few seconds later, after sitting through an all-new DARWIN bootup animation, you’re in.

The landing page, also adorned in DARWIN-themed regalia, is fairly spartan. At the bottom of the screen is a launch bar with five icons – not your usual Android icons, but rather HiBy’s customized Darwin designs. From left-to-right there’s an icon for Snapdragon Gallery, File Manager, HiBy Music, Via (whatever that is), and Play Store.

Pressing the app drawer icon reveals four more preloaded apps: Calculator, Clock, Files and Settings. Swiping down from the top of the screen reveals the editable quick launch bar, with icons for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Auto Screen Rotation, 180-degree Screen Flip, Audio Settings and DARWIN Controller. Drag down and you’ll get a few more options, like screen brightness control and gain level settings. The only other visible information on the screen is the status bar on top, showing time, volume level, output used, Wi-Fi status, sample rate (when active), and battery level.

Of all these ‘apps’ and options, the only ones you actually need to configure the RS6 are Settings, Audio Settings and DARWIN Controller, so let’s briefly work through the different screens so you know what’s what before I flip the script and show you how to really take control of this DAP.


Settings

The RS6’s Settings section is where you get most of the configuration work done, connecting you to Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth devices, setting battery limits, customizing display elements, and tweaking security and accessibility options, as just some examples. Without going section by section, here are the most important configuration options you should consider:

Wi-Fi (Network & Internet). Unless you’re not going to use the Play Store, or stream, or do anything with the RS6 that requires Wi-Fi – in which case I have to ask, why did you even buy a Wi-Fi-capable DAP? – connecting to a Wi-Fi network or hotspot is the first thing you’ll want to do, as it basically leads into everything that follows.

Bluetooth Settings (Connected Devices). If you need to pair Bluetooth headphones, this is where you go to pair them. Also, if you want to set up the RS6 as a Bluetooth DAC/receiver, Bluetooth Audio Input is what you’re after.

Default USB configuration (Connected Devices). This option lets you set up the RS6 as a USB DAC with the option of charging it at the same time, or disabling power input for a cleaner signal. You can also put the RS6 into file transfer mode for connecting it directly to a PC or Mac.


Apps & notifications. This is where you go to mess around with installed apps, set their notification status, and set default apps for the home page and web browsing, among other tasks. The only time I’ve had to use this option was to disable certain apps, like HiBy Music (more on this later).

Battery. This is an important option for one key setting: Max battery. It’s a good idea to set this to 80% or 85%, and as long as you’re charging the RS6 while it’s powered up, it won’t charge to more than the set limit. This sort of works, with my maximum setting of 80% usually exceeded by a few percentage points, but it’s no biggie. Just make sure Idle shutdown is switched off, or else the RS6 will go into sleep mode and charge to 100%.

Display. Feel free to mess around with your display options here, the most important of which is setting the Ambient Display to show New Notifications (useful for showing new track titles when they start playing while the screen is off), and keeping the LED light on when powered on (to see when playback is active or stopped while the screen is off).


Security & location. This is a strange place to put the toggles for activating or deactivating the volume dial and navigation buttons when the screen is locked, but it’s where you’ll find them. You can also set other useful options from here, like Lock screen preferences and gestures. I also enable Find My Device.

Accounts. This is where you can set up new Google accounts or activate existing accounts, useful if you’re going to use the Play Store. If you want to tweak specific account settings, go to the Google option a few rows down.

Gestures (System). The only thing you need to check here is that Double click wake up is on, considering how important this is for overall usability (trust me). Later on, I’ll show you how to enable double tap to lock screentoo, so stay tuned. Another feature I enable from here is Swipe up on Home button. This discards that ‘old’ 3-button navigation control in Android and replaces it with a more modern multifunction button and context-sensitive back arrow.


System updates (System). This is an important option for checking that you have the latest firmware installed, although if you’re regularly connected to Wi-Fi you’ll be automatically notified when a new firmware version becomes available.

Build number (About device). This is a trick I learned early on in my Android journey. Click on Build number 7 times to enable a ‘hidden’ Settings menu called Developer Options, from which you can set all manner of hidden attributes, like Bluetooth codecs, USB debugging, and other potentially useful features. If you don’t need these, leave it alone.

Audio Settings

Now that you have the Android system and usability functions set up to your liking, it’s time to configure the music playback options. You’ll find all the important options in the Audio Settings menu as follows:

Gain: low, medium, high. I’ve set all my DAPs to high by default as I find it gives me the most dynamic sound, at the small cost of less play on the volume dial. The RS6 doesn’t have the R8’s Turbo option, but I find that High Gain drives my IEMs louder than the High Gain + Turbo setting on the R8, even though the RS6 has half the power output of the R8.

Plugins: developed by our good friend @Joe Bloggs, you have the choice of downloading three plugins: Convolution (misspelled Convlution), Sound Field (misspelled Sound Filed – come on HiBy!), and Balance. Of these, I’ve only ever tried the Convolution filter, which lets you play around with various custom profiles on 44.1kHz PCM files. Personally, and with all due respect, unless you’re a serial tinkerer, leave these well alone.

MSEB: another genius piece of software written by Joe, this one is absolutely useful. It’s also the only system-wide EQ software I’m aware of for Android that works seamlessly with any application at any bit-depth, other than MQA (which can’t be EQ’d by design). If you’re unfamiliar with MSEB – or Magic Sound 8-Ball as it was previously known – it’s a unique take on EQ in that it allows you to tweak actual audio elements, like temperature, bass extension, note thickness and sibilance, rather than using preset frequency bands.


The latest version of MSEB gives you more granular control of each element, adds + and – buttons for easy one-click adjustments, lets you choose from three preset tuning styles, and also adds the ability to import custom tuning files from other users. In my experience, MSEB leaves sound quality intact while allowing for subtle to not-so-subtle changes to the sound. It’s particularly useful for when you have minor issues, like moderate sibilance, with one of your IEMs or on certain types of music, which can now be fixed with a few quick clicks, irrespective of the app or streaming service you’re using.

There are three other sliders in Audio Settings you might find useful:

DSD gain compensation, for adding volume to DSD playback, considering many DSDs are mastered at lower-than-normal volume (I set this to +6dB by default).

Channel balance, for adjusting left and right channel volume balance, useful if your hearing is stronger in one ear or the other, or if your IEM has a slight channel imbalance.

Max volume, for setting the maximum allowable volume. This is a critical setting, and I recommend everyone sets maximum volume to 50% to prevent accidentally swiping the on-screen volume slider to 100% with IEMs plugged in (I’m speaking from painful experience).

DARWIN Controller

This is an all-new menu option for the RS6 (and presumably future RS devices) and allows for some very interesting fine-tuning using adjustable filters in the audio chain. That said, other than switching between NOS and OS, I can’t hear any changes to the sound, even subtle changes, when changing any of these filter options. This includes:

Low-pass antialiasing filters, labeled Darwin Default and Darwin 1 through 10. Regardless of filter, the sound stays the same, or maybe my hearing just isn’t acute enough to resolve the change.

Atmosphere Enhanced. I have no idea what this does, but like the low-pass filters, makes no perceivable change to what I’m hearing.

Customized Presets. This offers selectable filters for 19 current and legacy IEMs from the likes of QDC, Softears, Unique Melody and 64 Audio, but try as I may I can’t hear the difference with my own IEMs, which aren’t on the list.


I can only assume HiBy will build more options into the DARWIN Controller as the platform evolves, but for now, I consider it a curiosity more than a valuable resource.

Personalising the RS6

Settings aside, the real power of an Android DAP is what it allows you to do with software, specifically apps. The RS6, like other current high-end open Android DAPs, lets you run basically any app you can think of, which I consider both a blessing and a curse.

It’s a blessing because I can pick and choose which apps to use for the most important DAP functions for my use case: music playback, streaming, and file management. But it’s also a curse because it unlocks a smorgasbord of compelling apps that I could be tempted to try, even though I don’t really need them.

In this section, I’ll cover some of the most important apps I use on the RS6. If you’ve read my R8 review you’ll already be familiar with these apps, which work in exactly the same way on the RS6. To save you time, the information below is lifted almost verbatim from that review.

Launcher

The first step to customizing the RS6 requires taking control of the landing page, lock screen and overall appearance of apps and notifications. The easiest way to do this is with a Launcher app. My Launcher of choice is Nova Launcher, available as either a free (ad-supported with limited functionality) or an inexpensive premium (Prime) version.

Nova gives me complete control of the RS6’s interface, from the apps and widgets that appear on the home screen, to the way notifications appear on the lock screen, and even how I group and arrange the apps on the player. Once installed, every single interface element is controlled from the Nova Settings app.

I won’t go into great detail here, other than to say your choices are almost limitless. From the shape, size and colour of icons (I use an excellent third-party icon pack called Lines to get that minimalist look) to the app drawer, launch bar, folders and other UI elements, it’s now all under your control. It also allows you to hide icons of apps that you don’t use, making for a far less cluttered UI.

One thing I will mention here is gestures. The RS6 already comes with the most useful of modern Android features, Tap to Wake (oddly called double click to wake in Settings), which as the name suggests allows you to double-tap the screen to wake it from sleep without having to press the power button. As with the R8, the RS6 doesn’t include the reverse feature, Tap to Sleep (or Lock), but fear not: a few clicks in Nova’s gestures options and it’s there.


File Manager

The RS6 is essentially an Android smart device, so why not use it like you would any other Wi-Fi-capable smart device? A basic file manager is included as standard (two actually), but you’ll want a more advanced app to take full advantage of the RS6’s capabilities. My rec here is Solid Explorer, which among other things, allows me to manage my entire music library wirelessly over my home network.

With Solid Explorer installed I never need to remove the SD card or attach the USB cable for file transfer. Everything I need to copy music and other files to or from my networked devices can be done wirelessly from the RS6. Solid Explorer gives me SMB access to my desktop Macs, workgroup access to Windows PCs, and remote access to NAS, FTP and Cloud storage, including Dropbox and other services. All of it can be done securely, and even encrypted, just as you would from any other computer.

With fast 5Ghz Wi-Fi support and a gigabit wireless mesh network at home, copying files to and from the RS6 is much faster than doing so the old USB 2.0 way, and almost as fast as connecting the RS6 directly with USB 3.1. I can also access and play music files remotely from Solid Explorer, but for that I use the remote playback capabilities of UAPP instead.


Music Player

Saving the best for last, no Android DAP should ever be without USB Audio Player Pro, or UAPP for short. UAPP helps me make the most of the RS6’s native audio hardware and networking features and turns it into a fully-fledged music playback and management system second-to-none. Since I also use UAPP on my smartphone, the experience is consistent and seamless, regardless of which device I use to listen to music, so much so that the first thing I did with the RS6 was disable HiBy Music in App settings (sorry HiBy).

The most important reason I use UAPP is its built-in support for the RS6’s audio hardware, bypassing the Android audio system and ensuring bitperfect output from headphones, line out and USB. It’s a very mature, very responsive and very stable application, with a clean, uncluttered, modern interface, including nifty features like background colours that match the cover art of the playing album, lock screen controls - including ambient display notifications on the RS6, and refined English-accurate menu and navigation structure.

It also features superb media management, including automatic updates to the main library when adding or removing music files, metadata editing, extensive album art support regardless of file type, and finely-tuned sorting capabilities, including Album Artist that many OEM music apps still seem to lack. And it’s fast, very fast. Everything from loading your library to gapless playback to scrolling and database updates is superbly optimized on the RS6.

UAPP integrates Tidal (with full 16x MQA support), Qobuz and YouTube Music, giving you access to your favourite streaming service with its native playback engine, though it doesn’t support offline downloads, and MQA support comes at an additional nominal fee. It also features advanced playback controls and effects, including optional ToneBoosters professional PEQ, Crossfeed and Morphit plugins, each as an optional add-on.

And lastly, it’s scalable, with built-in automatic support for external DACs that turns the RS6 into a high-end digital source for a desktop system. It also supports built-in DLNA and network music playback support, so you can access any of your local shares (including Plex libraries, in my case) directly from the UAPP interface.


Quick shout out to @Davy Wentzler, the creator of UAPP, for being highly responsive to my request to add native support for the RS6. Within 24 hours of speaking to him, he sent me a beta version of UAPP with RS6 support, which has now been added to the main retail version on Play Store.

Streamer

Most people choose Android DAPs for their streaming capabilities, and the RS6 is one of the very best in this regard. Not only does it support the highest level of hardware MQA decoding (16x) for Tidal users, it also supports bitperfect playback from hi-res streaming platforms like Qobuz, Apple Music and Amazon HD.

As a native Android player with built-in Play Store support, you have access to any of the major streaming apps out the box, including Tidal (which I personally use), Qobuz, Amazon HD, Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music, among others. If any of these apps support offline playback on Android, you’ll be able to use that feature with the RS6, and even choose where to store your offline files (internal storage or SD card).

One of the benefits of using a fairly modern Android version with a fast SoC is evident from how quickly the latest streaming apps load and run on the RS6, which to me feels even more responsive than the R8. Tidal is not the world’s fastest app, but the experience is as smooth and seamless as it is on my smartphone, which is to say excellent. Searches are instant, and scrolling through large playlists is lag-free.

Other useful apps

While I have other applications on the RS6 that can be used for music playback (including the native Tidal app and Plex), I generally don’t venture too far away from UAPP for most of my listening. Aside from UAPP, Plex is the only other app that requires the Google Play Store, which is why Play Store support is essential, for me, in an Android DAP. While Plex isn’t perfect (I mainly use it at home for TV and movie playback), it does have one invaluable music feature: remote support. Basically, this means that when using the Plex app on the RS6, I can access my entire 4TB+ music library wherever I am in the world.

Unfortunately, the Plex app doesn’t take advantage of HiBy’s DTA for bitperfect playback, downsampling all my hi-res FLACs and DSDs to 44.1 PCM, but that still beats not having access to my music library wherever I go. I do get full hi-res and DSD support, though, when I access my Plex library at home using UAPP’s built-in DLNA browser.

One last word about personalising the RS6: I can’t stress enough how big a difference a smooth, fast interfacemakes to the overall user experience. This was always a bottleneck with older, smaller Android DAPs, or DAPs with underpowered SoCs and older Android versions. That’s no longer the case with the RS6.


Sound Impressions

As I mentioned in my first impressions, and also in the R8 review, DAPs don’t have their own sound per se. They do, however, affect the sound of your IEMs or headphones by virtue of how much, or preferably how little, they emphasise different frequencies, but also by how resolving and technical they are.

This is important because it impacts the synergy between DAPs and different IEMs. A warm IEM paired with a ‘warm’ DAP (that either boosts midbass frequencies, relaxes treble frequencies, or both) could prove too much of a good thing. Conversely, the same DAP could be just the tonic to balance out a cooler or brighter-sounding IEM.

My personal preference is a transparent and technically capable DAP that doesn’t veer too far away from a neutral tonality across the FR and provides an even playing field for almost all IEMs. That way, I get to pick the ‘flavour’ of sound I want by picking IEMs with certain tonal characteristics, knowing that the DAP I plug them into won’t change them too much.

With that in mind, let’s discuss where the RS6 sits on the spectrum. Note that all impressions were made using the RS6 in high gain mode, with a Sennheiser IE 900 and Empire Ears Legend EVO plugged into the 4.4mm balanced output. I’ll discuss both these pairings throughout, and also compare the tonality and technical ability of the RS6 with the R8. The RS6 was ‘burned in’ for 150 hours prior to testing.

For a more comprehensive comparison between the RS6 and other DAPs, and notes on a wider variety of IEM pairings, keep an eye open for @twister6's review here.


Tonality

The RS6 is not a neutral DAP. There, I said it. While I haven’t heard the R6 2020 for myself, I did own the R6 Pro, which had some power to its tuning but was overall a balanced sounding DAP. While the RS6 is also relatively balanced, it does emphasise some frequencies more than others.

I’m hearing the RS6 to have a prominent bass lift, centred around the lower-midbass frequencies, and also a dominant upper midrange that sits a few notches above neutral. There’s also something happening in the treble region that’s adding more sparkle to certain high-pitched instruments like bells, chimes and higher-register strings than I hear with the R8. This gives the RS6 a warmer, slightly thicker sound than I’m used to with other DAPs, but with plenty of clarity through the midrange and treble. It’s not a veiling thickness, in other words.

The bass and midrange emphasis was initially more apparent out the box, before I had time to burn-in the player for a few days, but even after burn-in I could still hear the prominence in these regions, albeit far less abrasively. For example, basslines on tracks I know well, and which are evenly presented on the IE 900, were more apparent with the RS6, so Katie Melua’s Red Balloons had a weight and rhythm to its thick and lustrous bassline that was more dominant than usual. Similarly, Jillette Johnson’s edgy vocals on Bunny were a touch edgier here, the vocals themselves brought more forward in the mix.

To be clear, I’m not saying any of this in a negative way, because while the IE 900 is presenting with the same balanced sound I love it for, its energy is turned up a notch, and some vocals that are subtly recessed with other players are far less so with the RS6.

Conversely, switching IEMs to the mid-forward and bass-emphasised EVO tips the scales too far on some tracks. Anything with an aggressive midrange or an already-compressed cacophony of instruments, like Seven Lions’ Island (featuring Nevve) or Daft Punk’s Contact, both of which are borderline edgy on EVO already, are fatiguingly so with the RS6 (even though the latter was recorded far more proficiently than the former, it must be said).

This is where the synergy I spoke of earlier comes into play. The RS6 pairs up more agreeably – and in some instances preferably – with the IE 900, but less so with EVO. Of course, that’s just my perception, and you might find the extra energy with both IEMs more to your liking. The point I’m making is the RS6 is changing how I hear these IEMs compared to how I hear them with my reference DAP (the R8), but not always in a bad way. EVO still sounds great with most of my library on the RS6, as does the Legend X it replaced.

If I were to graph the RS6’s tonal ‘shape’ it would be a flat W, with the bass and midrange upticks slightly longer than the treble’s, but overall flatter than a prominent W-shaped IEM tonality. It’s a rich sound that pulls out enjoyable bass texture and kick-drum ‘kicks’ in tracks like James Gillespie’s What You Do, and adds more clarity and immediacy to many vocal performances.

Where the RS6 excels, to my ears, is vocal purity and realism. There’s a sweetness in the vocals of almost every track on Lana Del Rey’s masterpiece Norman screw*** Rockwell! that I haven’t heard with other DAPs, not even the R8, and as good as she sounds with both IE 900 and EVO on other sources, she’s absolutely sublime on the RS6.

This could well be the analogue nature of the R2R sound at play, and if so, is reason alone to pick the RS6 over other players in this price range, especially if you’re fan of sweet and sultry female vocals. Just be mindful of IEMs that present female vocals as forward bordering on shouty, because the RS6 won’t do those IEMs any favours, at least not without some judicious EQ (-3dB at 3kHz does the trick for me, thanks @MatW).

Overall I can describe the RS6’s tonality as warm but clear, full but not overly thick, and well extended at both ends. It’s not a light and airy sound, so if that’s what you’re after, best look elsewhere. But if it’s lushness, texture and bigger note weight you’re after, give the RS6 a listen.


Technicalities

With a midrange and low-end emphasis, the RS6 presents a natural but not overly-wide or spacious soundstage. I wouldn’t call it intimate, though it certainly can be with an intimate IEM, but it won’t close in your already-wide IEMs if that’s a concern. I also wouldn’t call it compressed – contrasty is a better word. There’s slightly less space between notes and instruments, but not in a thick and sludgy way, and not because of any added noise in the signal, but because the sound is pushed warmer and fuller than neutral.

Playing Agnes Noble’s The Curse, I notice how the opening instruments are set closer in from the extremities than they are with the R8, using both my IEMs. Agnes’s voice is also notably off centre and slightly to the left of the microphone with the R8, but is positioned more centrally with the RS6, at least relative to the smaller projected space.

The track itself plays with a dark background, warmed up slightly by the bass and the lushness of the vocals. The signature cellos in this track seem to purr and vibrate, adding a lovely texture and authentically analogue veneer to the presentation. Stage-wise, I’m sitting about five rows further back with the R8, while the RS6 brings me up close and personal to the performance.

I’m not hearing any hiss or fuzziness from the noise floor with any of my IEMs, even on high gain. Some consider noise an issue with HiBy DAPs in general, but I don’t hear it. That said, anyone using ultra-sensitive IEMs (like anything from Campfire Audio) would be best served with a lower gain level, at which point I can’t imagine noise ever becoming an issue.

The RS6 is very resolving, and at least on par for what I’d expect from a DAP at this price. The slight treble emphasis plays a part here, not in creating false detail through added brightness as some DAPs tend to do, but rather by adding focus and proximity to the shimmer and ‘ping’ of some high note instruments. The guitar plucks in Jethro Tull’s The Waking Edge are delicately sharp and very lifelike, while on other tracks, like Holly Throsby’s What Do You Say?, I’m hearing subtle guitar plucks far more clearly than I do on the more reserved and spacious R8.

This doesn’t mean the RS6 is necessarily more detailed than the R8, and in fact I’m hearing more subtle details in the R8’s vocals than I do with the RS6 despite the latter’s mid-forwardness, so it’s likely a combination of different emphasis on certain sounds, and also more overall contrast from the RS6, which tends to put greater emphasis on lower and higher-frequency sounds in particular.

Where the RS6 does fall short of its big brother flagship is in imaging and layering, and specifically how distinctly it places and separates elements on the stage. The subtle backing vocals in BEYRIES’ Alone, for instance, are easier to pick out with the R8 than they are with the RS6, and while the futuristic synth effects in Pink Floyd’s On The Run are well imaged on both players, they follow a larger and more precise left-to-right arc on the R8.

Overall I’d say the RS6 is excellent technically, though not quite at the same level as the flagship DAPs. It won’t diminish the technical ability of your IEMs, but it won’t enhance them either. The emphasis is more on tonality and overall musicality – if your definition follows mine – rather than pure technicalities. This is not an analytical sound, far from it, but then that’s exactly what I’d expect, and want, from an R2R-based player.


More on Sound…and Features

In the course of writing this review I’ve had a chance to engage with several users – and potential users – of the RS6, who asked a variety of not-quite-mainstream questions about sound quality and features. I’ll try and address a few of those in this section, before wrapping up.

DSD playback quality

As mentioned earlier in the review, the RS6 supports native DSD playback by using a separate DAC circuit specifically designed to decode DSD signals, something an R2R DAC can’t do without first converting from DSD to PCM. This means the playback chain for DSD is different to that of PCM audio, and so the question was rightly asked: how does it affect DSD playback quality?

That’s a difficult question to answer, but going back and forth between a native DSD (.dsf) version of Norah Jones’s Come Away With Me, and a bitperfect PCM conversion of the same track (.flac) does reveal subtle but audible differences. Whether or not you prefer the sound of the native DSD file or the converted flac file is very subjective, but what I’m hearing is slightly smoother, slightly warmer playback of the PCM file, compared to a cooler, more ‘precise’ rendition of the native DSD file.

Specifically, I’m hearing Norah’s voice to be sweeter with less grit in the PCM playback, and a touch edgier and more forward in the DSD version. The bass guitar strum at the bottom of the stage that accompanies the intro is warmer and fuller in the PCM version, and less pronounced in the DSD version, and the faint guitar plucks in the right channel are also more obvious in the DSD version while still present but less prominent in PCM.

You’d have to sample a variety of different DSD tracks and conversion formats to determine how these subtle – and I do stress they’re subtle – differences impact your perception and enjoyment of the music, but for all intents and purposes I enjoyed both, and without comparing side-by-side repeatedly probably wouldn’t have picked out most of the differences myself. There’s no doubt the differences are there, however.

RS6 as a DAC

Another point that came up in discussion was how the RS6 performs as a DAC for an external source, like a PC, and as a source for an external DAC.

The RS6 is one of the few DAPs with the ability to function as a wireless or wired DAC, via Bluetooth or USB respectively. As a Bluetooth DAC it can receive files in ‘hi-res’ Bluetooth formats like LDAC (990kbps) or HiBy’s own UAT format (1200kbps), making it essentially transparent as a DAC for redbook and some hi-res files, even though Bluetooth is inherently lossy. It can also transmit to Bluetooth headphones and IEMs using LDAC and UAT, which results in much-improved performance over standard SBC and AAC Bluetooth codecs, which I verified by casting LDAC Bluetooth from the RS6 to my Sony XM4 LDAC-capable TWS IEMs.

As a USB DAC the RS6 can not only decode files in any format from an external source, but also be set to receive input power while doing double duty as a DAC, meaning you don’t have to use up the battery while the RS6 is plugged into your PC. As a source, the RS6 can also output bitperfect audio to any external DAC, in all the formats it supports, including DSD.

This makes the RS6 extremely versatile, both as a standalone DAP, but also as an integral source or playback component in a computer system or larger hi-fi setup. The fact that it can also send and receive files wirelessly at the highest possible quality is just another arrow in its already well-stocked arsenal.

NOS vs OS

For most of this review, I’ve been referencing the RS6 from the viewpoint of its NOS sound quality. That’s because this is my review and I get to pick and choose how I write it. Jokes aside, this doesn’t hide the very obvious fact that the RS6 is not an exclusively NOS device, far from it. Indeed the most sophisticated hardware and software programming for DARWIN went into the creation of a 16X oversampling engine that, for many listeners, will provide a preferable sound profile to NOS.

I spent a fair amount of time testing different tracks while jumping between NOS and OS modes, and honestly the differences I picked up were subtle at best. Bass is ever so slightly richer and more saturated in NOS mode, and vocals ever so slightly crisper in OS, but going back and forth and switching tracks and musical styles and one could easily get confused between one and the other.

My experience with full-size desktop R2R DACs is that oversampling can have a far more dramatic effect on the music, bringing it closer to the precision and character of many Delta Sigma DACs in the process. The best DACs I used offer a gradual ramping up in OS levels, allowing you to gradually introduce the effect of oversampling, or bypass it altogether. I’m sure HiBy will develop these features further, and I expect to see more obvious differentiation between the two modes in future firmware revisions of the RS6 and even more so in future DARWIN designs.


Verdict and Closing Thoughts

When I decided to switch from desktop head-fi to IEMs, I was consciously aware that it meant giving up the type of sound I’d grown accustomed to over the years: the sound of a natural, earthy and authentic discrete NOS R2R DAC.

Over the years I’d come to learn and then appreciate the differences between Delta Sigma and R2R DACs in the same way that people differentiate between most things in the hobby. For me, the preference was squarely in the ‘measures poorly but sounds great’ world of R2R versus the ‘measures well but sounds flat’ world of Delta Sigma.

I’m exaggerating and generalising here, but the picture I’m hopefully painting is one where R2R – and specifically discrete NOS R2R – is synonymous with a rich, warm, comfortable sound that doesn’t exaggerate detail or technicalities yet still gives you an accurate and holistic representation of the music itself.

Until the RS6 was announced earlier this year, discrete R2R in DAP form was the preserve of the well-heeled. As far as I know, the P6 Pro from Luxury and Precision, at three times the price of the RS6, was the only currently selling discrete NOS R2R DAP available, with other R2R DAPs using chip-based R2R solutions instead. Cayin’s R01 discrete R2R board for the N6ii DAP, which preceded the RS6 and on which the R2R DAC in the RS6 is based, does not feature NOS support either.

Where the RS6 changes the game, so to speak, is not its R2R credentials as much as it is the combination of R2R and a modern Android platform. In the RS6 we have the world’s first, and fastest, open Android DAP with full streaming support, high-speed wireless and Bluetooth functionality, and fully discrete, NOS R2R audio hardware.

It could be the start of a trend, or just an anomaly in DAP design in response to the audio chip shortages currently befalling the industry (here’s hoping it’s the former). But nothing changes the fact that if you want the very latest in DAP features and performance along with a healthy dose of R2R, the RS6 is currently – and for the foreseeable future – your only option.

And honestly, it’s a great option. With the same tested, proven and stable software ecosystem as HiBy’s R6 2020 and R8 DAPs, the same design features, and the same powerful hardware, the only thing the RS6 really changes – and significantly so – is its sound profile. Gone is the reference sound of the R8; this is a more lively, punchy take on music delivery, with all the pros and cons. It sacrifices broad synergy for unapologetic energy, and trusts there are enough sliders and buttons for anyone to dial in their ‘perfect sound’ with their preferred IEMs.

Indeed the new DARWIN architecture is as exciting for its potential as it is for anything it tangibly delivers today with the RS6. Not only did HiBy opt for an entirely new sound system, using R2R in a radical departure from all its previous DAPs, but it built an entire software and hardware system around it, allowing for future expansion and configuration options with huge upside potential and very little downsides.

The RS6 is, in and of itself, a polished and capable performer already, even if it’s only version 1.0 of the new series. Technically it performs just short of flagship level, and yet has some of its own technical strengths over the flagships. Tonally it’s a departure from most other DAPs I’ve personally heard myself, with a warmer, fuller, more immediate sound that demands attention, especially so with strident or aggressive music and IEMs. But it also has a vocal sweetness and realism that belies the analogue nature of its NOS sensibilities.

Does enough to command a doubling in price over the virtually identical R6 2020? Personally, it’s no contest, given my affinity for R2R, and, now that I’ve spent some quality time with it, my affinity for its sound. Whether or not it ‘betters’ the R8 is a more difficult question to answer, and I admit the jury is still out as far as my personal preferences are concerned.

For me, a great DAP is the sum of all its parts – features, performance, stability, design, UX and sound quality. In my experience, few other DAPs comes close to the RS6’s combination of features, flexibility and sound quality, and no other DAP offers all of that plus R2R in one sweet and shiny copper package. Highly recommended.

The HiBy RS6 is available direct from Musicteck here: https://shop.musicteck.com/collections/hiby/products/hiby-rs6?variant=39597894795326

Introduction

I’ve been thinking about how to best write this review for a while, ever since I first experienced HiBy’s new flagship DAP towards the end of last year.

Since then, every other major Chinese DAP manufacturer has been playing catch-up with HiBy, and today the market for high-end ($1000-plus) portable music players is already getting crowded.

Marketing 101 stipulates that, given a crowded market, the success of a premium product is directly related to how different it is, what unique features it offers, or even what it looks like, so that the relatively small pool of potential buyers sits up and takes notice, singles it out from the crowd, so to speak.

While the R8 does have some distinguishing features that make it different to the others, its biggest differentiator – a 4G sim card, the first such feature in a DAP of any description – isn’t actually a feature at all, given its not available outside China and a small handful of Asian countries.

Of the features that do count, for western users anyway, at the time of its launch it was the first high-end DAP to incorporate the double-whammy of a relatively modern processor/system-on-chip (Snapdragon 660) with a relatively modern Android platform (version 9), making it the fastest and most up-to-date Android DAP on the market.

But perhaps I’m looking at it the wrong way, and it’s not just one feature that makes the R8 different to the others. Rather, it’s the combination of features that make it, in my opinion, the most complete flagship DAP available today.


A premium package

Given its launch price of $1899 (for the non-4G, all-aluminium, 64GB ‘western’ version), the R8 more than doubles the cost of HiBy’s previous flagship DAP, the R6 Pro. This puts it firmly in the upper price bracket of the DAP market, with only the likes of Lotoo, Sony, Luxury Precision and Astell & Kern offering higher-priced models, a list which includes exactly none of HiBy’s traditional mainstream Chinese competitors.

Of course, this pricing suggests the R8 has a seriously ramped-up spec, which it does (see the next section for a breakdown of the tech specs), but more importantly, HiBy made every effort to position the R8 as a premiumpackage. This is not just another player update, but rather the foundation of a high-end portable audio system.

Most modern DAPs, especially expensive DAPs like the R8, are well presented in quality packaging. Some come with multi-layered carboard boxes, others with wood cases and leather accessory holders. Most come with decent leather protective cases and even screen protectors.

The R8 is a step-up from all that. Inside the sizeable but otherwise nondescript black box is a well-made, genuine leather, classically-styled briefcase, complete with belt buckles and carry handle. That’s right, briefcase. Why would you want a briefcase for a portable music player you’re just going to slip in your pocket or throw in your backpack for the train ride to work? Because you’re not going to do that with the R8, or at least, HiBy is using design cues to suggest that’s not what the R8 is all about.


Opening the case reveals the player inside a custom cutout tray. Alongside the player, an aluminium placard with ‘HiBy R8’ etched into it tells you what you just bought, in case you didn’t know. The only other visible accessory is a pull tab on the pre-applied screen protector on the R8 itself (a very nice touch, often missed by companies wanting to cut costs). Turn the player over and you’ll find a second pre-applied screen protector on the glass-backed casing, even though the casing is made of Corning Gorilla Glass and should be fairly impervious to damage anyway. I do wish the screen protectors were glass and not film, but that’s a minor gripe.

Lifting the top tray (using tabs on either side of the tray) reveals a second tray with a similar player cutout, only this time instead of the player it houses a genuine leather case for the R8. If you were one of the first 100 buyers, you’ll be greeted with an exclusive limited edition Dignis case (which, judging by Dignis case prices for other premium players, is valued at around $200). If you buy an R8 today the case will be HiBy’s own original leather case, with a different design, colour and finish, but still attractive and well-made.

Alongside the case, two circular cutouts hold the R8’s connector cables: a high-quality HiBy-branded USB-C to USB-C cable for charging and data transfer, and a HiBy-branded USB-C to coaxial digital cable for connecting the R8 to an external DAC.


But wait, there’s more. HiBy included a third tray (in a separate box), which features covered cutouts to hold spare tips, connectors or loose IEMs, four small cutouts for extra MicroSD cards, and two more round cutouts (similar to the cable cutouts) to hold two sets of IEMs attached to their cables.

In other words, this briefcase is not just a fancy presentation gimmick, but rather a premium storage and carry case for your (possibly entire) portable audio system.

A premium player

At first glance, the R8 exudes quality. Made from a solid block of CNC-milled aluminium, it is not small or light, measuring 143 x 81 x 20mm and weighing in at a pocket-busting 466g with the Dignis case. That’s significantly bulkier and heavier than the stainless steel R6 Pro, which itself was quite a hefty, albeit more pocketable DAP.

I therefore wouldn’t call the R8 easily portable, although strictly speaking it’s still portable rather than transportable. It’s not a desktop-replacement DAP (like iBasso’s DX220 MAX or Sony gargantuan DMP-Z1), but given its size and power, can very easily do double-duty as one.

The design of the DAP itself is a departure from HiBy’s previously rounded aesthetic, being more angular and aggressive (or ‘masculine’ as HiBy calls it). That said it’s not nearly as angular or sharp-edged as Astell & Kern’s obtusely-shaped DAPs, and its slightly rounded edges mean it can be used comfortably without a case.

This is not a random design choice, and is grounded in how the R8 functions ergonomically. For example. The four push-buttons on the right side of the player (power on/off, previous track, play/pause, and next track) use the angled sides of the player to prevent you from accidentally clicking them while making it easy to find and click them by feel.

Between the buttons, a slot-like LED shows the various states of the player, whether it’s charging, or which bitrate it’s playing (the LED can be turned off in settings if you prefer not to use it). HiBy has also moved away from push buttons for volume, using a Lotoo-like knurled alumimium volume dial on the top of the player, protected from accidental activation by the angled edges of the player. The volume dial isn’t very sensitive, and takes a touch or two to activate, which I believe is a design choice. I like it, but some may prefer a more sensitive dial.

On the left side of the player, a single sim-tray opens up to reveal a MicroSD slot, which is hidden away when the player is in its case. I personally prefer the sim-tray design, especially since I hardly ever swap out my SD card (more on how I use and manage my music library with the R8 later). The bottom of the player is where you’ll find all the active ports: two headphone ports (3.5mm single-ended and 4.4mm balanced), two dedicated line-out ports (SE and balanced), and a USB-C 3.1 slot for charging, data transfer and external DAC use.

The back of the player, despite being glass covered, is also its heat diffuser, and can get fairly warm when playing music, video, streaming, or driving power-thirsty headphones. That said, the R8 doesn’t get uncomfortably warm, even when charging, and both leather case designs (Dignis and HiBy) include an alumimium heat shield that allows for good ventilation and heat dispersion when the player is used screen-up, as it normally would be.

Which leaves the entire front face of the player as the screen, an outstanding 5.5”, 1080P IPS retina touchscreen at that. No, it’s not going to compete with the ultra-punchy OLED screens used in modern high-end smartphones, but it’s a very impressive screen befitting a premium DAP, with good contrast, excellent touch sensitivity, natural and accurate colours at all viewing angles, and an almost edge-to-edge display that’s easily visible in bright light and daylight.


If the exterior of the R8 is heftily-impressive, what’s on the inside is even more so. The spec sheet of the R8 includes:

• Dual AKM AK4497EQ DACs with support for native DSD512 and 32bit / 768kHz PCM
• Snapdragon 660 octa core 14nm LPP process SoC with CPU frequency up to 2.2GHz
• HiBy OS, a highly-customised version of Android 9 (Pie) complete with built-in Google Play Store support, Direct Transport Architecture (that allows for native hi-res playback), and 16X native MQA rendering support
• Qualcomm 8x Kryo 260, Adreno 512 GPU, 4GB RAM, 64GB ROM and up to 2TB SD storage
• Custom high-density 38Wh ATL 10,000mA battery for up to 13 hours playback with QC 4.0 support
• Four independent power supply circuits for digital, DAC, preamp and amplification
• Up to 1088mW output power into 32ohms from the balanced headphone port
• Turbo mode for even more driving power (up to 16W) for over-ear and less-sensitive IEMs
• Four ELNA SILMIC II audio capacitors and exclusive HiBy-designed OP02 opamps
• 10 tantalum gold-plated capacitors, 18 high ripple-suppression-ratio LDO regulators, and 35 Panasonic Hi-Polymer POSCAPs (I have no idea what all this means but it sounds impressive)
• Dual 45.1584MHz and 49.152MHz oscillators with femtosecond precision, controlled by a dedicated, custom FPGA chip
• 2.4/5GHz dual band WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0, two-way Bluetooth (transmit and receive), including HiBy’s own UAT protocol, LDAC and AptX HD

Without getting too technical about the already technical spec list above, it’s fair to say that, even at a glance, the R8 packs a seriously premium array of high-end components (including the largest battery of any modern DAP) which sets it apart from budget players that primarily use off-the-shelf parts to keep costs low. That doesn’t automatically mean it will sound or perform as well as it should on paper, but at least you know you’re not just buying a packet of chips in cuisine clothing.

A premium experience

Package, specs and smoking good looks (in the eye of this beholder) aside, this is the part of the review where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. I’ve broken down the in-depth analysis of the R8 into four sections: speed, software, sound quality and stability.

Depending on your own preferences, these criteria may be more or less important relative to each other, but to me, they are all equally important when it comes to creating a complete experience in a flagship DAP. No single feature is the only important factor, not for me, and not when you’re paying this much for a premium product.

A great sounding player can still deliver a poor experience if the UI or software is too slow or laggy, for example, or the software might lack certain features that you need, or the combination of software and hardware might be unstable under certain circumstances. So let’s take a closer look at each of these aspects in turn, and see how the R8 stacks up in real-world use.

Speed

When it was first announced, the headline feature of HiBy’s new flagship was the newer (relatively speaking) Snapdragon SoC, which promised to make the R8 the fastest Android DAP on the market. That promise materialised when, on its release, the R8 was indeed shown to be faster than any other Android DAP, and not by a small margin either.

There are a few ways to measure an Android device’s real world performance, one of which is AnTuTu Benchmark – a free tool you can download and run on your own device from the Google Play Store (or sideload from APKPure if your device lacks Play Store functionality).

My R8’s AnTuTu score of 188140, using the latest version of the software, can be seen in the screenshot below. To put this score in context, the R8 remains the fastest Android DAP on the market, based on the AnTuTu scores of its three closest flagship competitors (taken from published reviews, not my own measurements):

• iBasso’s DX300, with its similarly-specked SoC and 2GB more RAM, is almost a dead heat at 177936;
• FiiO’s M15, with its older Exynos SoC and even older Android 7.1 platform at 108448; and
• Shanling’s M8, which is actually newer than the R8 but sports a lethargic (by modern standards) Snapdragon 430 SoC running Android 7 at 74651.

To put these scores in context, however, the R8 is only moderately faster than my LG V30+ smartphone, which on the one hand means that it’s the first DAP I’ve used that’s finally caught up to the speed of a modern smartphone, but on the other, my idea of a modern smartphone is a 2017 LG.

That said, the R8 is still the fastest Android DAP today, which is an important consideration if you’re buying a DAP that is already behind the curve in terms of the latest Android hardware and software platforms. FiiO’s M15, for example, was the standard bearer for Android DAPs less than six months ago, yet is already showing its age, while HiBy’s new R6 2020 DAP matches the R8 in speed and software specs yet costs $1000 less, suggesting the R8’s platform is already the minimum you should expect from a modern flagship.

When it comes to speed, CPU and graphics are only one part of the equation. If you’re thinking of doing anything with your Android DAP that involves networking or the Internet, you’ll also need fast, stable Wi-Fi support.

The R8 is equipped with a dedicated dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi antenna. Comparing the Wi-Fi performance of my LG phone I found very little difference with the R8 – if anything, the R8 even edged out the phone when it had line of sight to my wireless mesh nodes.

I can’t say for sure how the R8 compares to the other flagships in terms of Wi-Fi speed, but this is a big step up from the previous HiBy flagship, the R6 Pro, and the combination of fast 5GHz Wi-Fi and its class-leading SoC makes the R8 every bit as capable a streamer as a modern smartphone.

Software

At this point the review is going to digress away from most of the other mainstream reviews. Instead of treading the same ground and describing the standard software configuration, apps and options out the box, I’m going to instead jump to how I’ve configured the R8 for my own use case.

This is important for two reasons: the basic configuration, while fully featured, is just that – basic. You get an optimised and customised (but otherwise intact) Android 9, all the Google Play Store and Services pre-installed (no need to sideload anything from APKs or stand on your head to register the Play Store correctly), vanilla applications (like a basic file manager, photo manager, web browser and clock), and HiBy’s own music player and media manager, HiBy Music.

The second reason is that none of these maximise the power and potential of the R8 as an open, optimised Android DAP, at least not by my definition of maximise. For example, the first thing I did on booting up the R8 for the first time was jump into settings and disable the apps I don’t need, including (shock-horror) HiBy Music. It’s not that HiBy Music is bad software, far from it, but in my experience to really make the most of the functionality of this (or any other open Android) DAP, you should install a more advanced third-party playback application, of which my pick would be USB Audio Player Pro (more on this later).

So that’s why this review is going to be a little different. I’m not going to run through the various screens and settings options for you – there are plenty of other, excellent reviews that already cover these, and I’ll reference these at the end of this review. Instead, I’ll walk you through how I’ve set up the R8, how I use various apps for everything from wireless file management to remote streaming, and even how I’ve totally changed the look and feel of the R8 to better suit my preferences.

OS and UI tweaks

Let’s start with look and feel, because otherwise you’re going to stare at my screenshots and wonder why your R8 looks so different to mine. One of the benefits of using a DAP with open Android is that you can change how you interface with it using a launcher application. My launcher of choice is Nova Launcher, available as either a free or premium (Prime) version.

Nova gives me complete control of the R8’s interface, from the apps and widgets that appear on the home screen, to the way notifications appear on the lock screen, and even how I group and arrange the apps on the player. Once installed, every single interface element is controlled from the Nova Settings app. I won’t go into great detail here, other than to say your choices are almost limitless. From the shape, size and colour of icons (I use an excellent third-party icon pack called Lines to get the minimalist look I wanted) to the app drawer, launch bar, folders and other UI elements, it’s now all under your control.

One thing I will mention here is gestures. The R8 already comes with that most useful of modern Android features, Tap to Wake, which as the name suggests allows you to double tap the screen to wake it from sleep. Ever since I first used this feature on the FiiO M11 I was hooked, and will never buy another smart device, Android or otherwise, that doesn’t have it. Strangely the R8 doesn’t include the reverse feature, Tap to Sleep, but fear not: a few clicks in Nova’s gestures options and Tap to Sleep is yours.


File management

The R8 is essentially an Android computer with fairly advanced hardware, so why not use it like you would any computer and manage you incoming and outgoing files direct from the DAP. While a basic file manager is included with the R8, you’ll really want a more advanced app if you want to take full advantage of the R8’s capabilities. My rec for a full-featured file management app is Solid Explorer, which among other things, allows me to manage my entire music library wirelessly over my home network.

Ever since installing Solid Explorer, I no longer need to remove the SD card or attach the USB cable for file transfer. Everything I need to copy to or from my music server or network can be done wirelessly from the R8. Solid Explorer gives me SMB access to my desktop Macs, workgroup access to Windows PCs, and remote access to NAS, FTP and Cloud storage, including Dropbox and other services. All of it can be done securely, and even encrypted, just as you would from any other computer.

Instead of describing how I use Solid Explorer, I’ve included a short video below that shows me accessing my main music library on a Mac mini server and copying a number of music directories to the R8’s SD card.

With fast 5Ghz Wi-Fi support and gigabit wireless mesh network at home, copying files to and from the R8 is much faster than doing so the old USB 2.0 way, and almost as fast as connecting the R8 directly with USB 3.1. I can also access and play music files remotely from Solid Explorer, but for that I use the remote playback capabilities of UAPP instead (see the ‘Music management and playback’ section below).



Streaming

Most people choose Android DAPs for their streaming capabilities, and the R8 is one of the very best in this regard. Not only does it support the highest level of hardware MQA decoding (16x) for Tidal users, it also supports bitperfect playback from hi-res streaming platforms like Qobuz and Amazon HD.

As a native Android player with built-in Play Store support, you have access to any of the major streaming apps out the box, including Tidal (which I personally use), Qobuz, Amazon HD, Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Music, among others. If any of these apps support offline playback on Android, you’ll be able to use that feature with the R8, and even choose where to store your offline files (internal storage or SD card).

One of the benefits of using a fairly modern Android version with a fast SoC is evident from how quickly the latest streaming apps load and run on the R8, as I’ve illustrated in the video below. Tidal is not the world’s fastest app, but the experience is as smooth as seamless as it is on my smartphone, which is to say excellent. Searches are instant, and scrolling through large playlists is lag-free.

I can’t stress enough how big a difference a smooth interface makes to the overall experience. This was always a potential bottleneck with older, smaller DAPs, with their lower-resolution screens and underpowered SoCs. That’s no longer the case with the R8.



Music management and playback

I mentioned earlier that I use USB Audio Player Pro as my music management and playback app of choice. Not only is the app worth every cent, you can also use it across all your open Android devices, as long as they support Google Play.

Without going into great detail, I’ve listed the main the reasons I prefer UAPP to any other music app below:

• It supports bitperfect, native Hi-Res playback, bypassing Android’s limited audio layer and interfacing directly with the DACs in the R8.
• It supports native DSD playback on the R8, unlike some players that convert DSD to PCM.
• It’s is a very mature, very responsive and very stable application, with a clean, uncluttered, modern interface (including nifty features like background colours that match the cover art of the playing album), lock screen controls (including ambient display notifications on the R8), and refined English-accurate menu and navigation structure.
• It features superb media management, including automatic updates to the main library when adding or removing music files, metadata editing, extensive album art support regardless of file type, and finely-tuned sorting capabilities, including Album Artist that many OEM music apps still seem to lack.
• It’s fast, very fast. Everything from loading your library to playback to scrolling and database updates is superbly optimized on the R8.
• It’s versatile. UAPP integrates Tidal (with full 16x MQA support), Qobuz and YouTube Music, giving you access to your favourite streaming service with its native playback engine. It also features advanced playback controls and effects, including optional ToneBoosters professional PEQ, Crossfeed and Morphit plugins.
• It’s scalable. UAPP supports playback using external DACs, which turns the R8 into a high-end digital source for your desktop system, but also supports built-in DLNA and network music playback support, so you can access any of your local shares (including Plex libraries) directly from the UAPP interface.

Suffice it to say, UAPP helps me make the most of the R8’s audio hardware and networking features and turns it into a fully-fledged music playback and management system second-to-none. Since I also use UAPP on my smartphone, the experience is consistent regardless of which device I use to listen to music.

Other software and applications

While I have other applications installed on the R8 that can be used for music playback (including Tidal and Plex), I generally don’t venture too far away from UAPP for most of my listening. The R8 is also a very capable multimedia player, and even has auto screen rotation functionality should you want to watch movies and TV shows using Plex or YouTube the natural way.

Aside from UAPP, Plex is the only other app that requires Google Play Store support, which is why Play Store is essential to my DAP use case. While Plex isn’t perfect (I mainly use it at home for TV and movie playback), it does have one invaluable music feature: remote support. Basically, this means that when using the Plex app on the R8, I can access my entire 3TB+ music library wherever I am in the world.

Unfortunately, the Plex app doesn’t take advantage of HiBy’s DTA for bitperfect playback, downsampling all my hi-res FLACs and DSDs to 44.1 PCM, but that still beats not having access to my music library wherever I go. I do get full hi-res and DSD support, though, when I access my Plex library at home using UAPP’s built-in DLNA browser, as the video below illustrates.



Other than the main apps, the software features I use most on the R8 are built-in to HiBy OS (HiBy’s name for its optimised Android 9 platform). These include:

• MSEB: HiBy’s homebrewed take on an intelligent EQ, which on the R8 is available as a system-wide EQ for any music playback applications, including streaming apps. Developed by @Joe Bloggs, MSEB makes it easy to tweak the music to your liking with intuitive sliders that affect everything from overall temperature to bass texture, note thickness, vocals and sibilance, without requiring a PhD in EQ theory.
• Instant screenshots: pressing the power button once brings up a menu with one-click screenshot control, making it easy for me to take screenshots for this review.
• 180-degree screen rotation: a new feature included with the latest firmware, this is more useful than you’d think, especially if you want to pocket the R8 and have the headphone ports facing up rather than down. One click from the quick access menu and you can flip the R8 for the road.

While it technically can do much more software-wise, from Telegram and Discord chatting to online shopping and even fitness tracking, I use the R8 exclusively as the premium music player it was designed to be, but with all the supporting services and remote access capabilities I can only get from a fast, connected Android device.

Sound quality

If you jumped straight to this section from the intro, I encourage you to go back and read everything that came before if you really want to get a feel for what the R8 can really do. If all you care about is sound quality, you might be buying features with the R8 you’ll never need or use.

That said, the R8 wouldn’t be getting my rec if I didn’t think it lived up to its primary purpose as a premium music player, so I’ll get right to the point. If you want flagship-level sound quality in a portable platform, the R8 delivers.

Once again, unlike mainstream reviews, I’m not going to directly compare the R8 with other flagship players. I’ll make some reference to other DAPs I’ve personally used or owned, but I don’t have any with me to check like-for-like playback qualities. For that I refer you to some excellent reviews below, the best and most comprehensive of which is Alex’s (@twister6) industry-benchmark review, complete with detailed comparisons to other DAPs.

An important note at this juncture

While I’ve become a lot more appreciative of the role a high-end source like the R8 plays in the sound quality chain, describing the sound of a source is like describing the colour of water. What you’re hearing is first, foremost and mainly determined by whatever you have plugged in to the DAP, not as much the DAP itself.

Just like water reflects the colour of the sky, so any good DAP should primarily reflect the sound of your IEMs (or headphones). Yes, it will influence what you hear, depending on how well the DAC and amp have been implemented, but in my opinion, just like crystal clear water, a great DAP gives your IEMs the best possible foundation – clean power, low distortion and low noise – and lets them do what they do best while getting out of the way.

I used a variety of IEMs with the R8 over the past two months, ranging from the entry-level BLON BL-03 to ultra-high-end IEMs from 64 Audio and Empire Ears. If you’re after a DAP that’s more coloured or tuned to emphasize certain qualities in your IEMs, the R8 might not be the best choice for you. With that in mind, the R8 does have its own sonic characteristics, both tonally and technically, that are consistent across the IEMs I used, so let’s take a closer look.


Tonality

The R8 is about as close to a reference source as I’ve heard, but thankfully not in a flat, analytical way. By reference I mean that the R8 adds very little to the character of the IEMs you use with it, but what it does add is done in a very subtle, refined and transparent way.

For example, there’s definitely some extra meat on the bass, more so sub bass, which – if it’s present in the music and within your IEM’s capability – gives a little extra kick, a touch more rumble, and a very natural decay. There’s no extra boost that I can detect in the midbass, maybe the slightest hint of warmth when paired with more neutral IEMs, but no more than that.

The midrange is rendered precisely and very clearly, not any fuller or thinner than you’d expect from your IEMs. Listening to how the R8 renders vocals and instruments that centre on the midrange reminds me of how I heard my IEMs with another flagship reference DAP, the Lotoo Paw Gold Touch. I think it’s how transparent and clear the vocals and supporting instruments come across, especially with IEMs that I know to be very transparent themselves.

Treble is where the R8 gives a nod to HiBy’s ‘house sound’, which has been advanced and improved here. HiBy’s approach has always been to render music with a more natural, ‘musical’ tonality, and that’s most apparent in the R8’s treble which, while being more detailed and extended than it was with the R6 Pro, for example, is still more relaxed than the typical clinical, overemphasized treble that some high-end DAPs go for in their singular pursuit of detail.

Another thing I’ve picked up in my time with the R8 is that it’s not a pushy DAP. By that I mean it’s not going to stamp its character all over the music, for better or worse. If anything, it actually has a fairly relaxed tonality. It can be dynamic with the right IEMs, but it’s not going to bring the alcoholic punch to the party on its own.

That said, neither is it bland. I find the R8 delivers music with great authority, with excellent control. Where IEM’s like 64 Audio’s Nio or Empire Ears’ Legend X might be prone to losing control of their uber-powerful bass drivers with some lesser DAPs (or even quality warmer-tuned DAPs), the R8 controls them with a firm but deft grip. Not once have I heard the bass on either IEM as too loose or flabby or thick with the R8, nor the treble too nonchalant.

Technicalities

Where the R8 presents a bigger departure from the R6 Pro (and all the other midrange DAPs I’ve heard to date) is its technical ability. At first listen the word that came to mind most often was refined.

The R8 delivers whatever it’s playing at a very high technical level, but not in a jarring, wow-factor way. You’ll hear music with a wider, deeper stage, for example, especially compared to less capable DAPs, but it’s not done in an unnatural way, and if your IEMs are inherently intimate, then intimate they’ll stay. On wonderfully spacious IEMs like 64 Audio’s Tia Fourte, the stage is as magically wide as you’d expect, with the R8 easily capable of rendering the full depth, height and layers in the music.

While the tonality is slightly north of neutral, and natural rather than analytical, the R8 makes the most of its quality internal components to squeeze tremendous detail from almost every IEM I’ve used with it. Even the ‘lowly’ BLON scales up nicely.

It doesn’t fake detail, nor does it warm up the sound too much to smooth it over (despite the dual AK4497 DACs’ reputation for their smoother character). Make no mistake, the R8’s sound is silky smooth, but not at the expense of resolution.

If you have an IEM that revels in minutae microdetails, then that’s what you’ll hear. If you use a thicker, meatier IEM, the R8 won’t stand in your way or dilute its impact in any way. But unlike some DAPs, it won’t add this character on its own, nor artificially boost what’s not already there – it’s up to your IEMs to do most of the work.

Noise and power

One of the criticisms I’ve heard levelled at the R8 (and the R6 variants before it) was a tendency to push the noise floor just a touch too high, especially with very sensitive IEMs. While I have my own feelings about the merits – or lack thereof – of super-sensitive IEMs like Campfire Audio’s Andromeda and Solaris, I can honestly say the R8’s noise floor is the ‘blackest’ I’ve heard with the IEMs I’ve used with it (and with previous DAPs).

No question, the R8 is a very powerful DAP. With more the 1 Watt of power at 32 ohms out of the 4.4mm balanced output (which translates to significantly more wattage at the 3-, 6-, 10- and 14-ohm sensitivity of my IEMs), there is far more headroom than anyone would actually need for IEM use. But in my experience, it’s very clean power, even in Turbo mode (which was designed for full size headphones, but somehow makes my IEMs sound better too).

If you’re into numbers and measurements, the R8’s absolute noise floor is lower in both single-ended and balanced modes compared the R6 Pro, despite having more power on tap. One caveat to this: there are many who I know and trust that have keener hearing than mine who can sniff out even the faintest hiss from IEMs than I ever could, so don’t take my word as gospel. But even they would agree that using the R8 single-ended without Turbo all but eliminates any hiss, even with pointlessly oversensitive IEMs (there, I said it).

Pair-ups

In case I haven’t made my point clearly enough above, the R8 is an ideal match for just about any IEM (and probably most full-size headphones too). But that’s not to say it’ll be ideal for your IEMs.

If you’re looking for a DAP to counterbalance one or other characteristics – for example, if you have a very bright-leaning IEM and want a DAP that would naturally tone down its brightness (with a slightly rolled or thicker treble response), the R8 isn’t that DAP. Likewise, if you have an IEM that’s a bit too bass light for your liking and want a DAP to fill in the missing octaves down low, there are probably better options than the R8.

That said, if you’re looking for a DAP with a very linear, transparent but still natural sound, that’s the R8. It will effortlessly elevate any IEM to its full sonic potential without changing anything about it, making the most of what it already has without embellishing. IEMs that scale well with a better DAC or amplification will definitely benefit from what the R8 has to offer in both departments.

To illustrate the point, here are some examples from my personal experience:

64 Audio Tia Fourte – this is 64 Audio’s current flagship hybrid IEM, and is renowned for its resolving power, wide stage, microscope-like detail retrieval and precision imaging. It’s also a fairly bright-leaning IEM, albeit being balanced overall, and the R8 doesn’t mask any of these traits. Play a poorly recorded track or something that’s mastered too thin or bright, and you’ll get the unforgivingly harsh sound you’d expect with the Fourte. But play a reference recording and the R8 gives Fourte every nuance of the recording. You’ll literally hear everything the Fourte is capable of, and nothing that it’s not.

Empire Ears Legend X – probably the best bass you’ll ever hear with an IEM, if you consider big, bold, natural, resolving, textured and infinitely deep bass as ‘the best’. But Legend X is so much more than bass; it’s a highly technical, refined and natural IEM in its own right, across the spectrum, and the R8 plays it like a master conductor. If you’re looking for a wild basshead experience with the Legends, you’re probably not going to find it with the R8. It’s far too polished and disciplined to let the bass run loose. Nor will you hear any treble spikes the Legend X is said to have with some sources. I haven’t heard the Legends with another DAP, and frankly, I don’t need to.

64 Audio Tia Trio – this is the ‘wild child’ of the 64 Audio lineup. It has a bashful energy to it that makes Fourte blush. It’s a party animal, and while some would want to control its base instincts, the R8 is happy to let them loose. Still, the smoother, more relaxed nature of the R8 gives the Trio exceptional range with well-recorded music, while its bass response with high-energy EDM is palpably visceral. Excellent synergy here, if the Trio is your cup of tea.

BLON BL-03 – it’s not going to win any technical awards, I know, but the BLON has one of the very best tonalities of any IEM I’ve used, $3600 Fourte included. It’s such a warm, organic, balanced tuning that makes almost any track from any genre sound superb. It’s also far more forgiving than any of the flagship IEMs in my collection, probably a combination of its smoother tuning and lower resolving power, but connected to the R8, it sounds so much better than its cost of entry suggests. Pair it with a balanced cable and it even scales up superbly, to a point of course.

Stability

In the frantic rush to get new products to market, this is the one aspect of modern DAPs that I feel is too often overlooked by many, not least by otherwise experienced audiophiles. What’s the point of having a super-fast, feature-laden, superb sounding flagship DAP if it constantly glitches, the software is incomplete or limited, it fails to charge properly, or doesn’t give you the seamless experience you should demand at this level?

This is where stability comes into play. I appreciate that, as a niche product in a niche market, most DAPs are going to be compromised in one way or another. Even the R8, with its fairly modern architecture, still lags behind mass-produced modern smartphones with the latest processors and upgradable Android operating systems.

But none of this is an excuse for releasing an ‘unfinished’ device. If anything, using slightly older SoCs and more mature operating systems should add up to even better stability, but in my experience, that’s not the case. Even HiBy has had its fair share of disappointing issues with previous DAPs, the R6 Pro’s notorious EMI issues being one example, the original R6’s oddly high output impedance another.

Though neither of these are strictly stability issues, both impacted user experience. That’s how I personally define stability – the lack of anomalies or issues that negatively impact the user experience. In that regard, touch wood, the R8 is by far the most stable DAP I’ve used to date. Everything seems to work as intended, from the very first bootup. Apps install and work flawlessly, basic features like gapless playback and bitperfect support are there from the start, streaming services function as expected, and I’m yet to encounter a spelling mistake or grammatical error in the display of a song title or interface element.

As polished and refined as it sounds, so the R8 appears to be very stable. That said, I’ve seen anecdotal evidence that some units do have stability issues. I’ve personally seen an R8 with a corrupted display, requiring a full system reset to fix it. I’ve heard of another that reboots sporadically, one with backlight bleed, and one that drained its battery overnight. None of these issues are unique to the R8, and HiBy (and its resellers) are on the ball when it comes to technical support.

My own R8, thankfully, has never been anything but stable. If I had to nitpick, HiBy forgot to grammar-check its English firmware update notifications, but I only noticed that because of how jarring they are compared to the overall polish of the rest of the UI.

I don’t for a minute excuse any of the issues above as one-offs, but at the same time don’t accept that this is just the nature of living on the bleeding edge. In any other premium product category, basic quality control issues would never be tolerated as much as they are in this hobby, and as users we have a collective responsibility to hold DAP makers to a much higher standard.

As long as HiBy continues to be responsive to issues that do arise, and the R8 continues to be an impressively resilient device, I’ll continue to recommend it for its stability as much as I do for any of its other qualities.


Verdict and closing thoughts

With the HiBy R8, it feels as if the flagship Android DAP has finally come of age. Some will argue that summit-fi DAPs like Astell & Kern’s SP2000 have been delivering a premium Android-like experience and top-shelf sound at the highest level (and price bracket) for longer, but even they can’t offer the fully open, virtually limitless Android 9 experience of the R8. In fact, only one other current flagship DAP I know of supports open Android 9, iBasso’s DX300.

Not only has the software caught up to modern smartphones (more or less), now the hardware has too (more or less). The R8 (and DX300, to be fair) don’t quite scale up to the latest smartphone platforms, but because their system software is slimmed down and optimised, their real-world performance should be very close to that of phones with nimbler hardware. What is certain is that no other flagship DAP, not even the SP2000, comes close to the processing power of the R8 and DX300.

You could argue neither the software or hardware are really important, and sound quality is the only criteria a DAP should be judged on, to which I’ll say you’re either wasting your money on an Android DAP, or seriously compromising on the experience (and benefits) a true flagship DAP should deliver.

If sound is your only barometer but you still want the benefits of a modern Android system, save your money and buy a high-end portable DAC/amp that uses your phone as a source. If Android isn’t important at all, there are some excellent non-Android flagships that are equally fast and full-featured, like Lotoo’s superb PAW Gold Touch.

The R8, for me, transcends every other Android flagship DAP in delivering the most complete package of them all, including:

• Premium hardware and build quality, inside and out
• The fastest Android hardware platform in a DAP
• The most modern open Android system in a DAP
• The latest wireless connectivity, from high-speed, dual-band WiFi to Bluetooth 5.0 and all major hi-res and low latency codecs, including HiBy’s 1200kbps UAT
• The largest battery of any current DAP
• Built-in hardware sensors for screen rotation, tap to wake and tap to sleep
• A colour-accurate 1080P retina display
• Flagship-worthy sound quality, from tonality to technicalities
• Generous, premium packaging, storage and protection accessories
• A stable software experience with frequent and responsive firmware updates
• A reference-grade tuning that doesn’t impose on the sound of your high-end IEMs

Does it have any shortcomings? Certainly. There’s no such thing as the ‘perfect’ device, especially in such as fast-evolving product category. Quality control has been questioned by some, and there’s no question HiBy could have pushed the envelope even further with its included accessories or storage options for the asking price.

That said, the R8 puts a marker in the ground for where flagship DAPs should be in 2021. Some might prefer the sound profile of other DAPs, but that’s as true for the lofty SP2000 as it is for any number of mid-fi or lower-end DAPs. None of those DAPs, truth be told, hold a candle to the R8’s combination of versatility, functionality, power, sound quality and stability.

Going forward I expect newer DAPs to overcome some of the R8’s limitations and exceed its capabilities, at even lower price points. That’s the nature of the beast. But for now, the R8 presents the most compelling example I’ve seen of the complete flagship DAP, an example that many others – including HiBy – will no doubt follow in the months and years to come.



Recommended reviews (for DAP comparisons and other pairings)

Twister6 – HiBy R8 – Turbo Charged! (the standard for portable audio reviews)
Headfonics – HiBy R8 Review
Headfonia – HiBy R8 Review

There’s something about Chicago-based, European-made company EarMen that breaks the ice even before you’ve heard their expertly tuned audio products. Perhaps it’s the tongue-in-cheek naming (I mean, Donald DAC and TR-Amp, classic!).

But beyond marketing smarts, the products themselves are designed to break the mold of tried-and-tested designs, especially at their price points, and the burgundy-red TR-Amp is no different. The portable DAC/amp market is a crowded one, and there are literally dozens of options for every wallet. But very few originate outside China, or have the high-end audio heritage of EarMen’s sister company Auris.

The TR-Amp is not my first experience with EarMen. I was first introduced to the brand with the remarkably miniscule-yet-powerful Sparrow, followed by the similarly miniscule-yet-capable Eagle. So, I probably should have guessed there’d be more to the TR-Amp than meets the eye.

For starters, I’m a firm believer in the benefits of an end-to-end balanced audio chain, be it for portable applications or full-blown desktop systems. The balanced-vs-single ended debate is beyond the scope of this review, but suffice it to say I’ve rarely used a single ended system that I felt couldn’t benefit from some balanced goodness.

But strike me down and call me Wally, the TR-Amp eschews any type of balanced output…and I don’t really care, such was the clarity and immensity and power of sound I heard at first listen. But before I get ahead of myself, let’s take a closer look at what the whole package has to offer.


What you get

Like its EarMen siblings, the TR-Amp ships in a nondescript solid black box with a simple line diagram of the TR-Amp on the front and a detailed schematic of the product and its technical features on the back. This way you can see exactly what you’re getting before you even open the box, and you’re getting quite a lot:

• A high-end mobile DAC in the ESS Sabre ES9038-QM2
• TPA6120 current-feedback AB amplifier with 2-channel 300mW output at 32 ohms and 128dB dynamic range
• Super low ESR tantal capacitors, high grade power-supply components and four-layer golden plated PCB technology for ultra-low-noise playback
• XMOS USB decoding
• Support for 32-bit 384kHz PCM and native DSD256/DXD playback
• Full MQA hardware support
• A 3700maH battery for up to 10-hours of portable use (with separate data/power USB-C inputs)
• Pre-amp support with coax line-out and a pre-out toggle switch
• 3.5mm portable and 6.3mm full-size headphone outputs

These specs are all par for the course for this level of portable DAC/amp, but at least there are no glaring omissions (other than balanced output). More important is how EarMen have taken the basic ingredients and integrated them into something more than the sum of the parts.

Lifting the lid, you’re greeted with your first look at the TR-Amp itself, its silky red shell set into a firm foam cutout. The TR-Amp is reassuringly solid, yet fairly compact. A closer inspection shows expert machining, no hard edges, and all-metal parts in its 129mm x 66mm x 30mm 240-gram CNC aluminium frame. Four rubber feet suggest the device is best used flat on a desk, but also serves to protect your phone or DAP when used in a portable stack.


Speaking of which, EarMen provides a branded elastic strap to hold a phone or DAP in place, along with a nicely made USB-A to C cable. For some reason they don’t supply a shorter USB-C to C or C-to-Lightning cable for mobile use, which is an oversight for a product that’ll likely be used as often with a smartphone as it is with a laptop or PC (most of which sport USB-C outputs nowadays anyway).

Other than a quickstart guide and warranty card, the only other accessory is a mesh-lined pouch for safely carrying the TR-Amp in your pocket or bag. It’s not exactly a smorgasbord of accessories, but other than the extra cables which would have been genuinely useful, you get everything you need in the box. And, like all other EarMen products that are made in Europe, you get a full two-year manufacturers warranty.


How it sounds

I was going to spend some time to describe how to best use the TR-Amp, but really all you need to do is hook it up to a device with a modern OS and voila, it’s recognised as an external audio device. This was the case with each of the Android, iOS and MacOS devices I tested it with. If you use a Windows machine, Windows 10 should have native drivers built-in, otherwise you can download the necessary Windows drivers here.

My own testing was mainly done with an LG V30+ Smartphone using UAPP as the client. Plugging the TR-Amp into the phone (using the USB-C to C cable supplied with the Sparrow) and turning the device on (using the physical volume dial) immediately registers a playback device in UAPP, with nothing else left to do but connect a headphone or IEM and press play.

Before I dive into the sound impressions, a quick note. Depending on how you hear them, sources can have very little or quite a significant impact on the sound of your IEMs, but fundamentally what you’re hearing will be mostly determined by your IEMs (I’m using IEMs as a blanket term here since I don’t own any headphones). I definitely hear a difference between sources, and quality is not always improved with price. It really comes down to your own listening preferences.

With all that said, the TR-Amp is a remarkable performer at any price, especially if you’re using it as part of a portable system like I am and aren’t trying to drive high-impedance, low sensitivity headphones. The first thing that struck me was the sheer size and space of the sound. It was like walking your audio from a quiet room into a vast recording studio, complete with an ink-black, sound-dampened background, instruments and vocals seemingly appearing from nowhere.


Compared to the sound coming straight from the V30+, which in itself is a very good performer for a smartphone (complete with a Sabre Quad DAC), the TR-Amp adds a much larger sense of space – both width and depth – to whatever you’re playing. Details are more easily apparent, and instruments are better separated from each other and the vocals. The difference isn’t subtle either. Make no mistake, this is a big jump up in sound quality, whether you’re using $50 or $1500 IEMs.

Tonally, I’m hearing the TR-Amp as brighter overall. If your IEMs are prone to a thicker, more midbass-coloured sound, I think the TR-Amp would make a good complement, lifting the veil typically imposed by the midbass blanket and pulling out finer details from the mix. Conversely, if you’re already using a bright-leaning IEM with excellent clarity and detail retrieval, the TR-Amp might tip it a touch too bright for some.

For example, playing smooth live Jazz by Norah Jones using a BLON BL-03 with its warmer-leaning, more organic sound, the TR-Amp clears the cobwebs, so to speak, and presents a crisper, slightly cooler sound overall, maxing out the technical capabilities of the BLON and giving the performance a realistic sense of stage.

Switching to the 64 Audio Tia Fourte, on the other hand, straddles the line between class-leading resolution and soundstage and overly-bright inflection, further magnifying any and all imperfections in the recording (in the case of Norah Jones’ …’Til We Meet Again Live, there aren’t many, so it sounds sublime).


I’m hearing plenty of detail in the deep bass notes of Lana Del Rey’s It’s Dark But Just A Game, from her chart topping Chemtrails Over The Countryclub LP. The TR-Amp seems to get a solid grip on the dynamic drivers of my IEMs, helping them eek out detail and texture in abundance from the sub-bass, without pushing the midbass any further forward than it should be. It’s definitely not a thick bass presentation, and won’t necessarily emphasise bass impact if your IEM is lacking in that department.

Midrange is where I find the TR-Amp is really doing the business. There’s a ton of detail and separation happening here that I’m not even hearing with the flagship $1900 R8 DAP, although it’s less a case of detail retrieval as it is an emphasis and clinical separation of some specific notes.

Sticking with Lana and another breakout track from Chemtrails, Yosemite, there’s are some stick hits that sit well within the upper midrange spectrum that are almost surgically extracted from the mix by the TR-Amp. The same sounds are set further back in the mix with any of the other sources I used to compare it with. They’re still there, just not emphasised quite as much. Whether or not this is the ‘correct’ presentation is moot – it’s what you prefer to hear that matters, and I’m really liking what the TR-Amp does with this track.

The flipside – and there’s usually a flipside – is that the trailing edges of female vocals can sound a touch glassy on occasion, and vocals as a whole are thinner and less organic compared to a more natural sounding source like the R8.

There’s not so much a treble glare (not atypical for Sabre DACs) as a treble shine with the TR-Amp, which serves the dual purpose of highlighting detail and revealing flaws. While the TR-Amp won’t add sibilance if it’s already absent from your IEMs (Missy Higgins’ Shark Fin Blues is a great test track for sibilance), but if your IEMs or recordings are sibilance-prone you might want to tweak the volume down a touch.


Other than that, treble is very well extended, and while it’s not the last word in resolution, I’m not left wanting for detail. More importantly there’s very little harshness I can detect. Across the FR, the TR-Amp presents a super-clean sound that’s almost entirely devoid of signal noise other than what’s in the recording itself.

How it pairs

To be honest, I wouldn’t be buying a portable DAC/amp of any description to drive hard-to-drive headphones. I mean, you could – and the TR-Amp has far more power in reserve than its meagre spec numbers suggest – but larger headphones really do benefit from Class A amplification and brick-sized power supplies. There’s just no escaping the laws of physics.

For a single-ended amp, and a diminutive one at that, the TR-Amp has so much power in reserve, I struggled to get past 10 o’clock on the dial with any of my IEMS – even with the power-hungry woofers of the Empire Ears Legend X. Not only that, it displayed tremendous deft, controlling the drivers like a maestro expertly conducting a 100-piece orchestra without breaking a sweat.

This, for me, was the biggest surprise of the lot. I’m so used to connecting all my gear with balanced cables to make the most of an IEMs capability, that the effortlessness of the TR-Amp’s drive was seriously eye opening. If I had to nitpick, I did hear some static noise come through when turning the volume dial with nothing playing, but this is a minor quibble and doesn’t affect the sound in any way when actual music is playing.

As such, my rec for a perfect pairing is easy or moderate sensitivity IEMs (and headphones). I’m not sure if the power on tap would overwhelm ultra-sensitive IEMs like Campfire’s Andromeda, as I tend to avoid them for that very reason, but worst-case scenario, an ifi IEMatch should sort out any noise issues. With all three IEMs at my disposal, there was zero hissing, even at max volume with the amp engaged, always a sign of a well-designed amplification circuit.


What I think

If the EarMen Sparrow is a high-water mark as far as ultra-portable DAC/amp sound quality is concerned, the TR-Amp sets a new bar for portable/transportable DAC/amps. It may not be as powerful, flashy or well-known as ifi’s iDSD series, or as plentiful as the various Chi-Fi variants from the likes of FiiO, but for $249 it’s easily the best value portable I’ve heard that’s equally at home on the desk and on the go.

Like its siblings, the craftsmanship is first class, and there’s quite obviously a very experienced ear that’s tuned it. With a Sabre DAC at its core, the sound may not be to everyone’s taste, at least not if you like your sound warm, thick and gooey. A tube-like sound it’s not. But if you favour precision, detail and transparency with plenty of space for your music to live in, the TR-Amp should definitely make the shortlist.

If EarMen someday manage to build a TR-Amp that takes this package and adds a well-implemented balanced circuit for more demanding headphones and a few extra cables for convenience at a reasonable price, it could set a new benchmark for budget-conscious desktop replacement portable sources. As it stands, the TR-Amp isn’t too far off that mark.

The FH7 is FiiO’s new flagship in-ear monitor, combining the best of the various technologies we’ve seen in their previous IEMs with a new filter system that lets you tweak the final sound to your preference.

At $495 the FH7 is also FiiO’s most expensive IEM – twice the price of the FH5. But unlike most flagships that exhibit only incremental improvements over their predecessors, the FH7’s performance not only justifies its price, it represents even better value for money on a dollar-for-dollar basis.

Frankly, the combination of FiiO’s M11 and FH7 is close enough to the quality of my (significantly more expensive) desktop head-fi system – with the added convenience of portability and isolation – that I find myself using it more and more, and the desktop rig less and less.

Let’s take a closer look at what makes the FH7, in my opinion, the most complete and compelling IEM that FiiO has released to date.

The whole shebang

The FH7 takes the FH5’s already generous package and impressively crams even more into the box.

Set into custom foam cut-outs, the familiar wave-like CNC-machined aluminium earpieces are presented like jewelry, attached to the eight-core LC-3.5C silver-plated copper cable – a separately released upgrade option for the FH5 which now comes standard with the FH7.

Below the IEMs you’ll find a smaller foam block dotted with a large selection of ear tips, including a triple set of SpinFit tips, medium-sized double-flange tips, and the same vocal, balanced, bass and foam tips first seen with the FH5 and FA7.


Also included in the box is a new faux-leather flip case that replaces the Pelican-like case of the FH5 and FA7 – a refined finishing touch for a premium IEM like the FH7. While not waterproof or shockproof, the new case is much larger, lined with soft material to protect the earpieces from scratches, and includes a mesh pouch for extra tips or other accessories.

The small material pouch is still there, which fits neatly inside the leatherette case should you want extra protection. The bundle also includes a convenient shirt clip and cleaning brush. I keep the earpieces zipped up in the soft pouch with the still-attached cable folded loose inside the larger case. That way the earpieces are protected from the cable and its metal splitter and connector, and also from any other accessories I sometimes put inside the box.

If I had to nitpick, I’m not convinced that the new cable is actually better than the four-core LC-3.5B cable that accompanied the FH5. In fact, I’ve already swapped out the stock FH7 cable for the balanced version of the FH5 cable (LC-2.5B). I also think the lack of a stock balanced cable is an unfortunate oversight and missed opportunity for an IEM at this price point, in particular given that it’s been designed with FiiO’s range of mid- to high-end DAPs in mind, all of which feature balanced outputs. Add to that the fact that the FH7 clearly sounds better balanced, and it’s a curious omission indeed.


Built to fit

I’ve always been partial to all-metal IEMs. While some modern plastics – the FA7’s injection-moulded shells comes to mind – are indeed very good, metal simply feels more premium and is also cooler to the touch.

The FH7’s shells are larger than the FH5’s. The hand-polished finish and understated rose-gold rim exudes quality. The wave patterns give them a streamlined appearance, though I worry that any rough handling will chip the fine anodized finish. If you’re prone to throwing your IEMs unprotected into a bag or pocket, I’d caution against doing that with the FH7.

Like other FiiOs, the FH7 uses the MMCX connector and an over-the-ear design to make the earpieces easier to fit and comfortable to wear for long stretches. Switching cables is not always easy with MMCX as the connectors tend to be a very tight fit, and the FH7 is no different. It takes some effort to hold the connector at just the right angle and disconnect with a significant amount of force. Only time will tell if the FH7’s connectors are strong enough to hold up to repeated cable swaps.

Missing cable issues aside, the quality of all the components that make up the FH7 package is unquestionably top-tier – likely every bit as good, or better, than those included with kilobuck IEMs.


Tweak and tune

The most significant addition to the FH7’s design is the new filter system, made up of a series of three anodized and colour-coded filters that screw in (very smoothly I must say) to the end of the metal nozzle of each earpiece. I’ll discuss the specifics of the filters and how they work to affect the sound later in this review, but for now it’s enough to say that the addition of filters is a boon to what is already a feature-packed product.

One of the less-noted but equally important benefits of the new filters is the additional 1mm or so of length they add to the FH7’s nozzle. This is not insignificant; the biggest criticism by far of the FH5 was its ultra-shallow fit which, combined with a thicker-than-usual nozzle girth, made it difficult for many to get a good seal, even with larger ear tips. And without a good seal, the sound quality of any IEM degrades considerably.

The extra length and slightly narrower nozzle of the FH7 almost completely correct this issue while retaining much of the noteworthy comfort of the FH5. I say ‘almost’ because the FH7 is still unmistakably a shallow-insert design compared to many other IEMs that tend to reach deeper into the ear canal. I find the FH7 is both more comfortable and more compatible with various ear tips than the FH5, and as such I find it far easier to get a good seal, and is for me the most comfortable IEM I’ve worn to date.

That comfort does vary with your choice of ear tips, however. As with the FH5, I find that JVC’s Spiral Dot tips are both the most comfortable and best sounding choice for the FH7. The longer nozzle of the FH7 does have one drawback with the Spiral Dots, which are themselves a very shallow design – they sit too far back. Spiral Dots use a series of indented dots (hence the name) to smooth out the sound waves coming through the IEM nozzle, but with the FH7, only one row of dots is left exposed.

The solution I found is one that was pioneered by some FH5 users that wanted a deeper insertion – a small rubber O-ring that acts as a spacer. You’ll want an O-ring of about 5.5mm inside diameter and 0.5mm to 0.8mm thickness, and if like me you struggle to source some locally, they’re widely available on Amazon and other online retailers.

With the spacer in place, the Spiral Dot tips have ample breathing room for the ‘dots’ to do their thing. The extra distance between the front of the tip and the nozzle grille also reduces the chance of ear wax finding its way into the sound ports.


Sound impressions

If you prefer foam to silicone tips, I recommend you try Dekoni Audio Bulletz, which I find more comfortable and better sounding than the more popular (and more expensive) Comply tips. You may also find a suitable pairing with one of the many tips FiiO includes with the FH7 – all of which are excellent quality, though none of which quite matched the quality and comfort of Spiral Dots.

Building on the design cues and clever bass porting first seen in the FH5, the FH7 combines a larger (13.6mm) beryllium coated dynamic driver with four custom Knowles balanced armatures, and an improved acoustic design to deliver a sound more refined and resolving than all of FiiO’s previous IEMs.

Rated at 16-ohm impedance with a sensitivity of 111 dB/mW, the FH7 is easy enough to drive, but mostly immune to hum or hiss when used with a powerful amp or DAP. Paired with the M11, I could hear no audible hiss even in high-gain and the volume maxed out. With an extremely powerful desktop amp you may start hearing faint hiss at high volume levels. Should that be the case, a simple tweak like the addition of an ifi IEMatch in the chain reduces noise floor back to inaudible levels.

Coming from a warmer, bassier IEM like the FH5, my first impression of the FH7’s sound profile was closer to neutral, bordering on bright. You wouldn’t think so, given the increased size and better materials of the FH7’s dynamic driver, but FiiO has obviously opted for a more ‘reference’ sound, sacrificing some of the FH5’s heft and dynamics for extra speed and control. The addition of a ‘super tweeter’ ultra-high frequency BA driver has also added more resolution to the mix, notably improving the clarity and detail retrieval of predecessors. This does come at the possible cost of some high-frequency stridency, as we’ll discover later.

Interestingly, FiiO’s new filter system lets you dial in (or out) the amount of high-frequency information by blocking (red filter), partially blocking (black filter) or leaving open (green filter) the sound path from the super-tweeter, which is placed front and centre of the nozzle opening. In other words, the filters don’t directly affect the low or mid frequencies at all; rather, they attenuate the highs and in so doing give the other frequencies more or less emphasis in the mix.

The filter system mostly works well, although the changes it makes are subtle compared to a more involved filter system that found in IMR’s Zenith or new Aten IEMs. This can be a good or bad thing, depending on your sound preferences. The filters alone won’t suddenly turn the neutral-tuned FH7 into a warm and dark IEM, even with the red (bass) filter in place; nor will it do much to the placement of the mids. Many users actually prefer the fully open green filter, which maximises the FH7’s excellent treble extension and air. The filters are thus useful in tweaking nuances of sound, but less so in terms of changing the overall character of the IEM.

To get a better understanding of how the FH7’s sound in real-world conditions, I ran them through a long set of test tracks and albums over the course of the past month. All of these tests were done with the M11 using a balanced cable, Spiral Dot tips, and lossless FLAC files (both standard and high-res).


Bass

You’d think with a substantially larger dynamic driver (13.6mm in the FH7 vs 10mm in the FH5) that the FH7 would be a bass monster. Well it is, in a way, but not in the way you’d think. The bass has actually been tuned downin quantity compared to the FH5, as a quick glance at the frequency graphs of both IEMs demonstrates. But what the graphs don’t tell you is how much more detailed, extended, and textured the bass has become. What the FH7 lacks in sheer scale, it more than compensates for in speed and resolve.

Like the FH5, the FH7 won’t add bass where there is none in the track. When called for, the FH7 delivers bass that is tight, punchy and lightning-fast, with a natural decay that lingers just long enough for you to feel it. It won’t rattle your jaw, but it will tickle your ears, and for a more refined and less fatiguing listen, that’s just about perfect to my ears.

If it’s chest-pounding bass you’re after, there are probably better IEMs out there for you. This is audiophile-grade bass that gives strings their weight and drums their texture without overpowering the mix in any way, but also not shying away from it.

Daft Punk’s ‘Random Access Memories’ is one of my go-to bass-laden albums. With some IEMs – especially those tuned with a steep V – the bass can become a bit too loose, but the FH7 has it tamed like a housecat. The steady bassline that comes in at the 20-second mark on the foot-tapping track ‘Doin’ It Right’ has just enough palpable weight to lay a solid foundation without taking anything away from the higher frequencies (which are actually the emphasis of the track).

But don’t mistake this tight-fist control for meekness. Lorde’s ‘Royals’ lets you know in seconds if your IEMs can deliver a good dollop of bass when required, and the FH7 delivers with aplomb.

All that said, the bass is very well balanced. It underpins the music, sets the pace, then gets out of the way. The gorgeous bass notes in the intro to Ingrid Michaelson’s ‘The Way I Am’ are full of rich, weighty texture, but as soon as the vocals begin, the bass takes a back seat, falling back respectfully into the mix. With hardly any mid bass bleed, the FH7 gives the midrange a clear, crisp stage on which to shine, and that is perhaps its most impressive quality.

Mids

This was one area where I really wanted the FH7 to improve over the FH5, and fortunately, I was not disappointed. Whereas the FH5 has an annoying upper midrange peak that could make female vocals a little forward and ultimately piercing, the FH7 pulls the mids back a few notches while adding a not-insignificant amount of additional detail. As a result, both male and female vocal are rendered beautifully, without any errant dips or peaks.

Having said that, the FH7’s overall brighter signature also extends to the mids, and while vocals and instruments that fall into the midrange band are full of nuance, they can also sound a touch cold, depending on the recording. I don’t want to call them thin, because that’s not what I’m hearing, but the mids certainly aren’t as full bodied as they are with some warmer, more mid-centric IEMs like Meze’s Rai Penta, for example. This is less a case of weight and more a case of character – picture a ‘drier’ Brut Champagne, rather than a ‘wetter’ Rose Champagne.

When I listen to Norah Jones sing ‘Come Away With Me’, I’m not getting the same buttery, smoky vocal presentation I’m used to, but rather a more neutral, airier, more intricate performance.

Recently though I’ve been finding some (but not all) higher pitched female vocals aren’t sounding quite as smooth as I’d like them to. The problem is I’m not sure if this is an issue with any of the midrange drivers or the ultra-high BA drivers, though I suspect the latter. I mention it here because I’m only hearing this subtle ‘ghosting’ on a small sample of female vocals, of which the recordings are pristine and sound perfect with other gear (almost every track on Norah Jones’s ‘Come Away With Me’ is a case in point). It’s something that requires more attention, but nine times out of ten won’t be an issue for most listeners.

Highs

Even if some of the treble drivers are indeed responsible for the vocal artefacts mentioned above, the FH7’s overall treble presentation is very much on point. FiiO clearly went to town with the treble on this IEM, making it immediately more extended and sparkling than the FH5’s slightly rolled treble.

I’m normally quite treble sensitive, easily irritated by peaky highs, but the FH7’s brighter character doesn’t make them harsh in the least. If anything, the treble is among the smoothest I’ve heard in an IEM. So many IEMs shoot for extended treble in the hope of adding extra detail – and fail miserably. The FH7 just about pulls it off, perhaps not as well as a class-leading treble-centric IEM like the Andromeda, but close enough to make the price difference between the two academic.

When listening to brighter recordings, like def Leppard’s ‘Hysteria’, I often find myself turning the volume down to avoid some of the high hats and cymbal splashes, and as far as possible avoid the sibilance in the vocals. With the FH7 I find myself turning the volume up, so painless are the highs. The FH7 seems to have a firm grip on the highs to the point where they never overpower the mix, even though they might dominate the track.

This is a good thing, especially if you like energy (and even some grit) in your electric guitars. Joe Satriani’s masterful ‘Always With Me, Always With You’ is expertly rendered here, reaching the highest highs without ever making me wince. Timbre is excellent too, with the guitars sounding full and realistic. Sting instruments are likewise a joy to listen to with the FH7’s, and Max Richter’s recomposed version of Vivaldi’s ‘Winter 1’ from ‘The Four Seasons’ is both engaging and utterly believable. The detail in the strings on that track is actually astonishing, as is the way the FH7 is able to balance the highs of the strings with the lows of the bass, and everything in-between.

I’m still undecided about giving the FH7’s treble full voice by using the green filter or, as I’m doing now, keeping it slightly in check with the red. I’m still leaning towards the latter, mostly because I’m generally a fan of warmer over brighter, and with a transparent source like the M11, the FH7’s need a bit of help not to tip the scales. Switching to a pure copper cable is also something I’ve considered doing, given copper’s reputation for a warmer sound balance, and I’ll report back here should that experiment prove successful.


Imaging, stage and separation

Whereas the FH5 is one of the most open sounding IEMs I’ve heard, the FH7 is even more so. It presents a natural, spacious stage, with ample ability to fool your brain into thinking some sounds are coming from way outside the space between your ears. It’s definitely not the widest stage I’ve heard, nor the deepest, but it won’t leave you wanting in either axis.

More complex tracks, like the crescendo to Daft Punk’s ‘Giorgio by Moroder’, are deftly handled, not quite as well as some higher end IEMs known for their spacious separation and control, like 64Audio’s U12t, but at less than 25 per cent the cost, that’s not too surprising. The FH7 is far closer in its presentation and separation to the likes of Andromeda and Solaris, even though the far more expensive Campfires probably have the edge in overall balance and resolution, but again, given the gulf in price, the slight compromise is well worth it, and astounding to think how capable the FH7 is at its price point relative to these more expensive IEMs.

Stereo imaging is always precise, notably using Pink Floyd’s supremely-mastered version of ‘Time’ from the ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ as a reference. The ping, tick and chime of every clock is rendered precisely in its own space, and the nimble balance the FH7 displays across the frequency range lets you follow each clock as if you’re in the room with them. Anyone who knows this track also knows how it can trip up even some very good full-size headphones that cost more than the FH7, so to hear it performed so capably in an IEM is impressive to say the least.


Closing thoughts

The FiiO FH7 is the culmination of a steady evolution of the company’s in-ear monitors, and sets a new bar for features and quality in its price bracket. It follows the success of FiiO’s two previous IEMs, the hybrid FH5 and all-BA FA7, but kicks up the performance of both by several notches.

While the overall sound is balanced, bordering on neutral, the FH7 still knows how to deliver visceral bass when required, sublime (albeit dry) mids, and smoothly extended treble with plenty of air. It presents a clear, direct, surprisingly detailed and very refined sound, with a punch that packs a wallop. The versatility makes it equally at home with modern pop and rock as it is with vocal jazz and classical orchestras.

I suspect there may be something amiss somewhere between the mids and highs that adds a high-frequency shadow to some female vocals, but that could also be a factor of source, tip choice, cable or even my own hearing. That I don’t hear it with other IEMs, however, suggests the FH7 is not quite as silky as it could be.

Minor sonic quibbles aside, FiiO has once again upped the bar on value when it comes to their higher-end products, pricing them in and among mid-tiered competitors with features and quality that belie their cost. The FH7 is no different, and I can honestly say that if you enjoy the sound signature, you’ll struggle to find another IEM that can do what the FH7 can do, is built as well, and ships with so many quality accessories for the same price.

Full disclosure: Divinus sent me samples of the Ostia for testing in exchange for my honest review. I am not affiliated to the company, and the opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.

South Korea is renowned for many things in the modern technology world, but dedicated audio products aren’t high on that list. You could argue that’s not exactly true, given South Korean giants like Samsung and LG have entire product lines dedicated to audio, but to be fair those aren’t the first products you think of when it comes to those world-famous brands.

So, when a small South Korean-based startup called Divinus got in touch to tell me about a new true wireless (TWS) IEM called Ostia, which they created with their own custom-designed, professionally-tuned dynamic driver, my curiosity was piqued. When they told me the price ($60), I was intrigued. And by the time I ripped open the yellow DHL packets a few weeks later, I was positively impressed.


In the box

Ostia ships in a small, shrink-wrapped box emblazoned with the product name and likeness on the front. A pull tag on the side exposes a nifty tray that slides open to reveal the storage case and two small boxes, one with a short USB charging cable, the other with spare silicone tips.

Divinus sent me two extra items with my Ostia sample: a pack of TWS foam tips (sold separately for $9), and a pack of six tiny stick-on ‘sound filters’ (sold separately for $5). I’ll cover the add-ons in more detail later, but suffice it to say, I’m not sure if Ostia actually ships with both add-ons included or if you have to buy them separately. It would make sense to have them included – especially the sound filters – but again, more on that later.

Also included is a miniature user guide that wasn’t particularly helpful when it came time to setting up and pairing the IEMs with my phone and MacBook, but does provide a handy reference for what you can do with the touch button controls once you get them working.


First impressions

Physically, the Ostia case and earpieces are very compact, much more so than my recently acquired Sony WF-1000XM4 TWS IEMs, for example. Both the case and earpieces are made from a matte black plastic material that feels quite smooth and sturdy to the touch, and definitely doesn’t betray the ultra-budget price point.

The case is very portable, measuring about five centimetres across, and seems robust enough to take some punishment inside a bag or pocket. I’d recommend keeping the peel-off protector on the case lid if you want to keep it scratch-free, or buy a small pouch for it on the go.

The earpieces themselves are very light, and interestingly both are identical in shape, with only a faint L and R printed on each to differentiate them. This means they can be put back in the case on either side and still charge correctly, though this could also confuse matters when you put them back in your ears.

Comfort isn’t really an issue, and I got a good fit with the default medium silicone eartips pre-installed on the earpieces. Because of their rather oval shape and small dimensions the earpieces are designed to be worn parallel to the ear rather than pointing downwards, as with many other IEMs that ‘fill’ the ear cavity. The tips aren’t the softest I’ve used, and sit flush with the nozzle, so be careful not to press them in too hard or you might end up doing some damage to your inner ear.

I did have one frustrating issue that I’d be remiss not to mention: the initial pairing process. On removing the earpieces, the small LED indicator flashes red and white to show that pairing mode is active, and indeed I did see a flurry of possible devices appear on my phone’s Bluetooth options screen. Initially I had to guess which of the random code-named devices were the Ostias, but eventually OSTIA appeared as an option, and selecting it paired an earpiece. But only one. A few tries at resetting the pairings only succeeded in one or the other earpiece playing through, until I discovered that, once paired, both earpieces needed to be placed back in the case, with the lid closed, and only when removed again would they register as a TWS pair.

Once I learned the ‘trick’ it was easy enough to get the earpieces back into pairing mode, and pair them with various other phones and devices. Ostia don’t support multipoint connections (nor did I expect them to given their price), so keep in mind you’ll need to physically pair them to a device if they’re currently paired to another. Once paired, a reassuring female voice announces ‘connected’ and ‘TWS connected’, letting you know you’re good to go.


Battery life and other features

Divinus claims a battery life of five hours for the earpieces, and a total of 20 hours including the case (which holds three full charges). There’s no fast-charging feature that’s now common with many TWS IEMs, so you’ll need to allow two hours for a full charge from empty, but if like me you place the IEMs back in the case after every use and don’t use them for hours on end, you’ll likely never run out of charge in regular use.

A nifty feature that I didn’t think I’d see in a TWS product at this price point is wireless charging. Simply drop the case onto a wireless charging pad, and the four charging LED lights on the front of the case light up to show that it’s charging (and also to display how much charge remains).

Another feature I find quite handy for the price is an IPX 7 rating, meaning you can comfortably use the Ostia for sweaty workouts, and even in the rain if you have to. The website FAQ cautions against using them in heavy rain or during a shower, though in all likelihood they’ll be fine even then. If you need a lightweight IEM for a heavyweight workout and the standard IPX4 rating of most high-end IEMs won’t do, Ostia should definitely be on your list. They also won’t cost a bomb to replace should they get lost or stolen at the gym.

There’s not much else by way of features here: no noise cancelling, no app, no high-res Bluetooth, no sensors to pause the music, not even volume control. But the buttons on each earpiece are large and responsive, and you can get all the basics done – play, pause, answer calls, skip tracks and invoke the digital assistant on your phone, all by touch. Once paired (yes, about that…), Ostia are basically plug and play, and fairly intuitive too – assuming you’ve used TWS IEMs before, and their most impressive feature is not so much what they do, but how they sound.


Sound impressions

Before I get to the crux of this review, a word on wireless sound quality if I may. If you know me, you’ll know I’m not a huge fan of Bluetooth sound, at least not for serious, critical listening. Or at least that was the case before higher-end Bluetooth protocols like AptX-HD, LDAC and UAT started appearing in mainstream devices. I’m also not a fan of compressed music, and since ALL Bluetooth music is inherently compressed, something has to give.

Thankfully, modern Bluetooth codecs are advanced enough to support fairly high-bitrate compressed music (320kbit MP3 and 256kbit AAC), and since Ostia supports AAC on both Android and iPhone, you can expect very passable source quality, at the very least. Just make sure your device supports AAC, because you don’t want to be stuck using plain vanilla SBC Bluetooth for anything other than background listening.

With all that said, I initially found Ostia’s sound to be quite balanced, with a slight (mid)bass emphasis, smooth mids (with some upper midrange bumping) and a clear albeit slightly peaky treble that tilted a bit too bright for my liking. Initially I was also underwhelmed with the overall weight of the sound, finding it quite airy, and not in a good way.

That’s when I remembered the small pack of sound filters Divinus included in the box. The Divinus website shows a response curve with and without the filters, suggesting a rather drastic damping of the treble when filtered, so I opted to see if this might change the balance for the better, for my preferences anyway. Lo and behold, it did.

A word of caution though: turns out the filters are little more than thin felt stickers, and if you have fat fingers like mine, are not the easiest to apply. I was a bit like Tom Cruise trying to diffuse a bomb in Mission Impossible, except blindfolded with handcuffs, trying to apply the miniscule filters to the miniscule open nozzles, and I admit to losing at least two in my attempts to slide them on evenly. Before you try this at home, best watch this YouTube video, and use the tools they recommend too!



But I digress…

Tonality

If, like me, you prefer your sound slightly warmer, your bass slightly fuller, and can’t tolerate spritely treble for too long, the sound filters are an essential accessory for Ostia. Even with the sound filters in place, I wasn’t hearing a large amount of sub-bass, but down low the bass was suitably punchy and fairly quick too. Listening to Lorde’s Royals, the intro electronic bass hits were fuller than I probably anticipated them to be, but not as full as I would have liked them to be. Brandi Carlile’s kick drums on The Story were also modestly punchy, but also quite well textured, and didn’t feel too far off from ideal. This is not basshead-level bass by any measure, but it’s enough to satisfy.

Male vocals are fairly neutral, with the midbass bump giving them a little extra volume when called for. Neil Diamond’s chesty delivery in Hello Again, from The Jazz Singer soundtrack, is coarsely emotive, and even the higher-register male vocals on Radical Face’s Welcome Home are rendered realistically.

Pre-sound filters, female vocals were pushed a touch higher than I like them to be, though that’s probably a consequence of some unfiltered treble peaks rather than any midrange abrasiveness. Katie Pruitt’s signature voice was ever so slightly glassy on It’s Always Been You, but warmed right up with the filters in place. Same with Lana Del Rey on some of her Chemtrails Over The Countryclub numbers.

Treble is where the filters seem to have the most effect. The combination of some errant treble peaks – not surprising at this price and from a single dynamic driver – and compressed Bluetooth playback can make for a rather unpleasant treble fiasco. Thankfully Ostia’s treble is actually better than on some more expensive wireless IEMs I’ve tried, even without the filters, but the filters really, really smooth things over without sacrificing too much detail up top.

The string section in Max Richter’s Winter 1, from his recomposed version of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, were crisp and sweet, with enough detail to separate the different string sections on stage, but also more one-dimensional than I’m used to hearing them. And the cymbal splashes on Def Leppard’s Love Bites were definitely much more tolerable than they were on first listen, and actually quite enjoyable once the filters were on.

Overall, I’d class Ostia’s tonality as a gentle U, tilted right pre-filters and left post-filters. The latter is definitely my preferred option, but trebleheads and those who prefer their bass more neutral can probably live without the filters for sure.


Technicalities

Divinus made a point of telling me about their custom-designed 6mm dynamic driver, dubbed DV1, which claims to offer ultra-low 0.1% distortion across the audible spectrum. I’m no engineer, but my ears were telling me this was indeed a quality driver I was listening to, without any obvious grit, and a commendably resolving signature.

I have to keep reminding myself that this is a $60 TWS IEM, and for that price there’s a heck of a lot of technology that needs to be packed in to two tiny shells and a case to make them all work. Often it’s a case of good sound being a nice-to-have, but Divinus set out to make sound quality a priority with Ostia, and it shows.

Without getting carried away, Ostia isn’t going to win any technical awards, but at the same time I’ve heard wired IEMs that cost more and sound worse. Stage size, for example, is actually very respectable, with some sounds pushing past the periphery of my ears and hanging just outside my head. It’s not the deepest stage I’ve heard, but it’s not cramped or intimate either.

Imaging is also good, as is instrument and vocal separation. There’s some diffusion going on with vocals – especially on multi-vocal tracks – that maybe don’t get the singers placed dead centre on stage, but aside from that I find the presentation very natural and lifelike, if not quite life-size.

What Ostia lacks, technically, compared to more expensive IEMs, is resolution. That’s not always a bad thing, especially when you want your IEMs to paper over the cracks in poorer recordings, but the flipside is that you’re not going to get the most in-depth and revealing listen with these compared to higher-end offerings. Still, I’m not going to mark them down too heavily because hey, $60, and tonally they’re a very pleasant listen indeed.


Closing thoughts

True wireless IEMs have come a long way from the days where just getting a stereo signal without wires was deemed a miracle in and of itself. Today, some of the best TWS IEMs match their wired price-tier counterparts for sound quality, and beat them hands down for features, portability and convenience. At the same time, Bluetooth technology in both handsets and chipsets is improving, heralding ever better quality for wireless systems as a whole.

While the very best TWS IEMs used to be the preserve of name-brand, big budget companies like Sony, Bose, Bowers & Wilkins and of course the major platform vendors like Samsung and Apple, the technology has matured to the point where smaller companies have the means to create compelling products that can compete on an even footing with the big boys.

Divinus seems to be just such a company, and in Ostia they have a product that ticks a whole bunch of boxes that discerning listeners would want from a set of low-cost, high-value TWS IEMs. They’re well built, nicely packaged, with a rugged waterproof rating and wireless charging. They’re small enough to wear comfortably for hours, and compact enough to carry in a small pocket.

With custom drivers tuned by someone who clearly knows his or her stuff, they present a relaxed tonality that will appeal to those wanting a crisp and clear listen, or alternatively, with the application of some cheap filters, a warmer, smoother listen that suits almost every genre equally.

There’s a reason why Divinus have already sold more than 14,000 units in South Korea alone, so if you’re after a great sounding pair of wireless IEMs for the price of a few coffees with friends, or a set you can confidently give your kids to carry in their bags to school, I’d put Ostia near or at the top of your list.