First and foremost, a big thank you to those at Noble Audio who has sent me a unit to review. The Noble Audio customer service experience has been a joy to behold. Brannan is always on hand to deal with your queries, as well as Dr Moulton.
 
I would not call myself and audiophile. Instead, a music lover, performer and engineer.
 
As a Classical musician, my genre of choice revolves heavily around Classical and Jazz. Once in a while, when I don’t feel the urge to immerse myself in Bach’s complex counterpoint, I choose to listen to rock and some K-pop, the latter being my ‘guilty pleasure.’
 
From my engineering background, I like gear that doesn’t distort or colour my recordings. As a consequence, my preferred choice of DACs and Amps are chosen on both hearing and AES compliant technical specifications (i.e. the more transparent, the better). This has meant that I have been a big fan of the Benchmark Media Systems over the years, especially their latest offering - the DAC2 HGC, which is essentially a device devoid of distortion. Moreover, the built in amplifier has a 0 ohm output impedance, assuring the frequency response of sensitive Balanced Armature IEMs will not behave erratically.
 
 
The Test Tracks
 
Female Vocals
o Erin Boheme
 
 
Orchestral
o Mahler Symphony No. 5 (Boulez)
 
 
Piano
o Bach Goldberg Variations (Perahia)
 
I use piano music as one of the main ways to judge the quality of speakers/headphones.
 
Sound pressure can go from zero to sixty and back down again instantaneously. A hard hit on a key creates a big percussive hit out of the note. Headphones have a tendency to swallow up and flatten out big percussive strikes like that and It can make an acoustic piano sound like an electronic keyboard with evened out note weights. Or, the pressure can come through without the note being behind it creating a thumping in your ears. Also, when a pianist does a run down a keyboard, they're very careful to maintain clean and even articulation of each and every note. Frequency response imbalances can jag that up, and harmonics on the notes can be exaggerated or non-existent.
 
 
Male Vocals
o Schubert’s Wintereisse (Dietrich Fischer Dieskau)
 
 
Rock
o Dark Side of the Moon (Pink Floyd)
 
 
Jazz
o Oscar Peterson & Itzhak Perlman
 
 
Early Impressions
 
The Savant like many of Dr Moulton’s creations are excellently built with pristine aesthetics. Therefore, when choosing which Noble IEM or CIEM to own, the decision should mostly boil down to your sonic preference. Each and every model in the Noble line-up has a unique story to tell, and this is no different for the Savant. I would recommend auditioning them if possible.
 
The Savant comes in the usual otter case along with a rich variety of tips. The Olive tips offer the best noise isolation, even more so than all my Customs. 
 
The Savant handled all the aforementioned tracks without any significant problems. However, I believe that it is important to elaborate upon the term ‘balanced’ that is used in the product description of the Savant. It is balanced in the sense that it sounds very coherent. Nonetheless, the frequency response of the Savant does not seem neutral to my ears.
 
The frequency response is somewhat paradoxical. There is a slight emphasis on the lower and middle registers and a slight emphasis on the upper frequencies, which help to bring out the minute details that lie dormant in a lot of recordings recordings. This treble presence is welcome, as it prevents the Savant from sounding excessively ‘warm,’ for want of a better word. However, this is not to say that the middle registers are compromised. The intermediate frequencies are still excellently portrayed. 
 
Despite the slightly pronounced upper frequencies, the Savant does not possess a fatiguing sound signature, and so would be ideal for long listening sessions.
 
I would say the Savant is similar to the Shure SE535, with more treble and bass presence, whilst preserving the wonderful middle registers the SE535 is famed for. 
 
In summary, I  would say the sound signature is slightly V shaped, without compromise to the middle registers.
 
 
Handling Different Genres
 
The Savant sounded good with the aforementioned genres. Initially, I felt that its versatility was also its weakness. It handled all the genres well but didn't seem to shine particularly with any specific ones. However, when I started to listen to Jazz and orchestral music, the Savant was phenomenal. Especially so for the former. It is the best IEM I have heard to date for Jazz music.

As the subjective sound quality of the SR-009 has been extensively discussed in the other reviews, I will focus on my objective experiences. Whenever I purchase new high-end products, I always choose to run a blind test consisting of the model in question alongside other high-end headphones. This time, the comparison counterparts included the LCD-3, HD800, HD650 and Orpheus. 
 
My subjective impressions always tend to take a similar route: there exists a very strong correlation between the price tag and the sound quality that I perceive. It was no different this time. Therefore, I performed the blind test on ten participants who are all fellow classical musicians in a blindfolded setting (with the volume matched etc).
 
The results this time were indeterminate. However, the HD800 came last followed by the Orpheus. After the blindfolds were removed, the Orpheus was unanimously agreed as having the best sound quality (the Orpheus does look rather magnificent). The Stax was chosen to have the best sound quality by three people.
 
This kind of test demonstrates that all these high end headphones do not have such a huge disparity in sound quality as made out by other subjective reviews. Therefore, I am always slightly let down by products with such a steep price tag as the Stax. Evidently it is not as steep as the Orpheus, however, for this money, I believe it is more worthwhile buying a pair of speakers.
 
I believe it is also important to stress that the superlatives associated with this headphone should be taken with a grain of salt, in fact several pounds would suffice. I do not think that the SR-009 sounds bad. On the contrary, I believe it sounds fantastic (I had very similar experiences to Currawong's review). However, as this test has demonstrated, it does not outperform other high end counterparts with noticeable significance (this is especially noteworthy as the other test headphones except for the Orpheus are considerably cheaper than the Stax). 
 
Hence all in all, I believe that the SR-009 is an outstanding piece of gear, but by no means the King of headphones.

The Orpheus sounds fantastic. It is full of detail and clarity with a very flat frequency response. It also caresses the music, in that the music's presentation is very warm. The soundstage is excellent and instrumental timbre is very well replicated. These are my subjective listening experiences.
However, I believe the money would be better spent on speakers. I own a pair of Focal speakers that outperform the Orpheus at two thirds of the price. 
 
In a blind test which I performed on ten fellow classical musicians, which included the HD800, HD650 and LCD-3, the Orpheus did not outperform these counterparts to a significant level. In fact, a lot of them preferred the LCD-3 and HD650 over the Orpheus and the HD800. After the blind tests, I revealed all the headphones (the participants were blindfolded at first) and asked them to try these models again. As expected, the Orpheus gained unanimous approval after the visual stimuli. 
 
These experiences show that the high-end headphones often have negligible difference in sound quality; and that these differences get wildly blown out of proportion when visual stimuli is present. 
 
All in all, the Orpheus sounds great, but does it really trump the other high-end headphones at a comparatively cheaper price range (around the HD800 level)? I believe the answer is a definite no. 
 
As people have kept on asking, (I used the Beyerdynamic A1 as the amp). Used several power amps as well coupled with ESP100 adaptor just to see how it would turn out. (Most of these gear belong to my father, and it was done ad-hoc).
 
 
Sounds like you forgot to mention a lot of things. Like how you connected the 009 to the Orpheus amp, or how it's hardly optimal for driving an 009. A Beredynamic A1 huh. Let me know where I can buy this amp it sounds very interesting! There's a bunch more hurdles I was faced with when doing these blind tests but you should definitely answer these questions first.




 
I seem to be unable to add more comments?! As I said, there were many variables I couldn't control for. Sennheiser offers an adaptor for other headphone connections for the Orpheus amp. However, as I said, I used the A1 for all the others. And to those of who you ie Maxvla who is needlessly offensive, you should see how the ESP P100 is created. It's quite a simple resistor based adaptor so one can use serious power amps with your headphones with little or no risk.