At-a-glance Card

Full Device Card

Test setup and preliminary notes

Sources: AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt / Chord Mojo / E1DA 9038D, 9038SG3 / Questyle QP1R, QP2R, M15, CMA-400i / Sony WM-1A – Final Type-E silicon tips – Dunu DUW-02S cable – lossless 16-24/44.1-192 FLAC + DSD 64/128/256 tracks.

Signature analysis

Tonality

EA1000 are tuned following a wiiide V shape, and feature a replaceable “tuning nozzles” system to offer interesting variations of the tonal balance on top. There is a slight metallic sheen coming up on the high trebles, also depending on the source material.

No matter the nozzle choice the timbre stays more or less unchanged: mid-bodied notes across the board with a sole exception for lean-ish low mids, and a commendable overall organicity.

The various nozzles deliver different sonic nuances vis-a-vis their building materials (Gold ones are made of brass), their length, their front mesh and of course the sponge or cloth they may be filled with. Here’s a description of the differences each one brings to the board.

Red nozzle : midbass is somewhat “bloomy”, its notes tend to “expand” a little bit; highmids and treble are instead near-precisely the tonality I prefer. Too bad for that bass, which is not as organic as it should.

Gold nozzle: midbass is evidently more combed, and I like it better, but so is treble too, while highmids are more forward. Guitars and femaie vocals are probably best expressed here, but stage height is cut off, and air and spatiality take a hit.

Black nozzle: midbass is the same as Gold, while high mids and treble are very similar to Red, with possibly a slight tad more energy on one hand, and a bit less depth on the other.

It’s a toss between Black and Red for my particular tastes, and well… I experimented further and found out that in the end I prefer Red with a -1,5dB Q=1 correction on 90Hz to “clean” those doublebass vibrations off. And yes, I’m a “never happy dog” !

Sub-Bass

Sub bass is extended but not elevated. Rumble is present but not imposing itself, which is perfectly good for my library but may be a point of contempt for other musical tastes.

Mid Bass

Mid bass notes are very well rendered by EA1000, with the Red nozzle adding a bit more butter compared to the other two alternatives.

While such makes them a bit more greasy than they should to be called perfectly organic when it comes to render acoustic bass instruments, the effect is indeed not excessive so not only it is welcome in conjunction with many musical genres, but also not necessarily unwelcome even to hardbop or modal lovers.

It’s quite easy to guess – or hope? – that the high quality of EA1000’s mid bass rendering is also directly dependent on that uncommon “Passive Radiator” device inside the box, and anyhow this is what Simgot’s marketing insists on making us believe.

Mids

Mid frequencies are a bit of a mixed bag here. They are recessed in their central part, and somewhat lean in their lower segment.

High mids however go up in power quite rapidly between 1 and 2KHz which is where they give their best. As a consequence, and simplifying maybe a bit too much, EA1000 render guitars and sax tenors better than pianos, for example.

Male Vocals

Vis-a-vis what I just noted about mids in general, male vocals are a territory where EA1000 don’t fare particularly well: especially baritone and bass voices come out perceivably leaner than real, and that’s a common trait no matter the nozzle installed.

Female Vocals

Opposite of the male case, female vocals benefit from a better tonal situation on EA1000 and in facts come across very naturally colored, bodied, detailed and very pleasing at all times.

Highs

Treble is one of the areas where EA1000 do best, and at the same time one where the 3 different nozzles apply more significant variations.

As I anticipated above, to my tastes Red nozzles nail it, period: “Red” trebles are energetic yet still not excessively so, bodied, very detailed, and they “breath” a lot of air in terms of spatiality. Their sole real downside is that perceivable metallic aftertaste coming up once too often – it’s not too strong, nor too fastidious, but it’s undoubtedly there to make the final result just a bit less than fully positive (what a pity).

Golden nozzles furtherly strengthen highmids and low trebles, while also taking some of that magic air quantity off. Black nozzles are very, very similar to Red up there, juts a tad less airy (but less so compared to Gold).

Technicalities

Soundstage

Width and height are very extented, much beyond what you normally get on similar priced IEMs. Depth is “only” barely above average, always referred to the same category.

Imaging

Macrodynamics are very well executed on EA1000, with always precise instrument positioning on stage.

Details

EA1000 offer very good detail retrieval in the high mids and low treble.

Retrieval is good on midbass too, where the concessions made to drama and musicality just rarely steal something off note contouring. As my few readers know I’m noticing this as I’m biased towards acoustic music.

Instrument separation

Separation, layering and microdynamics are all no doubt EA1000’s excellence points. It’s indeed very uncommon to find better around, not only at this price point, but much higher too.

Driveability

EA1000 are easy to drive in terms of sound pressure output thanks to a good sensitivity (109 dB/mW) paired with a not too low impedance (16 Ohm). Their sound quality scales with amping quality however – I suspect this may have to do with that passive radiator device.

Physicals

Build

EA1000 offer a very convincing feeling of solidity and reliability. Their full metal housings are obviously impervious to reasonable physical damages (and possibly to some unreasonable ones, too).

Faceplates are covered by what are declared as “crystal” (!) glasses. I couldn’t assess whether it’s actually crystal, all I can say is it does not appear to be easily scratched, and when in contact with a metal tip it does not tend to sound “plastic”.

For the benefit of those who pay particular attention to aesthetics it should be noted that the housings’ chrome finish and of the “crystal” faceplates are very well taken care of, and that will help them feel alive in their compulsion to continually wipe every surface clean of fingerprints.

Fit

EA1000’s housings fit me near-perfectly in terms of size & shape. Nozzles are not too short, and they are mounted on a sort of protruded portion of the shell. Eartips of the right size easily get a grasp – even more than a seal – onto my canals’ internal surfaces, with this contributing to a firm seating once properly worn – all this in spite of the earpieces not being precisely “featherweights”.

Comfort

As mentioned above EA1000 sit well in my outer ears and prove perfectly comfortable to wear, even for prolonged periods of time.

Isolation

Given the housings’ shapes and calibrated dimensions, EA1000 shells form an important isolation barrier. The multiple vents, and most of all the wide opening corresponding to the passive radiator do of course take steps in the opposite direction but I would say that the overall result is more than satisfactory anyhow.

Cable

EA1000 are sold with a replaceable non-modular-terminated 3.5mm cable. Its aesthetics and haptics are more than ok but I could not conduct my usual comparison tests round-robining amongst my various sources as most of them got balanced outputs. I can’t consequently offer an opinion on the stock cable’s sound performance. For my tests I paired a Dunu DUW-02S cable.

On a more commercial note, given the recent (2-3 years) market evolutions, the fact that an otherwise “premium” package like EA1000’s does not offer a balanced termination cable option – be it in form of available choice at order time or of modular termination system – is to be reported as a negative remark in the general evaluation.

Specifications (declared)

Comparisons

Tanchjim Oxygen (€ 190)

Oxygen feature a bit softer attack, yielding into less punchy bass and overall silkier, more relaxing timbre. Oxygen’s tonality is overall more organic, exquisitely neutral – which may of course be a love-hate thing in some cases. Their midrange is not recessed resulting in much better vocal and guitars rendition. Oxygen’s trebles are less energetic, airy and sparkly.

Stage on Oxygen is a bit narrower, perceivably less high, but much deeper. Lastly, Oxygen are much more demanding in terms of source power.

Intime Miyabi Mk-II (€170 + import costs)

You can find my Miyabi review here. Miyabi Mk-II differ from Miyabi insofar as their mids are less upfront, and their timbre is dryer and clearer, and that’s why I’m taking them as a more appropriate comparison to EA1000 here.

Midbass elevation is similar between Miyabi Mk-II and EA1000, but EA1000 have a cleaner timbre, better punch and sound more resolving there. In a nutshell, bass is technically better on EA1000, very possibly due to their Passive Radiator thing.

Miyabi Mk-II’s mids are way more bodied, and obviously more organic. Trebles are overall better on Miyabi Mk-II, less upfront but more refined. Opposite to bass, while good on EA1000 treble is, that is better on Miyabi, likely consequece of the fantastic deeds of Watanabe-sama’s VST driver,

Miyabi Mk-II cast a slightly narrower stage, same height, but way better depth. They require a bit more power than EA1000 but the difference is not big on this.

Ikko OH1S (€ 150)

The two offer very similar timbre, and similar general tonality. Bass is less forward and less punchy on OH1S (almost ruler-flat, indeed), which also contributes to their mids be felt as less recessed, more “meaningful”, and I’m talking about both low and middle mids.

Trebles are more energetic on EA1000, which is an advantage at times, but a disadvantage when this pairs negatively with some tracks or musical genres. Separation is similar on the two models, layering is a bit better on EA1000 due to better microdynamics. Stage is narrower on OH1S, but deeper.

Final A5000 (€ 299)

A5000’s presentation is more markedly V-shaped compared to EA1000’s. Both offer a dry timbre with little concession to warmth, with A5000 being by a whiff the coldest of the two.

Bass are a tie game, both models offering very significant quality in the region. Mids are also similar, in this case meaning both models choose to let them in second-layer position, accepting sub-organic leanness. Trebles are better on EA1000, with A5000 too often scanting into excess and sibilance, and delivering less air.

Technicalities – all of them – are in favour of A5000, sometimes vastly too. Stage is wider and deeper on A5000, just a bit less high. Layering and separation is macroscopically better on A5000. Ditto for detail retrieval, which is “sensational” on A5000.

Considerations & conclusions

Simgot hit a strike with EA1000, there’s very little doubt about this. Their nice timbre and even more their greatly calibrated tonality are of absolute value. Technicalities are also extremely good, with a particular mention deserved by layering and microdynamics. Their less shiny aspects are in the end very few in comparison.

As you may or may not know I’m quite selective, and that’s why I’m pleased to state that EA1000 fall amongst the very IEMs I find recommendable around the €200 mark. For that, I’m double thankful to Simgot for the review opportunity I’ve been offered.

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The post Simgot EA1000 Review – Hitting A Strike appeared first on Music For The Masses.

We already have had a complete review piece about DragonFly Cobalt for almost three years now at audioreviews.org, and based on shared appreciation within our team we decided to stick it onto our Wall of Excellence. As AudioQuest sent me a sample too, I am now sharing my own take on the device.

Very interestingly, AudioQuest recently repositioned Cobalt’s price to € 199,95 in EU (down from € 299,95) – and I can anticipate this is a KO move vs much of its direct competition. Cobalt is widely distributed, and can be purchased from multiple channels including Amazon and many other online platforms.

At-a-glance Card

Features and description

Externals

DragonFly Cobalt is the size of an old-school “USB pen drive”, with is encasing painted of a nice blue – or well, cobalt – color.

There are no controls, wheels or buttons whatsoever on the structure. Only after plugging it into a host PC (or Mac, or mobile device) one realises that the stylised dragonfly logo on the top side is indeed backlit by a colored LED, which color changes depending on the input stream digital sample rate:

Internals

The DragonFly product range is based on technology developed by a mr Gordon Rankin, a gentleman busy with seriously innovative digital and analog audio technology and products for the past almost 4 decades.

Gordon’s own company Wavelength Audio Ltd still holds the rights to the registered trademarks and of course the intellectual property at the very heart of AudioQuest’s DragonFl(ies), including DragonFly Cobalt of course.

Just for the sake of historical curiosity – and give Caesar his own, of course – StreamLength® is the given name of Gordon’s original setup which for the first time allowed for a plug-in device to take control of USB communication timing, which was normally exclusively managed by the host (the PC) until then. Such flip of perspective is the crux to the nowadays ubiquitous “Asynchronous USB mode”, the very base to start from and achieve adequate control over jitter when it comes to digital audio communications.

Once put the plug-in device in a control position over communications timing, the other step Gordon took was that of giving the device itself a high precision clock generator, which in DragonFly Cobalt case happens by taking it out of the very ESS ES9038Q2M chip at its core. Such setup was originally named “monoClock® technology” by Gordon.

Another fundamental architectural choice taken inside DragonFly Cobalt is to adopt separate chips for digital reconstruction (DAC) and amplification – as opposed to most of the direct competition relying on “all-in-one” chips doing both things on the same piece of silicon and – which is most significant to our discussion – without offering integrators and users any significant flexibility to change, fine tune, let alone customise the overall system behaviour. That’s why DragonFly Cobalt’s voicing, dynamic range and SNR won’t be apriori similar to that of other dongle devices relying on ES9038-line chips’ internal amping features.

Exploiting another feature on ES9038Q2M, DragonFly Cobalt comes with a custom designed minimum-phase slow roll-off FIR filter.

While I have no complaints about such choice, considering the hardware offers support for it I would welcome the chance to apply different filters, via good ol’ firmware flashing or even better via some sort of mobile app. Maybe there’s a chance this would come in the future?

USB communications are carried out via the good deeds of a Microchip’s PIC32MX274 IC, featuring extremely low power needs, also vis-a-vis its programming for support only USB-1on DragonFly Cobalt.

All such choices – the DAC chip, the AMP chip, and the USB processor chip – contribute to DragonFly Cobalt being amongst the lowest-power-demanding dongles on the market when it comes to host supply needs, which is why it is one of the very few to offer full compatibility with iPhone/iPad hosts, notoriously unable to deliver other than very low power off of their Lightning sockets.

Mind you though: free meals not being a part of real life, nor any divinity existing taking care of creating energy from nothing no matter how hard you pray, low input power draw means a few things that you do need to keep in mind to set the correct expectations about DragonFly Cobalt’s performance.

One: the USB-1 protocol drains much less power at the cost of a limited maximum transfer speed, which in terms of digital audio values turns into a 24 bit / 96 KHz digital resolution cap. And… PCM only! No DSD support.

Two: the ESS 9601 amp will prove limited in terms of maximum output power, with particular regards to current . So while it will reliably deliver a nice 2.1 V max swing on high impedance loads, DragonFly Cobalt will not (as it can not) adequately power low(er) sensitivity drivers, especially if featuring low impedances too.

So in practical terms you should not rely on DragonFly Cobalt to properly driver the likes of final E5000, or final B1, or final A3000, let alone pretty much any planar driver. 

And, no surprise should arise when Cobalt will seem to “struggle” (e.g. in terms of loss of treble control) with “mid-hard” loads. All that will be due to the device’s internal power circuitry “running out of current” in some situations, having it apriori been set up not to request more than a certain, very limited power from the host device to begin with.

Input

Like all pure “dongles”, DragonFly Cobalt only accepts USB input.

Very “classically” the device carries a USB-A male plug, so in itself it’s ready to plug onto any common PC or Mac USB port.

A USB-A to USB-C short cable adapter is supplied too, to facilitate connectivity with more recent smartphones. More on the adapter under Package, here below.

Output

DragonFly Cobalt’s sole output is its analog 3.5mm connector, of course accepting any 3.5mm single-ended terminated load.

Those who (also) own balanced-ended sources will most likely have a few or many of their drivers equipped with balanced terminated cables, and will need a balanced-to-single-ended adapter to plug them onto the Cobalt.

Host power requirements

DragonFly Cobalt requires very low power from the host (i.e., the PC, the phone or the dap it is connected to and therefor powered from). I’m talking about just 60mA when idle (i.e. when connected but “doing nothing”), and between 150 and 200mA when playing out on good volume on a mid-impedance driver.

This is of course very good news, but grounds for some caveats too.

Starting on the good side: DragonFly Cobalt will not suck your phone battery dry in no time like so many direct competitors and (!) it will perfectly work with iPhones and iPads, known picky fellas when it comes to the powering requirements of the devices you plug onto them. It will also not more than vaguely warm during operation.

On the flip side there are two important notes to make – which I indeed already mentioned above under “Internals”.

One: DragonFly Cobalt exclusively supports the USB 1 protocol speeds (USB 2 would require more power), which translates into a maximum supported input resolution 24 bit, 96Khz PCM (and no DSD).

Two: DragonFly Cobalt’s maximum output power will be, of course, limited, too: expect it to be good for powering high impedance (300 ohm) dynamic drivers (e.g. Sennheiser HD-series cans) and mid-impedance (20-30 ohm) not particularly demanding IEMs – which are, combined, probably >95% of the drivers out there anyway.

Volume and gain control

DragonFly Cobalt offers no physical control options so there’s no way to set the gain, and the sole way to manage its volume is via the host’s digital volume control.

On such latter front a point, as you may or may not know, the Android operating system divides the USB device volume range in only 40 steps (or even 25 for the latest Android releases…). When operating a device like DragonFly Cobalt this results in the last ticks of the volume control range converting into way too big SPL variations.

So if you are planning on using DragonFly Cobalt on a Android-based host just keep in mind that the way to “fix” this is using a better featured music player app e.g. UAPP or others – which is what you would normally do anyway for a number of other reasons one above all bypassing standard Android audio drivers – re-defining the number of steps Volume control is divided into (up to 250, on UAPP).

Other features

MQA Rendering

I won’t spend a word on what MQA itself is, of course. Google around if you wish and you’ll be overflooded with info.

What matters here is: DragonFly Cobalt is a “MQA Renderer”, so it can fully unfold MQA tracks on its own hardware, which is an upgrade vs the default represented by having the music player host do the unfolding, and only limited to the first 2 folds.

Firmware

For their DragonFly product line AudioQuest offers free software for users to autonomously carry on firmware upgrade operations when needed.

For DragonFly Cobalt no updated firmware version was (yet) ever released, however.

DragonTail

DragonFly Cobalt ships together with two complementary accessories: a leather sleeve, and a USB-A to USB-C short adapter cable – which, as always in AudioQuest’s standards, got its own given name: “DragonTail Extender”.

The DragonTail appear as nothing else than a digital plug format adapter, much needed of course to facilitate connecting the Cobalt to mobile devices like smartphones, or dap/transports. The version bundled with Cobalt is called DragonTail-C as it features a USB-C male plug at its end. AudioQuest also carries a DragonTail-Micro alternative.

What’s probably most interesting about DragonTail is its quality. I won’t take a digital audio cabling detour here, but I think it’s worth to share a very simple experience I had with Cobalt. When I first put it to work I connected Cobalt to my PC, where there’s only a USB-C port available, so I used a “nameless” USB-A to USB-C adapter cable I had laying around on my desk. No surprises: it just worked as I was expecting it to, and Cobalt sounded “right” off the bat.

One day for whatever reason I needed a USB-A to USB-C adapter for another application. Where do I have one? Meh… who knows. While watching around I noticed the one hooked to the Cobalt so I just took that one off, leaving the Cobalt disconnected for a while.

A few days later I wanted to use the Cobalt again, and did not want to “undo” the other cabling involving the other adapter. Time to think harder and try to devine where could I have another one – and that’s when I remembered there must have been one left inside the Cobalt box. Took it. Plugged it. It worked (of course). But… Cobalt seemed to be sounding different.

Mmmh – I thought – that’s very likely my wrong memory. So I carried on, for a day or two. Then, I decided to check it. Undid the other cable chain, recuped the “nameless” adapter cable, and organised a quick A/B test. And yes, there is a difference. When using DragonTail to connect it to my PC the Cobalt delivers fuller notes, and a darker background.

As I mentioned en-passant within my article regarding AudioQuest’s JitterBug, a passive cable cannot possibly “improve” a digital signal. However, it can deplete it. So what is actually happening on my case is that DragonTail revealed that the other cable was introducing noise…

DragonFly Cobalt sound

DragonFly Cobalt sounds detailed, dynamic and most of all clean, yet significantly musical.

In terms of cleanness in particular it trades (hard!) blows with the E1DA’s 9038SG3 and 9038D, arguably the “cleanest” – in the sense of most distortion-free – dongle-class devices one can find.

Which leads me right to articulate about the true crucial point of Cobalt’s sound: its stunningly spot-on compromise between resolving power, transparency and musicality.

I can name other more musical (“gracefully colored”) dongles. I can name more transparent ones, too. Very often, if not invariably, auditioning one of either group makes you soon want one from the other. Cobalt is not that. When listening to Cobalt’s clean notes you can’t fail noticing how expressive they also are, and, while going with Cobalt’s musical flow you’ll never feel you are really missing tiny beats, or soft nuances.

Cobalt’s output is masterfully “balanced”, not in the meaning we most commonly give to the word, regarding properly reciprocally calibrating lows mids and highs, rather is the sense of delivering as much of both – transparency and musicality, clean timbre and personal tonality – one can realistically hope to have at the same time.

Considerations & conclusions

DragonFly Cobalt is an absolutely remarkable piece of gear offering high quality reconstruction, reference-level amping transparency and delicious tonality, all near-magically mixed together at a unique mixture spot.

With its minuscule input power demands Cobalt is possibly the easiest in its class to pair with any mobile transport, iPhones and their (in)famous interfacing standards and power-out limitations. And, its single-ended output fully supports all those stock wires you may have a drawer full of, without leaving a balanced alternative to be desired.

Some may consider its modest maximum output power a limitation, and technically right so. However, in practical terms they translate into letting out possibly less than 5% of the IEMs on our Wall of Excellence.

DragonFly Cobalt was stuck onto our Wall of Excellence long ago, when its price was € 299,95. Now it’s been repositioned to € 199,95. Enough said, I guess.

The Editor: I have been using the Cobalt daily for the last three years...despite a drawer full of dongles: sounds great, has low power consumption, is small and light, and easy to use. The (monetary) value is mainly in its DAC part.

Our generic standard disclaimer.

The post AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt Review (2) – Knowledge Is Power appeared first on Music For The Masses.

A5000 like all of the A line is readily distributed in Europe, and can be bought from multiple sources including Amazon for € 299,00 retail.

Introduction to final A series

I’ll take the story from a bit far back in the past this time: I’ll start from D8000.

final’s D8000 project was (and is) founded on reaching absolute top sonic results stemming from world-class leading-edge R&D and technology.

More simply put, this more or less equates to engaging into the following bet: if we design components which are world’s best, really meaning 360° best materials, employing 360° best methods, etc, then we’ll get the absolute “best possible” head/earphones.

Is that the case with D8000? Well in a sense, arguably yes indeed, at least in terms of high-range market reception.

Let’s move forward.

As you may or may not know, the first model within final E family of earphones was E3000 (presented in the same year: 2017), and it was created with the exact purpose of obtaining a sound perception as similar to D8000’s “universality” as possible.

Of course, E3000 as a product being aimed at the budget market, no one ever thought to start from employing top end materials or parts on them, rather – in a sense, an equally and perhaps even more challenging effort indeed – by “just” applying extremely sophisticated psychoacoustic research to otherwise much more “ordinary cost” components.

It’s totally obvious that E3000 do not sound like D8000 in the end, but it’s certainly as much obvious that their general presentation, and even some parts of their technicalities, are incredibly close to their intended archetype, again the more so when considering the ridiculous price tag they were positioned on the market at.

In the couple of years following those 2017 months final pitted a total of 5 other models onto the market to complete their E family lineup – some carrying a pretense of higher sophistication and style, some oppositely aiming at an even tinier-budgeted market segment, however all based on two common fundaments : employing the same single 6-mm dynamic driver, and offering an arguably general-purpose tuning, beyond modest flavour touch-ups ranging from bright-neutral (E1000, E500), to balanced-neutral (E2000), to warm-balanced (E3000, E4000, E5000).

Then – and we are in the end getting close to our today’s case – a different train of thought was applied.

Making headphones sounding “as good as possible” starting from “as advanced as possible technology” may be a nice engineeristic exercise but runs the risk of ending up producing a remarkable piece of equipment which is nevertheless distant from the particular, real-world preferences of many users.

Alternatively said: what if world technology’s best can only get some – or many? – users “close” to what they really need, but not right on the spot? Simple as hell, they will just be not fully satisfied – in spite of all the rutilant technological words accompanying the product they were sold as “best”.

So : instead of moving from technology traits towards application, final started flipping the point of view, focusing on specific auditioning targets to begin with (!), and got engaged on understanding their particular challenges, ending out backtracking into (re)designing technology, and developing products purposefully tuned to best pursue such newly scouted needs.

As I reported in the introduction of my B3 review, when conceiving their B-series final reflected on the relations between spatial projection and dynamic range.

Taking into consideration small bands, acting on physically unextended stages, a lot of overlapping sounds and voices usually happen. In such situation there’s a relatively lesser need to render “spatial amplitude”, in exchange for much higher demand for sonic separation capabilities. B3 are absolute champions on that purpose.

On another drawing table – and we are finally starting to refer to the A series now – they started investigating better on the dyscrasy between today’s most common auditioning situations, naturally at the base of nowadays’ user expectations, and the very different ones which where common when much or even most of that music was actually produced.

Within such project, they moved from observing that perceptions such as “sound transparency” are not modellable in terms of sound amplitude modulation (you know? those “frequency response graphs” you see everywhere… they do not represent the entire IEM/HP sound behaviour!), yet they are crucial to a user satisfaction depending on the musical genre, and/or the aforementioned chasm between a piece’s original mastering and its today’s reproduction conditions. And that’s just an example.

In their effort to model user expectations, soon they realised that a mixture of physical measures and subjective evaluations was involved, and to manage it all they even developed an appropriate internal-use scoring methodology called Perceptual Transparency Measurement (PTM) – no real technical details sadly available on that, bar a succinct marketing-level description.

As already hinted before, different types of musical situations require, or at least preferentially would call for, different renderings to best be perceived by the auditioner.

For classical and other acoustic music the sense of a wider stage space, and perceiving the various instruments well enucleated from one another on it, is of course much more important vs rock or pop.

Furthermore: while (for example) for classical music priority #1 is no doubt making sure that the auditioner perceives the correct relative distances amongst the various instruments (violins and other strings in the front, wind in the middle, percussion back there), having a particularly wide dynamic range (i,e. a particularly wide breadth of in-between sound nuances separating the faintest and loudest note played by each instrument) is not a vital requirement here.

Oppositely rock and pop bands play much more tightly grouped together, and their music is supposed to be much more blended in the first place, which is why sound field size and imaging are much less prioritary in their case, while resolution and layering become key, and dynamic range amplitude with them.

All such differences were known since the beginning to music professionals, and that’s why different types of music were most often recorded / produced with such priorities in mind to begin with.

So how to approach such situation?

There are of course two different ways: develop relatively more specialised headphone/earphone models, each aimed at optimising a defined subset of musical situations, or, work on R&D to try and come up with something that will cover a broader, ideally almost universal applicative span.

While the former method would naturally result in products loved by relatively restricted groups of specific enthusiasts, the latter is supposed to deliver products that would be recognised as excellent by a very diverse users population.

Cutting this very long story very, very short: final’s marketing narration tells us they re-thought their (intended) universal-purpose IEM line on the basis of more up to date technical-demoscopic research, in parallel of course to their ever-accruing technological advancements and skills.

Fair enough. Enter the A series then !

Starting from the first model and flagship – A8000 – and through its other 3 ones named A4000, A3000 and A5000 (mentioned in the order of their release dates) A series is focused on delivering the most extended possible mix of clarity and spaciousness together, while not compromising on dynamic range.

In final’s own words (referred to A4000): “realize [its] quality not by its ability to create sound capable of attracting a small number of wild fans through its strong individuality, but rather sound aimed at greater universality”.

A bold target, indeed. I mean… try asking Diderot and D’Alembert…

No wonder that once self-encased in such an epic task they deemed it appropriate to specially develop a brand-new dynamic driver from the ground up. Or indeed, even two different ones.

The first one is the so-named “Truly Pure Beryllium Diaphragm” driver created on purpose for their A8000, released some four years ago. One of the very few real things on the market when it comes to Beryllium foil adoption. By the way: you did laugh at cheap chifi brands’ sudden hype, emerged just weeks after final and very few other higher standing companies presented their new Beryllium-tech drivers, stating they could deliver “True Beryllium” diaphragms for a fraction of the price, didn’t you?

Past social marketing fun apart, at the technological level the resort to Beryllium came from the search for an extremely lightweight material, to obtain superfast sound propagation speeds. In other words: they designed the fastest-moving dynamic driver they could think of, meant as a crucial component to get to the intended sonic target.

They also developed a second version of such driver, the so-called “f-Core DU” driver. No Beryllium in there, “just” a call for a speed as close to that of the Truly Pure Beryllium Driver, for a much lower manufacturing cost – both in terms of sheer material cost and of the equipment and skills required to treat it – which is a quite as tough industrial challenge, indeed.

I won’t bother you with the various marketing wordage final uses about the f-Core DU, you can find some here if you like. Long story short: it’s fast, very fast, and it costs less so it can be fit into “budget” finished products – as low as € 130 retail, instead of 2K€-tagged ones as the TPBD.

All good, even epic, indeed. But did it all work ?

Well if you want my opinion – and I presume you do at least a bit, otherwise why wasting your time reading all this? – yes to an extent, but not quite as they intended to.

Be warned: in frankness, I must say I am not a supporter of the project in line of principle. Universality and optimisation are irreconcilable enemies for me, and my life is made of distilled choices in most if not really all of its aspects, so I will always be a supporter for “specialised” vs “genericist” – and this applies to “items” (audio gear, vacuum cleaners, cars) as well as to “services” (restaurants, jobs…), or relations (friends, partners). This alone might and probably should be seen as an apriori bias leading me to downvote final A instances vs their declared intentions.

That being duly noted, first and foremost I must say I was not impressed by A8000, considering its price of 2000 €.

While I never owned an A8000 sample, I took some extended audition time on them during the latest Munich High End show, and there I built some solid “impressions” – not the same as a long term experience, for sure, however I feel what I heard is enough to form a clean opinion about their key aspects at the very least.

That beryllium-based fantastic driver is, indeed, as fast as a planar, and maybe even more – and that’s precisely why I reckon it fails on delivering a truly organic timbre – as I can’t fail decoding its supersnappy transients as a taint of artificiality touching pretty much everything in their presentation.

That is indeed a monumental pity, as it undermines all the effectively marvelous other deeds no doubt accomplished by A8000 in terms of clarity, spatial drawing, tonal coherence, range extension and more. However, an artificial timbre is a too serious turn off for me.

As for A3000, A4000 and A5000, instead, I happen to have purchased a sample of each right upon their release dates – so I have a much more extended opinion on each of them. You already [should] know my take regarding A3000, as I covered them here.

This article is of course about A5000, and before you wonder I will not write a full blown piece about A4000, and I hope I will succeed conveying why within the Comparisons section, here below,

Well I guess I can consider this introduction over now…

At-a-glance Card

Full Device Card

Test setup and preliminary notes

Sources: AudioQuest DragonFly Cobalt / Chord Mojo / E1DA 9038D, 9038SG3 / Questyle QP1R, QP2R, M15, CMA-400i / Sony WM-1A – INAIRS foam or JVC SpiralDot silicon tips – Stock cable – lossless 16-24/44.1-192 FLAC + DSD 64/128/256 tracks.

Signature analysis

Tonality

A5000 are tuned following a rather classical V shape, if a bit wide, so with elevated bass and sub-bass, energetic treble and (moderately, in this case) recessed mids.

The timbre is clear and a whiff lean-ish but not too much really, and the result stays reasonably close to organicity. The overall impact is a bit off neutral colour, shifted towards the cold side, and medium-bodied notes, a bit more such towards the bass, and less towards the high-mids and higher on.

Sub-Bass

Sub-bass is fully extended, and more elevated then midbass. It is not overly elevated though, so it stays there as a good, hearable rumble floor when of course the music calls for it.

Mid Bass

Mid bass on A5000 is good, fast, with quite pulpy and well contoured notes. Decay is tight, attack perhaps a bit on the relaxed side. From my library I get good bass readability, yet when pushing a bit up on the amping kickdrum may at times tend to get fuzzy. Even in such occasions however mid bass in never bleeding on the mids.

Mids

Mids are recessed yet well delivered nonetheless. They do partake to the overall note leanness, probably ultimately connaturate to the very f-Core DU driver, and such feat may resolve into a first impression of relative coldness and unwanted thinness.

Letting music flow, however, one appreciates such texturing, and the level of detail which are present in this segment, too, with that soon re-ranking A5000’s mids onto their honest value in the overall mix. It stays anyhow true that central piano octaves, and some guitars, will sound dry, somewhat unlushy.

No doubt, a sole driver is in general on vantage position to grant seamless tonal passage from mids to highmids, and this is the case on A5000 too, even in presence of a steep-ish ramp in the output, up to an important pinna gain at around 4Khz.

Good news include that there’s very little if any glare.

Male Vocals

A5000 treat baritones an basses with good authority and power, and tenors too but those start to partake to the mids’ general dryness – this, in spite of their relatively recessed level in the presentation.

Female Vocals

Female vocale are sparkly, energetic and clear. I would much prefer them having some more “butter” on them, yet their actual tonality is in the end consistent with the rest of A5000 signature, which is clearly not mid-centric by design, quite the opposite as we already noted.

Sadly, they are quite often affected by sibilance which paired with their dry-ish timbre brings them south of truly organic, and most importantly lets them come across quite raw a bit too often.

Highs

A5000 trebles are a mixed bag, and that’s a real pity. On one end there’s very good energy, sparkle, and clarity, without excessive thinness, and no zings. On the down side however they do lack airiness, and often expose a modest yet fastidious sibilance – and more in general their elevation and modulation is anyhow such to produce fatigue on mid-length listening sessions, which is a serious turn off to me.

Sadly, JVC SpiralDot tips – usually quite effective in taming harsh trebles and sibilance – don’t help in this particular case.

Technicalities

Soundstage

In compliance with an intended feature for the entire A family, A5000 offer soundstage drawing capabilities that are extremely significant in absolute terms, with this I mean they widely transcend the levels of other drivers, probably most other drivers, in their price category.

A5000 in particular draw very ample width, and even more remarkable height, paired with no less than significant depth.

Imaging

Microdynamics are an absolute forte on A5000 – it is always very easy to pinpoint instruments on the stage, and their positioning is offered in a very natural way.

Details

Detail retrieval is extremely good, perhaps even sensational on A5000 on the low mids and mid bass. It is also above average, but just that, in the trebles, due to their previously mentioned tendency to get a bit hot.

Instrument separation

Layering and separation are very good on A5000, at the absolute top and beyond of their direct price competitors. This, paired with the aforementioned drawn stage amplitude, depending on the particular track master delivers a comprehensive no less then theatrical spatial experience, with voices not only well identified and enucleated, but also seemingly positioned at sensible distances from one other.

Microdynamics are a bit above average but no more then that, hampered in general by the driver’s tightness. Within such general view, they are better on mid bass and low mids, and more limited the more we go up in the frequencies.

Driveability

Properly driving A5000 is not overly hard, but their 100dB/mW sensitivity at 18 ohm does call for sources with at least some current delivery muscle on low impedance loads. Read: I would not recommend direct smartphone pairing, or other particularly known-weak mobile source usage.

Physicals

Build

The ABS resin material appears fully resistant to “normal” solicitations. The Shibo finish is a love/hate thing (I am in the former group).

Recessed and notched cable connectors are good on the tech side, but a bit inconvenient for the user as only few(er) third party manufacturers easily make compatible 2pin terminations available.

Fit

A 3-contact-point fit between the housing and the outer ear has been designed by final aiming at the best compromise between wearing firmness and light stress accumulation over time.

The design idea is quite brilliant to be honest, the rationale being: you need (just) 3 grip points to obtain stability. One is the eartip umbrella, inside the canal. Another one is the housing’s short front side vs the tragus. And the third can be any one of the possible 4 contact spots between the housing’s shaped back side and the concha – depending on one’s ear particular shape that of course will happen on one or another position. I would say that for my experience it all works as intended.

The nozzle is relatively short – same situation for the whole A series of course as the shell size&shape is identical on all models – that calls for a shallow fit, which is consistent with the housings’ shape and size: pushing them further in would defeat their triple-support-point design, and most of all would (and will – I tried!) soon become uncomfortable.

Be as it may, this situation makes tip choice apriori limited. In my case luckily the working trick “just” stays in choosing a bigger size for my left ear: that gets me a firm grip and seal with the tip sitting “just in” the canal. Oh and by the way: stock final E black tips are good for the purpose.

Comfort

A5000’s particular housings size, their 3-point-fit design, and their external finish all contribute to a good comfort once the right “personal” position is found.

Oppositely, if you want, or feel obliged by your particular outer ear conformation, to opt for a deeper fit very high chances are that A5000 housings will not be as comfy for you after a moderate, and in the worst cases even short period of time.

Isolation

Passive isolation is quite nice once A5000 are properly fitted “as per design”, but not more than that as the housings won’t even “fill the concha up”, which would of course block more of the leak.

Cable

A5000 stock cable is a new model for final. Instead of the Junkosha silver plated copper, 2-thread PVC-sheated cable bundled with A8000, E5000 and B3, a new silver plated copper 8-thread braided cable is offered.

final did not disclose much additional information, nor spare / alternative termination versions are available yet on their website.

Sadly, similarly to all other final packages, no modular termination plugs are available on A5000 either, so pairing to a balanced source requires swapping it anyhow.

Talking about cable rolling: better stay on silver plated. Dunu DUW-02S is a good rec for A5000.

Specifications (declared)

Comparisons

final A3000 – € 109,99 Amazon.it

There’s an almost 3x price difference between A3000 and A5000, and such piece of data is totally misleading. In terms of general quality, strong points and – more simply – listening pleasure, the two are on par at the very least, and depending on personal tastes (such as in my case) A3000 indeed come ahead in the comparison. Which means that, while A5000 are already worth every cent of their cost, A3000 represent a total no brainer for whoever is akin to their presentation flavour.

Insofar as part of the same A family, the two models share identical housings (A5000 just carrying a different external finish) and drivers, and their packages bundles are identical too. A5000 come with a supposed higher quality cable – which however did not impress me too much in terms of sonic quality, not to speak about the fact that, both carrying a classical non-modular single ended termination, I had to swap both for the sake of properly exploiting my various sources.

A3000 present a U, or even W if you wish, shaped presentation in lieu of the (wide) V on the A5000. In terms of modulation, there are two extremely important, and crucial differences between the two tunings.

One: high mids are tamed and very slowly growing from 2 all the way to 6KHz on A3000, while “more harmanilly” ramping quite sharply from 2 to 3Khz on A5000, and almost plateauing thereafter.

Two: mid bass and mids are all the way uniformly more forward on A3000, this already per se resulting in a perceivable warmer tonality and a bit fuller timbre across the board, but it all results in a very evidently different overall timbre and tonality balance as the two aspects of course work together.

A3000 have an overall tonality which is much more pleasing to my ears, and while it may be said to be a bit less energetic and dynamic especially on guitars and trumpets, I would never trade added muscle in those areas for the wonderfully delicate balance A3000 offer on acoustic music, therein included tracks with vocals, and female vocals in particular.

Both sets can be said to have a non-lushy timbre, with A5000 on a furtherly drier position. A5000 have an evident if modest bit better extension towards the bass, with their sub-bass rumble being more nicely present in many occasions. Sadly, both are unable to completely avoid sibilance, but A3000 fall into this pit less then 50% of the times compared to A5000. Even with that said, however, in presence of similar 6KHz peaks A3000’s more relaxed high mids tuning makes them much, much less fatiguing, and pleasant to enjoy even for quite long sessions.

Technicalities such as soundstage casting and microdynamics are on par at stunning levels on the two models. Microdynamics are an evident tad better on A3000 thanks to their slightly more relaxed transients across the board. Similarly, detail retrieval is better on A3000 both on the bass, and moreover on the high mids and trebles, vis-a-vis them being much less invasively “hot” compare to A5000’s.

A3000 carry a (decisive) even lower sensitivity, which makes totally impossible to disregard selecting an adequate power source when it comes to pairing choices. Forget smartphones, and all low powered sources / dongles too. To give an idea, a Sony NW-A55 is barely enough to cope with A3000, with no headroom to spare to compensate for low volume recorded tracks.

final A4000 – € 129,99 Amazon.de

A4000 are the third individual in the “different twins born group” A3000-A4000-A5000. With this said, let me cut very short here on everything else which is similar or even identical between A4000 and A5000: shells, package, fit and comfort, cable (identical to A3000’s, different to A5000’s but not “practically so” in the end, see above), and last but not least f-Core DU driver.

Presentations are also quite similar between A4000 and A5000, however they diverge by that small much that makes for a decisive difference – especially for my tastes. Similarities are in the general tuning, which is a V, a sharper one at that on A4000, and on timbre, which is equally fast / clear on both models. Soundstage and imaging are equivalently top notch too. A5000 have farther lower extension, resulting in a more strongly evident sub-bass.

Most important, and crucially, A4000 offer even more energetic high mids than A5000, which is where their tonality breaks in my opinion, and anyhow for my tastes. Fast transient, so much (too much!) energy on guitars, trumpets and high piano chords, and that 6KHz peak which won’t forgive sibilating more frequently than not make A4000 a definitely unbalanced-bright, at times even splashy high tones cannon, too often sounding artificial – which is a true pity as their low mids and bass lines are viceversa beyond commendable.

Microdynamics are equivalently no more than average both on A4000 and A5000, with A4000 being nothing to write home about in terms of high mid and treble detail retrieval, too often drowning under the waves of excessive clarity and brightness.

Long story short: I would exclusively recommend A4000 to die-hard treble-heads.

Tanchjim Oxygen – € 269,00 AliExpress

I called A3000 and A4000 in as the first two comparisons due to them being part of the same product family of course, however no doubt the most significant notes will be those referring to Oxygen, being for me the rock-solid, as of yet undisputed natural-tonality sub-300€ reference.

Both A5000 and Oxygen carry a single Dynamic Driver, and while both can be classified as bright-neutral tonalities, their immediate skin-effect is obviously different due to the much clearer timbre brought up by A5000 compared to Oxygen, which – while still in the category of relatively fast drivers – offers definitely more relaxed transients, both as for attack and decay.

Oxygen sound therefor “mellower”, tonally softer, less clear, and most of all they convey a more closed-in group sensation – there is a way less air between one instrument and the other. En revenche, acoustic instruments and human voices sound obviously more organic on Oxygen.

Oxygen and A5000 are equally extended down to the bass, but A5000’s tighter transients deliver punchier, more energetic feeling to midbass, which of course may be more or less welcome depending on the track/genre.

Oxygen are more aggressive when it comes to high mids modulation, but less when it comes to low trebles. Their thicker note weight, however, make the entire high line less aggressive, if a bit less impactful, compared to A5000.

There is *no* sibilance on Oxygen.

Stage projection is evidently better on A5000, and by a significant margin. The opposite can be said about microdynamics, where the palm clearly goes to Oxygen.

Oxygen’s lesser cleanness and air presence do not compromise on layering and separation: Oxygen and A5000 are equally good at resolving overlapping instruments and voices.

Oxygen may be less easy to comfortably fit – shallow insertion being sadly a forced option here.

Like most if not all Tanchjim / Moondrop models, Oxygen require opposite-than-normal 2pin cable polarity so there’s that, too, to keep in mind when (as I strongly recommend) upgrading to a better cable, binning Oxygen’s disappointing stock one.

Yanyin Canon II – $ 341,00 + import duties, Linsoul

These recently-released 1 DD + 4 BA hybrids are surfing their hype waves right these weeks, and I happened to have a chance to assess a pair.

Both Canon II and A5000 offer full bilateral range extension, which is of course a more significant achievement on A5000 given they carry a single driver instead of five. En passant, it’s however fair to underline how Canon II offer commendable timbre coherence amongst their drivers, with some hearable débacle exclusively circumscribed to the passage between low and high mids.

Canon II’s dynamic driver offers very nicely calibrated sub-bass – possibly even better than A5000’s – and fuller bodied, slower decaying mid-bass notes, which sound punchier, but less cleanly separated, compared to A5000’s, resulting therefore in a stronger, but less readable and a bit more “stuffy” bass presentation. This, when Canon II’s tuning switches are both kept on their OFF positions – as flipping either, let alone both, up will make bass even thicker and less natural.

Canon II’s treble is vivid, and their BAs carry nothing short of a delicious timbre. Treble note weight is surely better on Canon II – and a sort of absolute weakness on A5000. Compared to A5000, however, detail retrieval is less on Canon II, and airiness is nothing to write home about even in absolute terms.

Imaging on Canon II is above decent, primarily hampered by the too bold bass actually, which would be not too big a drawback in absolute terms, if not in direct comparison to A5000 where it is practically perfect instead.

Canon II are also good at separation and layering, again with the sole exception of the 80-250 Hz region falling too often hostage of their exuberant mid bass personality. A5000’s are near perfect across the board though. Microdynamics are not superlative on A5000, but even more ordinary on Canon II for one reason or another.

Canon II’s fit is not too easy (not arduous either however) mainly due to quite bulky housings, and thick nozzles. Their stock tips are right away binnable, JVC SpiralDots offering good results on them, for the record.

Intime Miyabi – € 150,00 + reforwarding costs and import duties from Japan

Miyabi feature a hybrid setup made of a dynamic driver paired with a industry-unique, patented ceramic tweeter and other specialties, vs A5000’s proprietary f-Core DU single dynamic driver. In spite of such hybrid setup of theirs, Miyabi sport a totally commendable timbral coherence, nowhere shorter than A5000’s.

Miyabi and A5000 offer substantially equivalent bilateral range extension, with A5000 coming across stronger in the bass and sub-bass – Miyabi being nevertheless significantly slammy and textured there – and Miyabi more energetic, bodied and engaging in the treble. The two are also arguably on par on their exceptional space projection, separation and layering capabilities. Microdynamics are better on Miyabi.

Miyabi’s presentation is fundamentally neutral with a slightly bright accent, while A5000 is markedly V-shaped in comparison, although a mild-V if taken in absolute terms. Either can be said to carry a quite personal timbre, however diversion from more common options is more pronounced on Miyabi.

As a consequence, some may viscerally love Miyabi’s voicing while others might not fully enjoy their “brassy” aftertaste, and that sort of “popular crudeness” of theirs may be decoded as “commoner class” by those who will tend to better appreciate that silky, “rich middle class” style taint offered by A5000.

Miyabi’s vocals are a big notch more organic compared to A5000, very obviously so when it comes to female voices.

Miyabi’s fat bullet shape will probably result statistically easier to fit, and more easily comfortable vs A5000’s shallow fit. Neither get positive votes for their stock cables, which in both cases is bound for a quick upgrade. Unlike A5000, Miyabi benefit or indeed even require third party tips for best results.

Last but not least Miyabi are significantly less expensive, but much more difficult to source outside of Japan due to the very limited distribution network set up by their manufacturer, a very small crafting company.

Penon Fan 2 – $ 165,00 (down from $279,00 …why?) + import duties direct from Penon

Fan 2 are based on 2 dynamic and 2 BA drivers, vs final’s single proprietary f-Core DU driver on A5000, and sport a U-shaped presentation, with a nice organic timbre and a slightly warm-colored tonality, vs A5000’s more accented V tonality, definitely leaner note body and (in comparison) dryer/colder color.

I find Fan 2 striking a better, as in more realistic, note body compromise compared to A5000, which again I find a tad too lean in comparison. Fan 2 exhibit some timbral incoherence, which is extremely subtle if ever perceivable on A5000 instead. Both models offer very good bilateral range extension, I’d say on par the one with the other.

A5000 offer a much better defined, textured, detailed and slammy bass, which instead comes across too frequently a bit woolly from Fan 2. Flipping the situation, I would choose Fan 2 for what attains to organic mids rendering.

While both are very good about imaging and instrument separation, A5000 come clearly ahead in terms of layering capability. Soundstage casting is also hands down on A5000 favor.

Fan 2 are very picky when it comes to eartips selection, and possibly even more so in terms of source pairing – they require a very low impedance amp not to scant into fr skewage due to their extremely low internal impedance. Fan 2 and their stock cable pair better with one another vs A5000 and their one.

Considerations & conclusions

As I tried to outline above, I have mixed feelings about final’s A series, starting from not agreeing with the fundamental project purpose of delivering wide-range drivers, intentionally targeting equal satisfaction to very diverse user categories, continuing with not having been dazzled on my road to Damascus by auditioning the A8000s, on one end, while greatly appreciating the deeds of the f-Core DU driver as implemented into A-series budget models – such positive feeling standing beyond the tuning differences characterising those 3 models – on the other.

More than 2 years after my original piece about A3000 I do reaffirm that to my senses the overall best of the three budget priced A series models are indeed A3000. They deliver an incredibly subtle balance amongst note body, clarity, macro and microdynamics on top of a full-neutral presentation over a stunning all-direction-extended stage.

A5000 are anyhow second in line. Athletic like an Olympic fencer, they strike strong when needed while at the same time chiseling their movements in a precise and artistic way. Too bad for those modest, but perceivable, exaggerations in the treble area, as they could otherwise join their siblings on our Excellence showcase.

Lastly, I find A4000 much less special then their sisters, and of what they might potentially be. While they do positively hit on the user with the same grand stage, and imaging clarity, as their fellow A’s, they do pass the excess limit on their trebles, making an overly bright tonality, as such delivering a non-realistic overall musical experience.

The post final A5000 Review – One Cent To Excellence appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Very large part of the following article originally appeared as a section of my review of Sennheiser’s flagships IE900. We decided to spin it off as a separate piece to give it the just independence, considering how sensible the topic is.

Introduction to counterfeits and fakes

According to Cambridge dictionary:

Counterfeiting :- noun. UK  /ˈkaʊntəˌfɪtɪŋ / – The activity of making illegal copies of things such as bank notes, DVDs, or official documents.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/it/dizionario/inglese/counterfeiting

… and, let me modestly add, “any other element of registered intellectual property” (e.g. patented goods).

It goes by itself that counterfeiting is a crime defined and punished by the penal code of pretty much all modern countries. Selling products of known counterfeited nature is, of course, consequently also a crime.

This is not unimportant to know, as when one realises to have been sold a counterfeited unit, she/he can leverage on the much higher power of criminal law to pursue the recovery of her/his interests vs the offending seller – with much higher chances of a positive outcome, of course, when such fraudulent seller is identifiable and locatable, and subject to the laws of the same country as the buyer.

Beware of counterfeiting!

The market is literally flooded with fake / counterfeited IE900, and IE600, and many other Sennheiser sets – and not since yesterday.

Sadly the criminals involved with this are quite skilled on delivering aesthetically near-identical products (from the boxing down to the actual items), thus posing a serious threat to the casual user when it comes to choosing and giving trust to their vendors, especially considering the important price tags we are talking about.

Sennheiser recommends to buy new units exclusively from fully trusted, official Sennheiser distributors – and that’s a no brainer.

For second hand units – while of course remembering that channels like ebay or similar need to be taken with two (always better than one) grains of salt – a good idea is to have the seller send a picture with the unit serial number in advance, and get in contact with Sennheiser Consumer Hearing support services: they will check if the serial number is reported as legit.

An illustrative example

I happen to have access to a fake IE900 sample, which I could therefore compare with a guaranteed-genuine one coming directly from Sennheiser’s headquarters.

Sound quality wise I must say I expected a much bigger difference between the two sets. What surprised me the most was in particular the fake unit’s remarkable bilateral extension, reasonably similar to the original one. In terms of bass definition, note body and microdynamics, however, genuine IE900 are quite evidently better.

Visual counterfeiting on the fake unit is really staggering for how realistic it is, and how much attention and careful observation was required to discover the clues indicating the two units did not come from the same ultimate source. I took a few pictures, and shared them with Sennheiser personnel to have confirmation of my findings, and here is my report – with the hope that it may be useful to someone to avoid being frauded.

First and foremost, there was no way to spot any difference whatsoever about the printed carton box sleeve, not on the box’s internal structure and elements, the paddings etc. All apparently identical.

By closely assessing product details however some differences started to come up.

1) Cables’ earhook sheaths are not freely reshapeable on the fake unit I checked – they stay much firmer on their pristine curvature for how much you try to model them. Genuine Sennheiser sheaths are pliable almost like plasteline, and they stay in your wanted shape quite reliably while you wear them.

2) Cables’ chin sliders feature a Sennheiser logo sticker. The genuine one carries an S-logo hologram, the counterfeit one is very obvious flattened, non-holographic, clumsy imitation. Genuine cable is sitting on top in the following picture.

3) Genuine cable’s main sheath features a smooth, uniform, solid external finish. This fake unit’s sheath carries some sort of twisted wires appearance. You can appreciate this difference, too, from the picture above – where, again, the counterfeit cable is the coiled one, below the genuine one.

4) Assessing nozzle ends, genuine IE900 should look “pitch black”, while this counterfeit sample reveals silver colour inside through a wider mesh structure, as shown by this picture.

5) The pinned plastic plate carrying stock tips should show glossy S M L size letters, not matte ones. Furthermore, genuine foam tips have quite flat tops, not bulging ones. Based on this information, try yourself to spot the genuine set in the following picture .

YMMV

It’s of course worth noting that I could assess just one fake unit, so there is no certainty, let alone guarantee, that the above hints do apply to other cases. So don’t take the above clues are indicative, let alone exhaustive, as a “check list” to apply to a suspect IE900 sample.

This article will have done its own right if I succeeded in just making you aware that there is an issue with this, and a serious one too – and you better spend a lot of time and attention to avoid being scammed. Good luck!

The post Beware of Sennheiser IEM Counterfeits and Fakes! appeared first on Music For The Masses.

I have 3 units to test within my quite articulated home setup, and verify if / which sonic improvements are determined by the presence of one, or more, JitterBug FMJ units in line with and/or in parallel to my various DAC connections.

JitterBug FMJ retails in EU for € 69,00 and can be purchased from multiple sources, including Amazon. The manufacturer’s official information page is here.

At-a-glance Card

Introduction

I know it very well: there’s a thick population of “non-believers” who apriori refuse the whole concept of USB filtering.

Sole thing I can say about and to them is: fair enough ! If you are one of that lot I recommend you stop here, don’t go forward reading this article as I guarantee you won’t like it so why bother.

Some others are instead very confused about the topic.

Not about AudioQuest’s JitterBug FMJ per se, actually, or not yet about it, insofar as they “stop much before”, not having clear which “noise” are we talking about that a device like JitterBug FMJ (and others, in the same category) is supposed to do something with.

To all of them I dedicated the introduction to a past article of mine reviewing IFI’s Nano iUSB 3.0 filtered power supply, which I spun off into a separate post some time ago precisely to conveniently back-link to it from within other review articles (like this one), without dumbly “re-pasting” the whole thing again and again.

Long story (too) short: there’s of course no way nor need to “improve” on digital data quality. There’s however point, and need, to avoid that data depletes during transport, and/or that transport media (cables) “trojan-ride” spurious signals, together with legit data, which may, and will, perturbate the DAC’s activity.

General description and features

JitterBug FMJ looks like, and has the size of, a common USB-key drive. It’s in facts a sort of “passthrough” thingie: on one end is a USB-A male plug, on the opposite end a USB-A female connector.

The chassis is metallic, studied to protect the inside from nearfield RF interference. The female USB port is protected by a removable “cap” make of rubber mixed with carbon – that, too, aiming at tackling RF interference. Both such features (metal chassis and backport cap) are indeed inherent to this new “FMJ” version and were not present in the original JitterBug. FMJ standing in facts for “Full Metal Jacket”.

Finally, the ciruitry on the PCB inside the case is aiming at removing in-line RF interference, such as that generated (or transmitted) by pretty much any digital device e.g. a computer, a TV, an audio player, etc.

You can see JitterBug FMJ as a filter reducing / eliminating any signal coming out of a USB port which is distant from the working frequencies required by the digital data which are solely supposed to be managed by that port.

As a consequence the DAC will receive “just what it’s supposed to get”, with no, or at least much less “other spurious stuff”.

Of course electrical impurities might not be there in the first place in some case, or, they may be filtered/rejected by some circuitry built into the DAC device itself, and in these cases adding a Jitterbug FMJ may be simply… useless.

Another case where a JitterBug FMJ may be only partially or not-at-all beneficial, is of course when spurious signals and interference are picked up downstream of its location.

So in general JitterBug FMJ (and all other similar equipment) is not – as it cannot be – a guaranteed hit, nor a guaranteed complete solution.

As in all or at least most things audio, a try is needed to know if and how much it benefits each particular setup.

How to use it (in the manufacturer’s intention)

Quite simply, Jitterbug FMJ is intended to be plugged into a USB port on a music player host (a pc, a mac or a linux box). Then, the USB cable leading to an external DAC or DAC/AMP will be plugged onto JitterBug FMJ’s female connector.

There’s no driver to install, no options to set. Just plug it in and leave it there.

The removable rubber cap covering JitterBug FMJ’s female port is supposed to be put back in place when no USB cable is connected. That’s because the carbon mixed into the rubber material helps acting as an anti-RF shield.

Always according to AudioQuest there’s also another way to use JitterBug FMJ: install 2 of them in parallel on the same host machine, plugging them onto two different USB ports (partaking to the same internal USB hub).

Onto one of the two JitterBug FMJ the USB cable going to the DAC is supposed to be plugged. The other JitterBug FMJ will just stay passively there, with the back rubber cap installed, and may (or may not) add a further level of intereference removal from the USB line.

OK, but does JitterBug FMJ actually work ?

Simply put: yes, and well, too.

First things first, I tried Jitterbug FMJ at its main intended usage scenario: plugged in-line between a host and a USB DAC or DAC-AMP.

I tried this on all 4 different hosts I normally use (also) for audio application, which are

• an aging MacBook Pro 2012 reourposed into acting exclusively as a Roon server
• a Lenovo Y520 laptop with Windows 10 which is my main general purpose work platform, including Roon Remoting, and gaming
• a BananaPi M2+ box with Debian Linux acting exclusively as a Roon Bridge, and
• a RaspberryPi 4 with Dietpi Linux (a well packaged Debian distro) also exclusively acting as a Roon bridge.

DACs (DAC/AMPs) connected to those include my Questyle CMA400i, the Earmen ST-AMP unit I’m reviewing, and the main “dongles” I own, which include Apogee Groove, E1DA’s PowerDAC 2.1, 9038D and 9038SG3, Questyle M15 and AudioQuest’s own DragonFly Cobalt. Oh, and a Chord Mojo, too, every now and then.

“Dongles” (i.e. host-powered) devices are by definition those exposed at the highest risk of “inheriting” host perturbance carried over via digital interconnects, that’s why I expect JitterBug FMJ’s effect to be most evident on them.

I also expect JitterBug FMJ to be more beneficial on devices plugged onto my Y520 laptop, and less so when the host is one of the raspberries (you should know the rationales of such expectation if you know this stuff at the technological level, or if you read my article referenced above).

Long story short: JitterBug FMJ does work, i.e. it did deliver a sound improvement, in all my different install positions.

The effect on final sound has been more evident, at times totally obvious, in some cases, and more subtle in others.

I can hear improvement on two main areas: better, more rounded up, fuller notes and darker background. Both these improvements together also result in a better sense of macrodynamics (imaging), which, depending on musical genre, also improves on rhythm perception.

Expectedly, out of all my gear the device for which the improvement is most subtle (yet still audible) is Questyle CMA-400i, no matter the host it is connected to.

Again very expectedly, the cases where Jitterbug FMJ’s improvement is obvious are those involving dongles (all of them – yes, including AudioQuest’s own Dragonfly Cobalt), connected to all my hosts, and maximally when connected to my Y520 “gaming” laptop.

Of course I also tried the other manufacturer-suggested use case, which is that of adding a second JitterBug FMJ in parallel to a first one, connected to a free USB port on the same host transport as the one onto which a USB DAC is connected.

This time my experience is not positive. Not negative either, actually, but I could not perceive any “further” improvement over the one obtained by the first unit – the one just plugged in-line between the host and the DAC. This happens on any one of my hosts, be them the small ARM SBC’s or the “noisy” gaming laptop.

Comparisons

iFi iSilencer+ (€ 59)

iSilencer is marketed as a device pursuing totally similar aims as JitterBug FMJ, so we can see it as iFi’s direct alternative to it. I had the opportunity to test a (few of) iSilencer unit(s), and I must say that, unlike Jitterbug FMJ, they did not hit the spot in my case.

Sadly, in my environment iSilencer wasn’t merely transparent (read: useless) but actually made sound worse: it fundamentally makes tones brighter, depressing mids and bass, reducing stage depth and making imaging worse.

iFi iPurifier 3 (€ 129/149)

iPurifier 3 is another device falling in the general “digital signal filters” category, but instead of removing carry-over electrical noise it focuses on signal timing – which is something on which JitterBug FMJ is only “consequently” involved.

I will soon release a piece about iPurifier3 but long story short: (in my setup) it does work. I’ve in particular been using it in-between one of my ARM-based Roon bridges and the Questyle CMA-400i desktop DAC-AMP, and it carried an audible improvement in terms of better treble notes definition, and perceivable better room size definition.

What’s even more interesting is that iPurifier 3 synergises positively with JitterBug FMJ: if I plug JitterBug FMJ on the ARM’s USB port, and iPurifier 3 on CMA-400i’s USB input port, I get both improvements at the same time. Very nice!

Conclusions

To me, JitterBug FMJ works – and very well so. It makes now standard part of my home setup, and I see no downsides to its adoption as an in-line USB channel filter, also considering its quite modest price tag.

A great thank you goes to AudioQuest for providing me with 2 more units (in addition to the one I earlier had already personally purchased) to allow me for extensive testing in multiple configurations.

Thanks a bunch to coblogger Kazi for the nice title image, too.

The post AudioQuest JitterBug FMJ Review – It’s Not About Dancing… appeared first on Music For The Masses.

I can anticipate I had a very big pleasure in the encounter, and I hope I’ll be able to properly convey my take on the many pluses and few minuses of this set, together with some comparison hints with their lower cost (but not lower quality) sisters IE600 and more.

IE900 currently sell in Europe for € 1499.00 including VAT. Main official product page, with direct purchase possibility here.

At-a-glance Card

Full Device Card

Test setup and preliminary notes

Sources: Questyle QP1R, QP2R, M15, CMA-400i / Lotoo Paw Gold Touch + Cayin C9 / Sony WM-1A / E1DA 9038D, 9038SG3 – INAIRS AIR1 foam and/or JVC SpiralDot silicon tips – Stock cable – lossless 16-24/44.1-192 FLAC + DSD 64/128/256 tracks.

Signature analysis

Tonality

IE900’s general tonality is bright-neutral. The timbre is slightly lean, especially in the mids, and you can tell from the very first audition that this is a product aimed at rendering trebles in the most organic, detailed, engaging at the same time non-distorting way as possible, while in the process never leaving bass less attended to. And – boy! – if they succeeded at this!

From a more tech-involved angle standpoint, what I also very interesting to note is that they chose not to closely follow, let alone chase, any most en vague target curves out there… More on this, maybe, much later on.

Sub-Bass

One of Sennheiser’s 7mm dynamic driver’s qualities – perhaps not the most important one, but the most readily apparent to me for sure – is its extension capabilities, something very hardly heard before on IEMs, at least from my modest hobbyist’s ears.

As a direct consequence of that bass reaches as deeeep as you can possibly hear. You can safely bet the limiting factor in this case is more your hearing than anything else.

In terms of volume some elevation is present, but a modest one at that. IE900 definitely are not made to satisfy so-called bassheads, not even “educated” ones. Even for the tastes of die hard acoustic jazz lovers like me, there are times when I concede to the pulsion to adding a +3dB low shelf at 50 Hz, but that’s really occasional: in most situations IE900 sub bass is just perfect for my (quite specialised – mind you!) library.

I’ll reach even further, actually, and I would say that although not so high in elevation it’s presence is anyhow so consistent and predictable that the net effect is similar to adding a subwoofer to your nearfield setup, keeping it at a modest sound pressure level, just for “background support”, so to say.

Mid Bass

IE900’s mid bass is fast, even sculpted, yet fully textured and very expressive, emotional. This is one of the sets that renders Andrew Cyrille’s kick drum with the highest level of realism I ever auditioned.

This weren’t enough IE900, and very particularly its bass line, scale incredibly well with amping power and quality.

While in general IE900’s sensitivity is not low, so as to make them driveable to already outstanding results by relatively modest powered mobile sources, you will be totally astonished by the difference – emerging particularly in the bass section – when driving them from high quality, much higher specced amp sources.

One inter alia: Cayin C9, which I happen to have access to. Mid bass and low bass notes come up in body, viscerality and slam in a totally surprising way. It all sounds (pun intended) as if you’re sitting in a mixing studios listening to on those high end monitors hanging in there. Really, really, REALLY significant. Oh and by the way: even in such “exalted” situation, mid bass never, ever takes over on the low mids…!

Mids

Mids feel slightly recessed, if nothing else because the other parts around them (bass, and most of all high mids and trebles) come across with even bolder personality, so to say.

On the other hand their general timbre is very good if a bit lean especially in the high part, yet feels spot-on in most if not really all cases for my library.

The passage from middle to high mids easily reminds me what happens on Final’s A3000 – another, much lower tier, single-DD set featuring a remarkable (within its price class) quality single dynamic driver. And, another virtuous example of totally surprising results based on a not so common, off-choir even, tuning curve.

The passage is very smooth, of course consequence of the one driver employed, and also of the sensible taming applied to the 2-4Khz region which, thanks to driver elasticity (and, in IE900’s case, of who knows what other aspects liaised to the triple resonance chamber milled into their housings – more on this below), does not translate into overly tamed feedback in that region, oppositely it delivers a very lively, detailed while unoffensive experience.

As I mentioned before, if one remark the high mids segment calls for is some relative leanness to the notes. I feel some “butter” missing on central piano octaves, and on female vocals, to match my personal perfection. I’m not of course expecting to find the same focus on that region here that you can get from specialised sets like Final F7200 to just name one, yet as I said just a tad more of lipids would have rendered the dish even more flavoury.

Male Vocals

IE900 render baritones and bass humans with organicity and authority, and tenors, too, with just a bit of relative leanness commencing to appear on their higher registers.

Female Vocals

Female vocals are well presented, textured, clean and quite engaging. As mentioned above, they do lack a bit of body to their central notes to be astonishing.

Highs

These, together with some of the technicalities, are evidently the stars of the show on IE900.

The result is so outstanding that you can bet this must be the consequence of something really special the developers had to put in to get there: energy, expression, body, details and air, all together, while never scanting into sibilance, shoutyness let alone zinging.

A wonderful litmus paper test for this is Lee Morgan’s trumpet phrasings from 1 up to to 2 minutes into Art Blakey’s & The Messenger’s monumental 1958 Moanin’ take, from the homonymous album. Morgan instrument’s sound is full bodied yet perfectly textured, but most of all powerful yet not piercing, and far from splashy or shouty.

Such result does vary a bit in accuracy depending on eartips selection (more on this below).

Incidentally, I could only hear one other set doing better to date, but it did so only on this very particular aspect and failed in others in comparison to IE900, bass being first: a German-made multidriver unit. Oh and that’s priced 3X over our today’s reference .

Technicalities

Soundstage

IE900 stage projection is probably the widest I ever heard in an IEM, and while I think about that I would also put all closed-back overears I heard in, for good measure. There’s significant height and good depth, too !

This is another situation where IE900’s huge treble extension shows its good deeds: as many know of course we can hear sounds up to 16Khz (well… when young! ) but frequencies above such mark are not useless at all, as they contribute carrying information about the time it takes for sound to come back (or not come back) from the “walls around the room” – thereby helping on “drawing the stage”.

This is of course only evident when the source digital material does contain such higher frequency information, and the DAC is indeed capable of reconstructing it – which is luckily the case for much of my library, and a few of my sources .

Imaging

Macrodynamics are extremely precise, positioning cues are spot on at all times, along all 3 axes.

Details

Detail retrieval from the high mids and especially from the treble is nothing short than superb, twice as much if again we remember we are in presence of a single DD set.

I like to believe this is one consequence of those Sennheiser’s claimed designs efforts focused on sound modelling obtained via those cavities inside the housings (more on this below).

Let me add that, as an old western-economy industry bear myself, I also like to think that in addition to the positivity on the obtained result this way of proceeding is also much less prone to be “easily replied” by of some of those chifi usual suspects – building practical reproduction hurdles into one’s physical product arguably representing an even more effective method, supplemental to “mere” legal patenting, to better protect one’s industrial invention efforts in our globalised world lacking cohesive governance.

Instrument separation

Layering and instrument separation is another field where IE900 surely excel, once again especially so when considering we are talking about a single driver set.

Even on busiest (acoustic) tracks you never get a sense of congestion or mixture between voicings coming from the same spot on the stage, and the sense of depth is always granted. At times, it seems as if IE900 are able to render virtually infinite layers, such is their capability in keeping overlapping but heterogenous sounds apart from one another.

I could only hear one other IEM set till now able – on equal source gear and tracks, of course – to present me with a superior readability on low volume and/or background sounds, and that’s Softears Turii – which other technicalities, and the tonality before them, are however quite different from IE900’s so I wouldn’t easily cast a better/worse score between the two, frankly.

Driveability

As en passant I previously mentioned, IE900 are quite easy to drive exploiting the power of so many at least decent mobile sources on the mainstream market, most dongles included. Their 123dB/V (corresponding to approx 105dB/mW) at 18 ohm are not a huge requirement in facts, and that’s surely a big plus in terms of crowd accessibility.

On the other hand, IE900’s note body will dramatically improve when the source happens to have the guts to push up on current delivery, this with particular regards to mid bass and mid tones.

While listening to IE900 directly paired to a Lotoo Paw Gold Touch DAP is already a lushy treat – for many reasons, first and foremost LPGT’s quite special proweness on subtle microdynamics reconstruction – you should wait until you’ll hear what you get having LPGT’s output pass through a further amplification stage, e.g. a Cayin C9 mobile set: then you’ll be in for a strong experience … .

Such situation can, and should, be reported both as a pro and as a (relative) limitation of the set.

Physicals

Build

I suspect not to be the only one whose first eye-impression when shown a pair of IE900 has been something like: “inconspicuous”.

Actually handling them such impression – well, at least my impression – changed radically: IE900’s housing are in facts CNC-milled off a solid piece of aluminium, which incidentally is a wonderful material I happen to know the positive properties of due to my professional involvement with it, on a completely different market.

Long story short, IE900’s housings are at the same time extremely solid and sturdy, and very lightweight.

I also do approve the choice for those thin engraving lines on the outside, which – if anything on the aesthetical level – result in a pleasant, if a bit mitteleuropean-industry-flavoured, “unglossy” finish style, and avoid overexposure to fingerprinting.

On the solidity and shock resistance there’s no question: a solid piece of aluminium gives more than the required warranties for this use case. I’m ready to bet that trampling over these ones (with their cable removed) with a car would leave them a bit dirty, but in shape.

Apart from all this, what is surely most interesting is what cannot be appreciated from the outside, and that is the internal shaping given to the housings – always by CNC-milling them – and the specially developed ultrawide range-capable 7mm dynamic driver.

The DD is responsible for offering coverage for an exceptionally wide range of frequencies for a single driver: from 5 to 48KHz.

That being not enough, taken alone, to deliver the wanted sonic result, tonality shaping is carried out by way of tree small resonator chambers, i.e. appropriate “carvings” milled into the very piece of solid AL making the housings, in-between the driver and the nozzle. Furthermore, some specialty shaping and internal surfaces finishing is put in there, to take care of smoothening excessive treble energy – and I must say with excellent results, based on my audition (see above).

Fit

Kudos to Sennheiser also for the just incredibly effective ergonomics they conceived for the shape of their IE series, which includes IE900 of course.

Even if for some reason you wouldn’t tell when seeing that somehow uncommon form for the first time, it takes seconds after wearing (any of) them the first time to vibrantly love them, and the one(s) who designed them.

On the flip – read negative – side two things are worth noting.

One: in some cases – me included – the main housing body may be a (decisive) tad too lean to match those magical proportions which fill your outer ear just enough to gain perfectly stable positioning while never feel like a swollen bean is nagging at you from out there.

It’s of course then evident that you can’t possibly design a one-size solid structure that’s so precisely fitting into everybody’s body, no matter human diversity. And in doubt, of course you’ll have to do it smaller vs bigger ! So this ain’t defect of course, yet it’s definitely an issue to manage, when it arises.

Two: again, in my case, the supply of stock tips (both silicon and foam) for one reason or the other falls short of being adequate.

Stock silicon tips have a very soft umbrella, 100% studied to get the best intended sound out of the IE900. Too bad that on the “mechanical” front it happens that, housings being too lean to stay put in my concha’s, I instinctually tend to regain firmness by pushing them deeper in. When that happens silicon tips’ umbrellas fold on themselves, totally losing the seal.

Sadly, the problem about stock tips falling short of properly fitting my canals (left one in particular) affects foamies too! Again, I suspect that’s liaised with me needing to get a higher stability by pushing shells deeper in, thereby reaching a wider segment of my ear canal, which those foamies can’t adequately fill up, not even the supplied L size.

I shared this issue with Sennheiser, and the answer has been enlightening for the sake of clarifying the origins of this situation.

First and foremost, in Sennheiser’s design intention IE900 tips should ideally “feel as if they disappear” in the ear canal, precisely the opposite of the sensation you get from bullet style IEMs, and/or triple-flanged eartips. Hence, the thinner umbrella the better, of course.

Flipping the coin, however, superlight tips intended for such precise aim will not be the best choice if for whatever reason a user prefers, or needs, to achieve a deeper fit.

I do confirm all : if – disregarding stability for a moment – I wear IE900 in a shallower position, indeed their stock silicon tips do keep the seal, and they deliver a very pleasant “feathery” sensation, or even virtually no sensation at all – as per intention.

And by the way, were it possible and handy for me, I would actually prefer such shallow fit, not being myself a die-hard fan of deep insertion – even when I use bullet-shape IEMs (which nevertheless – Sennheiser friends will forgive me – I don’t find so devilish counter-ergonomic as they reckon).

Be as it may, this finally reveals what the entire real problem is in my case: housings’ stability.

Again, in Sennheiser’s design intention, in cases like mine where the person’s ear structure is a bit too big and can’t grab the housings firm by itself, that’s where those easy-shape earhook sheaths installed on the cable (more on them below, under “Cable”) should do the trick, mechanically retrofitting the set so to say, and delivering the required stability.

So that is precisely where the game fails in my case (and not my one only).

No, to me those shapeable earhooks are super-comfortable, but not resilient enough to compensate for the housings’ eventual wobbling. That’s why I can’t personally “afford” a shallow fit, and rest comes with it.

Curtain fall ? Nevah !

First possible workaround: browsing the internet I found some sort of third party “gel outfits” – of course made some place in China. I call them “gloves”: imagine little-finger sized equivalents to a silicon smartphone back-cover. Or, similar to those winged rings you fit onto TWS drivers to help them stay firm in place. Something like this, but there are others around too.

I tried a friend’s ones and indeed those perfectly fit IE900’s housings, granting them that small body size increment that results into fitting my ear in a perfectly stable and comfortable way. And then, yes!, I can afford shallower fit and the whole stock tips game works as per design in my case too.

Alternative workaround: use third party tips .

Well as you can imagine I would have gone through the long tips exploration session anyhow, but in this case it was let’s say double motivated.

This article is getting already lengthy and I don’t believe that adding further smalltalk to it would make it better so my eighteen readers will I hope understand if I won’t indulge in the full report here about how I found each of the probably 15 different tip models I tried.

Suffice it to say that in the end I’m torn between two options, featuring some differences : INAIRS AIR1 foams, and JVC SpiralDot silicons.

INAIRS offer a firmer fit sensation, and their M size actually well fills my external ear canal up, thereby effectively contributing to hold those slim housings firm(er) in place for me. They also grant me better passive isolation, and a sort of delicate “softening” to some note edges (which, in itself, is not always a welcome addition).

SpiralDots feature stiffer silicon umbrellas compared to stock tips but won’t go as far as mechanically compensating housings movements, so their adoption does require either a deeper fit, or those “gel gloves” I mentioned before. The good news is that they are sturdy enough not to lose the seal when pushed deeper. Their wide bore positively contributes to IE900’s already good bass, and they yield a more crystalline timbre compared to foams.

Runnerup silicon options worth mentioning are Radius Deepmount – even better than Spiraldot on bass definition and speed, but tend to turn trebles a bit too hot – and Final E (strictly CLEAR version – black and other-coloured ones making low bass a bit “hazy”) – which deliver more body in the mids but lose some detail and precision in the treble and bass.

Last but absolutely not least, Sennheiser and their mother company being deeply involved with medical grade hearing aids and technologies, a custom eartips production service is made available – sadly only to German residents for now though .

It’s called Custom Comfort Tips. The rationale seems very simple in its complexity: by realising an elongated silicon tip, custom shaped following your own ear canal shape and size on one end, and perfectly slapping onto the IEM’s nozzles and neighbouring shell part on the other, you get extremely close to eliminate that personal fit variation that makes each one’s sound experience with that particular driver too much “potentially different” from its intended goal.

The program is also very well streamlined in terms of enduser fruition. It’s all centrally managed by Sennheiser, you don’t have to “look for” anything your own: place the order centrally, geoloc the supporting audiologist shop nearest to your location from a link on Sennheiser’s site, take an appointment and have your canals measured there (their service is part of the price paid to Sennheiser), wait for a few days and receive your tips at home.

The very same tips can be swapped onto IE900, IE600 and IE200. The tips’ fee is currently included with the price of an IE900 package, and a discount is offered to IE600 owners.

Those friends (lucky bastards individuals) who, residing in Germany, already could get their custom tips confirm they are indeed absolute game changers. The rest of us need to come to terms with a impatient wait .

Comfort

IE900’s shape is designed for very easy and natural fit and this immediately traduces into supreme comfort even for very protracted period of time.

In case the housing turns out to be a bit too “slim” for one’s ears (like in my case) there’s a chance the consequent instability may be somewhat fastidious. Longer story above about the origins of this. Consequences: compensating instability by reaching down for a deeper fit may turn out to be a bit uncomfy in medium/long sessions; adopting “gel gloves” of appropriate thickness may be the best way to go.

Isolation

When perfectly fitting, IE900 offer good levels of passive isolation – even more if equipped with foam tips.

In “fat concha” situations like my case, the same result is quite easily obtained by outfitting the housings with with “gel gloves” or such (see above).

Cable

It’s certainly pleasing – if after all in line with expectations vis-a-vis the package price, one may say – to find 3 different cables inside the box, each with a different hard-wired termination: single ended 3.5mm, and balanced 2.5 and 4.4mm, covering I would say 99.9% of possible needs.

Also, the freely mouldable TPU sheath applied towards to cables housing’s end allows you to shape them into the most precisely matching and comfortable earhooks you can get, exactly following your ear root line.

It’s the first time I encounter this offering, and it’s a very welcome feat – even if, as reported under “Fit” here above, it does not get as far as solving the problem of housings being too lean for my particular outer ears.

On another important note: Sennheiser’s IE-line MMCX connectors are not “everyday MMCX” fixings in reality. So be prepared: hardly any of your (my!) existing MMCX cables will fit, or safely fit .

Sennheiser’s MMCX implementation (in some documents tagged as “MMCX Fidelity+”) is indeed proprietary. Looking closely, the male connector coming off the tip of the cable has an additional “lip” compared to ordinary MMCX plugs. Such lip, plus a deeper, and more deeply recessed female connector, are responsible for significantly improving on connection firmness.

All good so far, the less good news however being the following two.

One I already mentioned: 99% chances are that you won’t be able to pair your IE900 with any loved individual off your thick existing herd of however good – and expensive! – MMCX cables.

The other is safely identifying the genuinely licensed (!) third parties, which would therefore be in condition to supply reliably compatible cables. Fact: between a few friends of mine and myself we experienced a few 3rd party cables sold as IE900-compatible, most of which turned into wobbly, unreliable connections. Tread lightly when shopping for cables here!!

Specifications (declared)

Comparisons

Sennheiser IE600 (€ 799,00 – currently on sale for € 549,00)

Even if very similar aesthetically, and equally based on a single dynamic driver, IE600 and IE900 are quite different at the technological level from one another.

Sennheiser confirmed to me that the dynamic driver inside IE600 is a different variation (although part of the same main project) from that adopted for IE900. The same applies for the driver inside IE200, by the way.

In addition to that, housings’ builds and their internals are also quite different.

Unlike IE900’s earpieces – CNC-milled from a solid piece of aluminium and featured with 3 specially designed resonance chambers inside – IE600’s housings are 3D-printed from a special zirconium alloy by Heraeus Amloy Tech, and featured with two sets of 2 internal chambers. Such structure internal to IE600 (D2CA: Dual 2-Chamber Absorbers) focuses on treating overlapping notes coming for different instruments at the same time, helping on dramatically improving they separation, and layering.

With all this said, the sound experience offered by IE600 is for some respects similar, for others quite different from that granted by IE900.

Similarities stay in rendering clarity, and in outstanding layering and separation proweness.

The main difference is in the tonality : unlike IE900, IE600 are quite evidently V-shaped, although maybe a “wide V” at that. A more mainstream indulging tuning choice if you wish, vs IE900’s off the choir one.

Bass is equivalently speedy on IE600 and IE900, but on IE600 it is much more evident, elevated, and I refer to mid bass and even more to sub bass here. In spite of such higher elevation, bass is still perfectly readable at all times, very well textured, and stays consistently separated from low and central mids – as it definitely should – in IE600 no less than in IE900.

Another part where the two sets diverge is in the high mids, and – I would say al least in part consequently – in their treble.

IE600’s 2-4K frequencies are way more forward and pulpy, with this bringing guitars and female vocals the “butter” which is a bit left behind on IE900. However an important taming is imposed on 6KHz on IE600, I assume to avoid that their composite output would scant into shouty and/or fatiguing. As a consequence, treble detail retrieval and overall “airiness” is quite obviously less on IE600 vs IE900.

Quitting all this tech talk : choose IE600 for prog rock, hard rock, electronic music and general purpose, while – money not being a hurdle – go blind-eyed with IE900 for acoustic jazz and most of all classical music.

Such separated applicative indications, paired with ultimately equivalent proweness in doing, each one, what they are designed to do, calls for refraining from positioning IE600 and IE900 one on a higher step vs the other, and I rather recommend them as different tools to reach different pleasures, so indeed complementary to each other.

Campfire Andromeda 2020 (discontinued, was € 1099,00)

I feel this is a quite interesting comparison not only due to the reputation Campfire Audio as a manufacturer, and the various iterations of their Andromeda set deservedly conquered over time, but especially vis-a-vis the under many respects opposite design philosophies behind Andromeda and IE900.

As everybody may remember, Andromeda are a full-BA multidriver sets, vs IE900 single-DD choice.

As a further testimony to the successful results obtained by Sennheiser on their sole dynamic driver, I would readily note that if one of the two sets may be found to deliver a tad less bilateral extension that is… Andromeda. Differences on this are small, however.

Other aspects which are very similar between Andromeda and IE900 include treble detailing, and the tuning choice to keep their 2-4KHz regions tamed down to help deliver a smooth, unshouty yet energetic overall highmid+treble section, which is indeed the case on both sets, and probable the key reasons why treble is equally delicious – beyond within some differences – in either situation.

Other similarities, or real equivalences are about stage size and three-dimensionality, with Andromeda being probably a tad deeper but less high and wide, and about layering and separation.

Tonalities are instead quite different: Andromeda is obviously warmer, consequence of some more power impressed onto 2-400Hz and some taken off from 1-2Khz. IE900 offer more airiness up above, not much resulting in terms of better clarity but rather in terms of a more realistic spatial sensation.

The most obvious differences however stay on bass note body and microdynamics: Sennheiser’s model attains to a higher level altogether, especially on the latter part – IE900 microdynamics are a very thick step above Andromeda.

As for driveability Andromeda require much less power to shine at its full potential, but conversely they require so little of that, and at such a low impedance, that many if not most sources will make them hiss, and that will of course be audible through quiet musical passages.

Beware of counterfeiting !

It is sadly worth noting that the market is literally flooded with fake / counterfeited IE900, and IE600, and many other Sennheiser sets – and not since yesterday.

Sadly the criminals involved with this are quite skilled on delivering aesthetically near-identical products (from the boxing down to the actual items), thus posing a serious threat to the casual user when it comes to choosing and giving trust to their vendors, especially considering the important price tags we are talking about.

I happen to have access to a fake IE900 sample, which I could therefore compare with the guaranteed-genuine one coming directly from Sennheiser’s headquarters.

Sound quality wise I must say I expected a much bigger difference between the two sets. What surprised me the most was in particular the fake unit’s remarkable bilateral extension, roughly in the same ballpark as the genuine one – and that’s saying something. In terms of bass definition, note body and microdynamics, however, genuine IE900 are just straight better.

Visual counterfaiting is really staggering for how realistic it is, and how much attention and careful observation was required to discover the clues indicating the two units did not come from the same ultimate source. I took a few pictures, and shared them with Sennheiser personnel to have confirmation of my findings, and here is my report, with the hope that it might be useful to someone to avoid being frauded.

First and foremost, there was no way to spot any difference whatsoever about the printed carton box sleeve, not on the box’s internal structure and elements, the paddings etc. All apparently identical.

By closely assessing product details however some differences started to come up.

1) Cables’ earhook sheaths are not freely reshapeable on the fake unit I checked – they stay much firmer on their pristine curvature for how much you try to model them. Genuine Sennheiser sheaths are pliable almost like plasteline, and they stay in your wanted shape quite reliably while you wear them.

2) Cables’ chin sliders feature a Sennheiser logo sticker. The genuine one carries an S-logo hologram, the counterfeit one is a very obvious flattened, non-holographic, clumsy imitation. Genuine cable is sitting on top in the following picture.

3) Genuine cable’s main sheath features a smooth, uniform, solid external finish. This fake unit’s sheath carries some sort of twisted wires appearance. You can appreciate this difference, too, from the picture above – where, again, the counterfeit cable is the coiled one, below the genuine one.

4) Assessing nozzle ends, genuine IE900 should look “pitch black”, while this counterfeit sample reveals silver colour inside through a wider mesh structure, as shown by this picture.

5) The pinned plastic plate carrying stock tips should show glossy S M L size letters, not matte ones. Furthermore, genuine foam tips have quite flat tops, not bulging ones. Based on this information, try yourself to spot the genuine set in the following picture .

It’s of course worth noting that I could assess just one fake unit, so there is no certainty, let alone guarantee, that the above hints do apply to other cases.

Sennheiser recommends to buy new units exclusively from fully trusted, official Sennheiser distributors – and that’s a no brainer.

For second hand units – while of course remembering that channels like ebay or similar need to be taken with two grains of salt (always better than one) – a good idea is to have the seller send a picture showing the unit serial number in advance, and get in contact with Sennheiser Consumer Hearing support services: they will check if the number is reported as legit.

Considerations & conclusions

I tried to outline the multiple reasons why I believe IE900 are a beyond-outstanding product, particularly suitable for classical, and acoustic music in general, and I feel like adding some considerations at a more general level here.

What is seems from the outside is that Sennheiser did this by going back to the design board, and restart from assessing the wanted target, asking themselves how to reach it – “reinventing the wheel” if need be, and/or using more “usual” parts and competences, purging their minds from “assumed-well-established existing solutions” bias in advance.

Of course I have no real clue about their internal processes and how the real story went, but if it were a plot for a movie about an industrial success story, it might probably go as follows.

IE900’s dynamic driver itself is proprietary, made to deliver a sensibly wider range extension compared to other high quality dynamic drivers on the market. Why? Because multidrivers do struggle with tonal coherence – all of them – and, let’s face it, for good reasons too. On the other hand, existing single drivers are all “short blankets”, so to say.

So point #1 : let’s design a “wiiiiiide blanket” driver. Period. Then we see the rest.

Oh by the way: let’s do it without employing marketing-buzzword-level raw materials.

IE900’s is in the end a plastic membrane driver – such an “obsolete sounding” technology, inn’it? – yet it loops dozens of circles around others made of “newer materials”. Guess why?… .

I must say I feel empathic on these topics as they can’t fail reminding me that within the infinitely more modest scope of the small industrial company I currently serve in as a marketing and sales manager I often listen to my agents recursively pointing at certain innovative-name-sounding products from the competition. Transeat. Back to our plot.

Once you have an eXtra Wide Range transducer, you are still supposed to shape its sound to manage its behaviour, avoid excesses, and bend its tonality to a specific wanted target sound. This is usually done by a mix of shaping IEM shells, adding vents, filters, foams, meshes etc.

As for us: we will primarily “shape the shells” – and good luck to those who will try to precisely copy them.

Inside IEx00 housings there are milled or built (depending on the specific model’s production process) micrometrically formed spaces (“chambers”). They even got as far as studying how wrinkled their internal surfaces need to be to get the right wanted effect on sound waves passing by.

I can only remotely fathom the complexity of such a research, and the level of competences, skills, tools and budgets (!) you need to put on the table to even commence spinning such a project up. Well they did it – and succeeded.

Last but not least: once you have those grand IEMs done, based on a superbly extended driver, and tuned to consistently output the exact wanted timbre and tonality onto… lab measuring equipment (!) how about maximising the chance the same or at least a very similar result is actually appreciated by anybody’s ears – which sadly (for engineers, and luckily for philosophers) are all “guaranteed different” from the most advanced acoustic coupler mockups employed at the lab ?

Yes, you can try closing the gap by filling the commercial package with countless alternative eartips, or…

Our mother company is a leading multinational involved in hearing aids and acoustic implantations. Let’s roll out a custom eartips program!

I presume this very long stream of considerations, and their fictionalized dressings, can be summarised as follows: the old saying “when the game gets tough, the tough get playing” is of course in general an abstraction – it does take for the tough to actually be willing to get playing ! But when they do… .

Sennheiser for decades did deliver undisputed top-class headphone models (do we need to remember that HD600 originally came out in 1997?) yet they flew much lower in the rankings of IEM proposals until recently.

With their IE900 / IE600 / IE200 program they took a wholly-renovated approach to the segment, and results do show.

These 3 models lead their corresponding price brackets, and debating whether they deserve #1, #2 or #3 entry in their specific subclasses is surely very important for Sennheiser’s product marketing, their numbers etc, but for us, the users, it’s now probably just funny, loud coffee bar discussions. IE200, IE600 and IE900 are, all of them, absolute winners, and each one can easily be taken as the sole IEM one may want to own given that budget and/or that musical preference.

IE900 are light years far from being yet-another high quality high priced single DD IEMs. They can and should be narrated as a successful reinvention of the entire IEM experience, instanced onto the specific preferences of classical and other acoustic music lovers.

Sennheiser created a monumental product with IE900, and while its price tag is no doubt demanding, not a cent of it lacks justification in the multifaceted quality it offers.

IE900 is dutifully tagged on our Wall of Excellence.

Our generic standard disclaimer.

The post Sennheiser IE900 Review (1) – Classical Reinvented appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Sho DD differ from Sho at various levels, including the housing material (an AL-CU alloy in lieu of Titanium), the material chosen for the ceramic tweeter, the sophystication of the pentaconn connectors, etc, so I’m sure it’d be wrong to expect that Sho DD represent a “Sho replacement” at a much lower price, as it would after all be totally illogical on a commercial level of course.

I happen to have two different versions of Sho DD available: the standard one, regularly in production and purchaseable from the company’s website (here without a cable for the equivalent of less than 100€, or here with a cable, for the equivalent of less than 200€), and a special edition called Sho DD Halloween, externally recogniseable by their purple colored backside resin, currently out of production. One of the two is my own property, the other has been sent to me courtesy of the manufacturer.

The description here below refers to the currently shipping Sho DD version. I’ll add the differential notes regarding Sho DD Halloween in the Comparison section below.

At-a-glance Card

Full Device Card

Test setup and preliminary notes

Sources: Sony NW-A55 mrWalkman / Questyle QP1R, QP2R, M15, CMA-400i / Dragonfly Cobalt – JVC Spiraldot silicon tips – Dunu DUW-02S cable – lossless 16-24/44.1-192 FLAC and DSD64/128/256 tracks.

Signature analysis

Tonality

Sho DD presentation is a sort of V-shape, with vivid yet controlled high-mids. Their tonality is on the warm side of neutral, however much less than the muscular bass might threaten to make it at first hearing.

The timbre… that’s where it gets tricky. On Sho DD timbre depends quite heavily on how trebles come up, which in turn changes even dramatically depending on eartips selection and insertion depth.

More in detail: when “casually” worn, and with narrow bore tips, Sho DD may easily present a dual-timbre scenario with a solid, bodied, muscular bass standing in front of razor cutting, brilliant, finely detailed treble (and highmids, to some extent). Such “inconsistency” might even rather be taken as a “duality”, something in the ballpark of a 2 tweeters + 1 subwoofer nearfield setup, to give an idea of what I’m talking about.

By working on insertion position and eartips (wider bore) it’s however very possible to smoothen the highs a bit, taming their finest and leanest fringes, but most of all adding to their body thereby significantly closing the gap with bass notes. That’s where my recommendation rootens, to choose for JVC Spiraldots.

Even with that Sho DD will be living on a dynamic balance between diverse elements, much different from a seemless or near-seemless merge like you can get on other hybrid setups. Such situation is very thin ice to thread onto: when done right a good orchestration delivers extremely interesting composite results, and comes across nearly unhearable otherwise. Sho DD are an evident example of the former case.

Last but not least: of course tips choice and insertion positioning being totally subjective, it may well be the case that the virtuous scenario I just mentioned takes place in your case just on stock tips, or with totally different ones. You’ll have to try your own mileage.

Sub-Bass

Sho DD have a hefty, solid, physical sub-bass acting like a concrete basement, while staying separated from the rest for most if not at all times.

Mid Bass

Midbass is no doubt one of Sho DD’s strengths. It’s thick, visceral yet very well controlled, quite fast but not sharp and very well textured. Transients are calibrated on a totally commendable speed compromise point, to one of the best “thick-bass tunings” I ever came across.

Mids

Mids are obviously positionally recessed nonetheless they carry good definition. Their note body is also not lean, just “unlushy” in a sense, such as to make vocals, guitars and part of the piano stay more in the back in relation to drums, winds and drumplates which are made to take the lead by Sho DD.

I guess it’s fair to say of Sho DD that they represent an example of a situation where leaving some parts (like mids and vocals) on second-priority does not necessarily mean not curing them at all. Au contraire.

Male Vocals

As they are contributed to both by the VST and DD driver, male vocals are indeed more than pleasing on Sho DD. Certainly positioned in the back, they carry good texture and especially more than decent organicity and credibility.

Female Vocals

Taken in absolute terms female vocals are also relatively un-lushy and somewhat cold, yet can’t call them lean: they indeed carry more than a bit of texture. If I put them in a V shape sig perspective they are actually very good for the category.

Highs

If I had to elect my preferred value on all Intime IEMs I heard (a total of 8 different models till now) their unique highmids and treble rendering is very likely where my choice would land. Which is in the end consistent with the fact that their patented ceramic-based piezo tweeter is the owner’s competence specialty coming from his previous professional history, too.

Be as it may, Sho DD’s highs section is shiny, vivid, energetic and fundamentally always south of excessive.

Also, if after trying other piezo technology drivers you tend to expect a characteristic unwanted timbre to them well, forget it: Intime’s VST does not carry any “electric” sheen or aftertaste.

Technicalities

Soundstage

Sho DD offer a very sizeable horizontal stage, good height and above average depth.

Imaging

Macrodynamics are extremely good, mainly thanks to the solid but unbloating bass not covering the tweeter’s job. Mid’s recession may occasionally put some vocals or guitars a bit too much in the background.

Details

The combined effort of the two drivers grants very good detail retrieval from all segments of the spectrum. The lion’s part is surely taken by treble, especially in their higher part, which deliver

Instrument separation

Sho DD are extremely good at separation and layering, and that’s surprising after the first audition when you notice those lushy midbass and their buttery transients. The crux is that bass stays so well controlled, and the VST2 driver extends all the way down to the mids, the result being just gorgeous with the user being able to follow each voice singularly, even on crowded passages.

Curiously enough, bass comes across physically “above” (in the sense of soundstage’s vertical dimension) mid tones most of the times, unlike what I tend to here more often on other IEMs.

Driveability

Sho DD require “some” amping power due to their somewhat modest sensitivity (100dB/mW). The good news is their impedance is not ultra-low (22 ohm), which increases the population of sources able to deliver the required current at that load point.

Physicals

Build

Much like most of Intime’s other models, Sho DD’s housings are made of two parts: a Duralumin front, complemented by a resin back side. “DD” in the name stands in fact for “Duralumin Design”, and also somehow recalls the presence of a DD (Dynamic Driver) inside.

Fit

Bullet shapes (slim ones like those designed by Final or Akoustyx, or fat ones like Intime’s) are quite easy to fit for me, just a bit wobbly.

I always considered wobblyness as a sort of unavoidable drawback until I came across those Earlock fitters bundled with Akoustyx S6, which taught me that it is possible to stabilse bullet-shaped housings, and do that for good. Sadly, original Earlocks won’t fit Sho-DD due to their too small central bore, so I temporarly adopted “comma-shaped” rubber fitters. The result is better than nothing but not perfect yet, so I’m keeping my search for suitable Earlock-shaped alternatives – stay tuned…

Eartip selection is one of those particularly tricky cases here. Most of the silicones I tried make treble going too hot and somewhat metallic. At long last I concluded that the best 3 silicon options are Acoustune ET07 (that is – guess what – those bundled with the product), Intime’s own iSep01 tips, or JVC SpiralDots.

Nearly identical to ET07 in shape and size, Intime’s own iSep are not ideal for my particular case however due to their softer umbrella structure: that’s supposed to be more comfortable to wear, and bring the advantage of a somewhat tighter bass, but it also proves a bit “too soft” for my particular case, and it tends to collapse under my ear canal tightening, thereby losing the seal – which does not happen with their stiffer siblings, the original ET07.

SpiralDots are an even better bet in terms of treble rendering, but they come with a further note body incresase on the midbass, which some might find excessive, even if it’s not associated with any additional transient loosening / bloating.

A very good alternative to silicones are foamies, which I normally don’t like but in this particular case I got very good sonic results with Comply TSX-400, and with INAIR Air-2, both of which I can then dearly recommend.

Comfort

Very subjective. I personally find them quite comfortable like all bullet shaped housings, even better if complemented with suitable rubber fitters (see above).

Isolation

No concha shielding due to bullet shape, but their “fat” build contributes positively nonetheless.

Cable

Sho DD are offered in 3 alternative packages: just the housings with MMCX connectors and no cable, the housings with MMCX connectors and a silver plated OFC 3.5mm terminated cable (“Intime M drum” cable), and the housings with proprietary Intime Pentaconn connectors and the matching silver plated OFC cable, in a choice of 3.5, 2.5 or 4.4 termination (“Intime P Tsuzumi” cable).

While Intime’s silver plated OFC cable is technically good, Sho DD (like Miyabi) are very sensitive to cable variations and after quite a few swaps and rotations I found Dunu DUW-02S pair best on Sho DD, significantly improving layering, separation and airness.

Specifications (declared)

Key technologies

I already covered Intime’s key internal technologies within my previous articles regarding Intime IEMs, here and here. I’ll quickly go through the differences applying to Sho DD.

The Dynamic Driver has a Titanium coating, different from Miyabi and Sora 2 which carry a Graphene-coated membrane.

The housing’s front part is made of Duralumin, which is an alloy made of Aluminun, Copper and some other stuff. Its advantages are basically similar resistance as stainless steel, with a weight similar to aluminum instead.

The VST tweeter and the HDSS device are instead both 3rd generation version, the same adopted inside Miyabi.

Comparisons

Intime Sho DD Halloween (discontinued)

Externally different just insofar as they carry a purple-colored resin housing backside (vs. regular Sho DD’s clear/transparent one) internally they reportedly differ only for a slighty different internal wiring.

Sonically, Sho DD Halloween come with a bit dampened, “more polite” (“less energetic”) highmids and treble. Sho DD are “crisper” up there. Sho DD Halloween alre also somewhat slammier on the midbass, decay is a bit shorter. I think the mids being a bit more evident compared to Sho DD are a consequence of what precedes.

final E5000 (€ 249)

Given E5000’s strong oddity, this comparison can’t forget to mention powering requirements.

When both are paired to a high(er) system, featuring very strong current delivery on low impedance loads, e.g. CMA-400i, QP1R/QP2R, 9038SG3 etc, then Sho DD deliver more solid note body and slightly less controlled midbass compared to E5000. Mids and vocals are less recessed on E5000, which also makes them sound a bit more organic. Sho DD delivers all the highmids and treble power, air, and energy that E5000 lacks. And finally, E5000 is still a bit (yet not much) better at layering compared to Sho DD.

When instead both are paired to a weaker-current source (e.g Dragonfly Cobalt, Sony A55, etc etc) E5000’s bass overfills the place and the presentations stirs towards darker tones – while Sho DD suffers much less if at all of the situation, coming out simply better on all respects in that situation.

Ikko OH10 (€ 170)

OH10’s bass is way tighter, colder and slammier, therefore less visceral and textured. Sub bass is a bit deeper on OH10, most of all more hearable due to the leaner midbass. Mids are similarly recessed but Sho DD has a fatter note body and therefore a more organic timbre. Treble air is similar, Sho DD is more energetic and presence treble is superior in quantity and quality. On the flip side OH10 is (in comparison) more relaxing in a sense.

Considerations & conclusions

Really well exectured V-shape IEMs are very uncommon, and that’s an already good reason to recommend Sho DD to those looking for one.

Add near-perfectly harmonised heterogenous drivers offering meaty yet controlled bass, and sparkly, vivid, energetic, highmids and trebles free from excesses and sheens. Complete with spectactular technicalities and you’re close to unicity. Masterful, nothing short of it.

Our generic standard disclaimer.

The post Intime Sho DD Review (Two Different Ones) appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Be as it may, I did assess a Penon driver (the Sphere) some time ago and I found it so wonderful it got stuck to our Wall of Excellence as the best single BA money can buy below $250, and that probably still is the case.

So it’s with quite some curiosity that I borrowed this pair of privately owned Fan 2 for a few days. They can be purchased on Penon’s site, here, for $279 plus freight and EU duties if applicable of course.

At-a-glance Card

Full Device Card

Test setup and preliminary notes

Sources: Sony NW-A55 mrWalkman / Questyle QP1R, QP2R, M15, CMA-400i – TRN T ear tips – Dunu DUW-02S cable – lossless 16-24/44.1-192 FLAC and DSD64/128/256 tracks.

Signature analysis

Tonality

Fan 2 have a mid-bodied note weight, showing some modest timbre incoherence between bass and treble segments (latter beind of course tighter and dryer). The tonality is however very natural across the board, with a modest, inoffensive tint of warmth, in a somewhat U-shaped, pleasant presentation

Sub-Bass

Rumble is very nicely calibrated, not too impositive nor too shy.

Mid Bass

Fan 2 deliver a very good mid bass line as notes are bodied, quite textured and almost punchy. It’s a good compromise between overly punchy / arid on one extreme and bleeding / boomy on the opposite. Timbre is a whiff wooly here, which is at the base of the abovementioned modest horizontal incoherence.

Mids

Mids are not forward but their timbre is natural and not lean, notes are decently bodied. Highmids are well present, quite energetic and well rounded, never offensive and almost glare free.

Male Vocals

Male singers come across well textured and organic on Fan 2, although not particularly outstanding vs the rest and a bit too lean to sound really organic. They may occasionally be influenced by (without outright succumbing to, though) the midbass warmth.

Female Vocals

Fan 2 offer a good rendering of female vocals, not particularly outstanding but not offensive let alone sibilant, while – like males – still a bit too lean to sound truly organic. Not a bad job for a non-vocal-specific driver though.

Highs

Treble is another part where Fan 2 strike a very good balance. They are vivid, open, almost airy, almost sparkly, without ever getting into excess leanness let alone scanting into metallic or artificial sheen. Sole negative notes are the already mentioned (modest) timbre incoherence vs the midbass and some very occasional splashyness.

Technicalities

Soundstage

Stage projection will depend quite a bit on fit optimization (see below). In best situation it’s not very wide, decently high and remarkably deep.

Imaging

Macrodynamics are no doubt amongst Fan 2 fortes: instruments are very pleasantly and distinctly positioned on the stage, and there’s air, clean space between them.

Details

Fan 2’s detail retrieval is simply “good”, thanks to the good work of the BA up there, free from excesses, and the good control imposed on the 2 dynamic drivers in the bass.

Instrument separation

Separation between main voices is very good thanks to very good imaging. Layering is also good, however it sometimes falls short, especially from the mids down, which is connected to the previously mentioned sligtly “wooly” timbre I found.

Driveability

Fan 2’s dynamic drivers are very sensitive to source impedance: a very low impedance host is recommended to avoid getting an evident bump in the mid bass. Apart for that, their quite high sensitivity help making it easy to get them amped mode than decently also by budget sources typically incapable of goo current flows below 16 ohm.

Physicals

Build

Housings are made of medical-grade resin and they seem quite solid but their most apparent feature is aesthetical beauty which is indeed a welcome if sadly uncommon case. The shape is clearly intended to offer as much hergonomicity to as many users as possible. Nozzles are uncommonly long, which is a love/hate thing I guess.

Fit

Fan 2 enter the class of very fit-sensitive drivers: move in-out, or even change their insertion angle and you’ll get quite obvious tonality and technicalities differences. In my case (see below) their particular shape & size is a further hurdle to find the ideal positioning + comfort + sound quality compromise.

After some long rolling I found TRN T EAR tips contribute to shorten midbass transients that little bit that makes them more neatly punchy without losing texture on one end, while – thanks to their short stems – helping on compensating long nozzles.

Comfort

I’m not particularly fond of Fan 2’s particular shape & size: in spite of the long nozzle the housings stay somewhat too “outside” my concha transferring me an unpleasant sensation of instability.

Isolation

Passive isolation is going to be quite good for all those who are lucky enough to have Fan 2 housings “seal” into their conchas.

Cable

I couldn’t assess Penon stock cable. Dunu DUW-02S pairs wonderfully though.

Specifications (declared)

Considerations & conclusions

Fan 2 are good, and I mean seriously good. They really have all it takes, and they do put it to good use to deliver a very pleasant musical experience. They are energetic however not violent, detailed however not aseptic, and feature a spot-on note body compromise, all of which make a superb allrounder of them. They also draw a sizeable scene, and cast wonderful imaging.

The fact that in spite of all that precedes I did not fall in love should honestly be considered totally incidental. My preference case is quite sided (see description above) and Fan 2’s somewhat too “soft” (slightly “wooly” I called it) note timbre is probably a much more a turn off for me than for many others.

I also do value layering quite highly, and that’s an aspect where Fan 2 don’t excel (without however being “bad”, mind you…). So for me Fan 2 is just “nearly there”, but as I said YMMV (for the better).

At their $279 price Fan 2 is no doubt to be taken in high consideration. It’s definitely relieving to find a piece of “chifi” manufacturing which is seriously worth its price. Good job Penon.

Our generic standard disclaimer.

The post Penon Fan 2 Review – Nearly There appeared first on Music For The Masses.

Introduction

One of my most “interesting” discoveries for me has been that a high end, high efficiency IT system (e.g. an hi-tier Laptop) can be quite far from being an ideal platform for an apparently “light” data transfer activity such as streaming digital audio from where its passive containers (the FLAC or WAV files) are, up to a USB-connected DAC.

The first and simplest perplexity an IT enthusiast, or specialist, comes up with when confronted with the above statement is some variation of:

“Cmon… A bit is a bit! The PC just has to transfer a digital file to a digital device, via a digital interface. Don’t tell me you ‘hear’ deterioration in the process as there can’t obviously be – data will not deteriorate!”.

Of course it’s exactly like that.

A bit is a bit, and the very same bits stored into (say) a FLAC file onto the PC’s hard disk will reach the externally connected USB DAC once sent over. No doubt. No error.

Too bad that this is not the point.

Cables as trojan horses

DACs are devices supposed to take such digital data (FLAC or whatever files) and convert their contents “on the fly” (i.e., while still receiving them, one little chunk at a time) into analog data (i.e. the music we all want to enjoy).

So far so logic. The problem is that a few unobvious caveats apply.

First of all it’s important to understand that while EMI (Electro Magnetic Interference) and RFI (Radio Frequency Interference) investing, say, a laser printer while printing a Word page on paper is not going to significantly (or at all) change the quality of a 600 dpi printed text, DAC chips and the rest of the circuitry around them will change (and significantly so) their behaviour, and ultimately reproduce “different sounding music”, when subject to EM/RF (and other) perturbance.

And no, it’s not enough to protect (“shield”) the DAC against perturbances in the human audible frequency ranges (20-20.000 Herz give or take) because this all is not about preserving the DAC’s job result after it was obtained, rather it’s about making sure the DAC is not “disturbed while doing its job” (simplistically said).

The bad news is in facts that DAC chips, and the electronics “around” them inside the box are sensible to frequencies up to a few Giga herz (!), which can sadly come from a virtually infinite spectrum of possible origins.

“Well then this is mostly about properly shielding the physical DAC box, so any possible “waves” polluting the environment near my DAC will not get in, no? Is this why I often read that a desktop device will most often be better than a mobile one?“

Sadly, no.

Or yes, of course you would ideally want a “nicely shielded dac box”. And yes, this is (normally) an inherent advantage desktop systems have over portable ones. That’s quite logical. But not enough.

Seriously pernicious interference can first of all come from the DAC’s power supply itself.

Converting from Alternate Current (supplied by the wall outlet) to Continuous Current (required by the DAC electronics to work) creates in general “side effects”, which are nasty for our DAC, and are transported into it by the very electrical cable which is needed to feed it with the “good part” of its required power.

Ideally, we would want:

1. a “side effect free” Power Transformer, to generate an as apriori-pure CC as possibile, and
2. shielded power transport cables to avoid “collecting noise on the go”.

Furthermore: the USB cable is another trojan horse for noise – and the more so if the same cable is used to carry both data and power into those DACs that do not have a separate input port for an independent power supply.

A PC 99.9% of the times has not been designed with audio-grade EMI/RFI prevention in mind, for the simple reason that it won’t be required by 99.9% of its uses.

All sorts of “bad waves” (I’m again vulgarising here) do happen inside the PC, and do indeed propalate out via any connected electrical conductor – there surely included the USB cable, the same on which our “a bit is a bit is a bit” data is unawarely travelling.

Timing is vital

Should the above (vulgarised) scenario be not enough, there’s even more to take care of. Again, I’ll make this a bit simplistic but give me some rope here, or wordage gets too complicated and it all’d get even worse

Data communication between a PC and another PC, or between a PC and a HD for example, are designed to be “as quick as possible”, while not necessarily “as time-regular as possible”.

While saving your Word file from your PC memory to your HD the actual writing speed might vary during the process as a consequence of many factors (your PC doing something else at the same time, the HD receiving other files at the same time, the HD speed recalibrating following thermal variations, etc etc etc). Depending on what actually happens, your file will save like one tenth of a second faster or slower. Who cares…

In a very bad case a peak of interference will force a data packet retransmission: a full second might be lost in the process (how bad!…). What really matters though is that no quality difference will be there at the end: our file will be “perfectly intact” on the HD.

Not the same applies when the “receipient” is a DAC.

Audio devices require to receive digital data on a perfectly timed schedule. Otherwise (guess what?) the DAC being unable to autonomously correct such schedule, it will convert data at the “irregular” pace with which it receives them, and the result will be “different music” than expected.

Data flow into the DAC must follow a sort of atomic-clock-precision “metronome”.

Now guess what else: when you connect an external DAC to a PC via USB, the default choice is using the PC’s internal “metronome” (called “Clock”), which – you know that by now – is sub-par for our audio purposes as it never was designed with the level of accuracy, and never equipped with those pace-granting gimmicks a DAC desperately needs.

Furtherly, even when the PC and the DAC “somehow manage” to adopt an adequately reliable clock to keep data flow pacing as regularly as the DAC wants, internal PC EMI/RFI can – and will – screw timing up every now and then anyway. And, DAC chips in general don’t come with built-in “circuitry” capable to correct such “hiccups” on the fly.

Lastly: as pacing is so important each DAC has its own independent metronome clock generator inside, used to master the timing of all its internal operations. A similar little device (“oscillator”) than the one used inside the PC generates that, just a more precise (and expensive) one. Too bad that such device is an electrical device like all the rest inside there, so should inbound power supply be not perfectly clean… yes, you guessed it

What a mess. What can we do?

Well very simply put what I just tried to say until now tells us that first and foremost a “generic” IT system (a PC, a Laptop…) is for a number of reasons far from being an ideal choice as an “audio player” when audiophile-grade results are wanted.

To solve the problem there are three possible conceptual approaches

1. Adopt more “audio-adequate” systems as digital players, and/or
2. Adopt “higher tier” audio devices (DACs) equipped with appropriate “noise countering” circuitry, and/or
3. Adopt additional devices, stacked “in between” the digital player and the DAC to “correct issues” on the go

A super-simple example of type-1 approach is using a battery powered device as digital player: it will infacts apriori have less power-originating noise as it will not require a power transformer (although… careful here: batteries are not totally noise-free either… but let’s not overcomplicate the story now).

Always in the type-1 area: stay away from general purpose PCs, even more so if they are beefed-up gaming rigs. Every single chip on the motherboard is a potential (and effective!) source of EMI/RFI and of time-pacing perturbance.

Even on “simpler hw” machines then gaming rigs the more different stuff the operating system is asking the hw to do while sending data out, the worse for our case. Using an appropriate SBC (Single Board Computer) class device driven by a stripped-down OS where only the essential processes to our special case are kept alive is, barred exceptions and caveats, a technically much healtier – if technically steeper – path to follow for best results given the situation.

A DAC offering the possibility to get power from an independent, audio-quality Power Supply instead of sucking it from the host via the same USB cable used for data is then the first and simplest example of type-2 approach.

DACs capable of inverting the default master-slave USB protocol, and play the “host” role themselves while receiving USB data from the host are another. And so on.

And finally, a number of articles will over time appear on our blog covering devices and accessories of various vendors and types implementing “type-3 approach” at various levels. Stay tuned

The post A Bit Is A Bit Is A Bit. Or… Is It? appeared first on Music For The Masses.

I recently spent quite some time reassessing from scratch all of my analog cables, aiming at spotting the most beneficial pairing for each, with particular regards to the IEM cables of my preferred drivers.

This article is the first of a (short) series on such topic. It covers Dunu’s DUW-02S IEM cable.

You can find it from multiple sources including Dunu’s own website of course. A reliable, and even economically convenient outlet is Hifigo, which lists them for $79,00 (and puts them on sale quite often, too).

At-a-glance Card

One-off introduction

These articles of mine about cables will be very short, much shorter than an average piece regarding a pair of IEMs or Headphones.

For this one first piece of the series, however, I reckon a general introduction is due. I will put it in this first article only. Boy scout word.

Let’s go.

I won’t begin to articulate on audio cables (analog and digital, by the way) making a difference or not. They do, period. If you believe the opposite you are welcome to consider me a moron. In such case do yourself a favor and quit this page immediately.

That said, cable effects can be quite varied.

Sometimes, especially in a low end configuration, the difference a cable makes is lost in the big ocean of noise and distortion, or is somehow made irrelevant by the other elements in the audio chain (from the track recording quality, to the transport, all the way to the transducers).

In some other cases, [some of] the virtuous differences cables introduce correspond to weak spots in some other component of the stack, and this results into a negative instead of a positive effect.

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly when in conjunction with modest budget (let’s say <3000€ overall) chains, the most frequent difference a cable makes is a negative one, simply due to its bad quality – either in terms of conductive components, or even most frequently in construction quality, or both.

With all this in mind a first problem about cables is: where the heck do I get the information on which cable(s) I better avoid, and which I better get ?

Look around you: how many sources can you name whose opinions about audio gear historically lead you towards purchases which, once put on personal use, turned out to accurately match what you thought you would get based on what you had read?

Now, assuming the answer to the previous question is a number greather than 0 : how many of such sources cover the cables topic, even only occasionally ?

Good. Now you know why I had to go through almost naked hands on this, experimenting in first person, of course in small steps.

Very much expectedly I had to kiss quite a few frogs before even understanding how a frog looks like – let alone getting a princess up.

This piece is about the qualities of one particular IEM cable (more articles will follow about other models) so I won’t go into specific details about all the frogs I kissed the cables I bought (and binned).

It might however be quite interesting to recap the passages of the process I went through:

One: every single one of the <75$ IEM cables I tested (in total surely more than 150 different models, if I factor stock cables in) introduced some or a lot of distortion / negative coloration.

Two: Same can sadly be stated for quite a few more expensive ones, too :(.

Three: I identified an extremely short list (less than 5 models) of <75$ IEM cables offering at least “some” positive sonic benefit. Sadly, those come alongside other distortive side effects. Pairing such cables within an audio chain which is somehow not particularly sensitive to their particular negative effects does result in a moderate bottomline benefit. Joy.

And lastly, four: I identified an (for now) even shorter list of >75$ IEM cables offering way more obvious sonic benefits, and hardly any negative ones. Biiiiigger joy.

From all this I drew a couple of quite logical conclusions:

One: cheap cables come with statistically cheap quality. Unsurprising, isn’t it. Surely by searching a lot I might be lucky and find more gold straws in the haystack – but that’s simply not me: in Las Vegas I wouldn’t be a penny machine gambler. I am not going to spend one more euro researching “rarely decent, wonderfully inexpensive cables” – same as I won’t be looking for the next budget priced “giant killer” (??!?) IEM, or DAC, or DAP of course. I can’t be arsed, really, and that’s final.

Two: higher tier cables are a very risky but at least more rewarding gamble. There are uninspiring, and even downright crappy expensive cables, and that’s the damned risky bit. But, there are also very good ones, which do make a big difference when paired to the IEMs I love.

This article is about one of those, until now the least expensive one I found by the way.

Features and description

Physicals and their impacts

DUW-02S is an IEM cable, in the very common length of 1.2m.

Its conductors are high purity silver-plated OCC copper wires, arranged in Type-1 Litz configuration. Conductors are structured in 4 cores, each one protected inside a non-declared polymer sheath, brided together.

The overall result is very lightweight, soft, with great haptics. It’s also very smoothly flexibly, it doesn’t tend to “keep the shape”, and it’s almost impervious to tangling. Simply put: it’s very “pleasing” when in service.

On the IEM end DUW-02S features (fixed) terminations: either MMCX or (protruded) 0.78mm 2pin plug models are available. Either model must be selected apriori, IEM terminations can’t be swapped later.

The 0.78 2pin plug is long enough to perfectly fit Final Audio A-series connectors (known to be particularly recessed). On the flip side, when plugged onto un-recessed 2pin female connectors (e.g. those on Ikko OH10, or many other IEMs) the aesthetic effect is less than ideal, and the total connector length is on the edge of inconvenience, too.

Regarding MMCX connections, all Dunu cables I tried (3 different models, a dozen total different samples, and counting) always proved mechanically slick, convincingly firm and reliable when stuck onto the female MMCX sockets found on so many IEMs, diverse by brand and model.

A special mention deserve Intime MMCX IEMs : DUW-02S plugs into Miyabi, Miyabi-II, Yo, and Sho DD housings “better” than those drivers’ own stock cables (!). This does not happen with Intime IEMs only, indeed, but in Intime’s case it happens all the times.

One last note about the IEM end is about ear guides: I find their shape too “tight”. That’s totally subjective of course, and in facts it happens with many other cable brands/models in my case. YMMV.

On the host side, DUW-02S features Dunu’s proprietary, patented modular plug system named “Q-Lock PLUS”.

Unlike pretty much all of their lower priced competitors I assessed to date, Dunu’s Q-Lock system offers seriously firm, reliable connections, free from any risk for the cable to slip off the back of the end-plug in conjunction with an even modest pulling force.

If something, I very occasionally got the opposite: on the various Dunu cables I assessed some plugs required a little bit higher insertion force when applied to the cable, and/or the Q-Lock ring sliding felt not perfectly fluidly. In no occasion however such relative hardness turned into connection failure or impossibility, so I can’t fairly book any of this as a non-conformity.

DUW-02S comes commercially bundled with a 3.5mm TRS (single ended) Q-Lock plug. It is not possible to opt for a different standard plug when purchasing the cable.

It is indeed possible to buy extra plugs, first of all those with 2.5mm TRRS or 4.4mm TRRRS balanced analog terminations, the special 3.5mm TRRS balanced analog (fantastic option, to fully exploit Ifi’s S-Balanced architecture, e.g. on their GO link dongle), or the Digital special plug, which includes a mini DAC-AMP inside and is in its turn available either with a USB-C or a (genuine Apple certified) Lightning male plug.

Dunu’s Q-Lock modular plugs are a major benefit if I look at my preferred host gear collection. DUW-02S is the least expensive amongst Dunu cables featuring it.

Sonic impact

And finally after all this bla bla here we come to the main course. The sonic benefits brought along by DUW-02S are:

• Tighter and fuller midbass notes. Notes are better rounded, and slammier.
• Higher central mids resolution.
• Improved note and instrument separation, especially in the midrange
• Some improvement on stage depth.
• More vivid high mids.

Such benefits are in some cases just blatant, other times more modest, but they are always there pairing DUW-02S with my preferred drivers, namely

• Final B3 and E5000, vs stock final C106 cable
• Final E4000, vs stock final C112 cable
• Final A3000, A4000 vs stock final 2pin black sheathed cable
• Final A5000 vs stock final 2pin braided cable
• Intime Miyabi, Miyabi MK-II, Sho DD Halloween, Sho DD and Yo Electro, vs both Intime-M Sound and Intime-M Drum cables
• Tanchjim Oxygen vs stock 2pin cable (easy win : Oxy’s stock cable is horrible)
• Ikko OH10 vs Ikko stock 2pin cable

I feel it’s particularly worth to underline how DUW-02S makes final B3 and E5000 “sound better” on all counts in comparison with their original final C106 cables (same bundle on both models), retailing for twice the price of the DUW-02S. Ditto for A5000, in comparison with their newly designed, braided stock cable.

Even most importantly: out of all those I tried, to my experience DUW-02S is the least expensive cable bringing multiple, consistent sonic benefits to all those IEMs, systematically doing better than their relevant stock cables. All other more or even much more affordable cables I tried on those same drivers either don’t improve over stock cables, or they do, but very lightly and partially, and always introducing some (negative) side effect too.

For example: there are cheap cables improving on bass tightening, but overexciting highmids at the same time. Others nicely add on note body across the spectrm, but cut on microdynamics in the process. Etcetera.

Talking about limitations, DUW-02S tend to give high-mids some more beer while keeping a more than decent control on them. However when pairing with signatures already featuring important elevations on 3 – 4KHz they might get too hot. Intime Miyabi is an example of such a borderline situation: DUW-02S is still a good pair for me, probably won’t be for a more high-mids sensitive person. Akoustyx S6 + DUW-02S is instead beyond acceptable.

And lastly, I found one single case which I tend to consider an “absolute lack of synergy”, and that’s final F7200 + DUW-02S. Compared with stock final C071 cable pairing we have improved midbass but too hot high-mids and most central mides moved wwway too much forward. A no-no.

Considerations & conclusions

While IEM cables are not something to start bothering with until reaching a certain stability in one’s audio tastes and equipment fleet, they may indeed bring obvious sonic improvements once properly identified and paired with selected drivers.

The bad news, if you wish, is that inexpensive cables are in the overwhelming majority of the cases a pure waste of money – so much so that I tend to recommend everyone to totally disregard the topic until he/she feels ready to get involved with cables costing 75-100$ at the very least.

In hindsight, I would actually do the same if it weren’t for the (partial) need of swapping fixed-terminated 3.5mm stock cables with balanced terminated ones to enable pairing to some sources. Not that this can be considered vital: a 50$ driver will stay a 50$ driver even if better amped, or driven by a better DAC. Nevertheless, now that I identified some at-least-half-decent budget cables I basically crystallised them as my “safe cheap harbors”, and I use them when I need a “balanced swap” on a driver I’m reviewing or whatever I am not particularly committed to. A future article of this series will be dedicated to them.

The more expensive cables market does instead offer good, and very good options, if mixed and hidden amonst pure lemons. Same to what happens on any other market, after all…

Dunu’s DUW-02S is until now my least expensive find in terms of an IEM cable bringing evident sonic benefits to most of my preferred drivers, very few and occasional sonic caveats, reliable modular host termination technology, very high quality MMCX implementation, and convincing general construction quality.

At $79 plus the cost of extra modular plugs DUW-02S is not something I would recommend buying to pair with a sub-100$ driver. However, the improvement it brings to quite a few mid-tier IEMs (those I explicitly listed above and some more others…) makes for an obivous recommendation when in search of an effective way to improve on an already loved mid tier driver.

Hifigo offered me a modest “reviewer discount” on DUW-02S, as always without expectations strings attached in terms of my subsequent review contents, and I thank them for both things.

Our generic standard disclaimer.

The post DUW-02S Headphone Cable Review – Most Affordable Significant Upgrade appeared first on Music For The Masses.

These MS5 have been heavily anticipated and are supported by a very energetic marketing campaign (nice job there, it must be said). Priced at $499 List, they are currently on promo at $399 + freight, and you can buy them here.

(As always our links are not sponsored: we don’t get any commission on sales – we “literally” don’t “care” if anyone buys anything as a consequence to any of our articles).

At-a-glance Card

Full Device Card

Test setup and preliminary notes

Sources: Questyle QP1R & QP2R / Sony NW-A55 mrWalkman / Questyle M15 / Questyle CMA-400i – JVC Spiraldot tips – Stock cable – lossless 16-24/44.1-192 FLAC and DSD64/128 tracks.

Signature analysis

Tonality

MS5 come with a modular screw-in nozzle system intended to offer easy access to tuning alternatives.

Default nozzles are colored “Gold” and are supposed to offer the most balanced presentation – whatever that means in the manufacturer’s mind.

Red nozzles are supposed to offer a bassier alternative, and they do, but just indirectly: they mainly tame trebles between 3KHz and 5KHz, and quite substantially so, while leaving the bass line pretty much unaltered in elevation, just a bit tamed in terms of transients.

Lastly, Silver nozzles are supposed to offer a brighter, more treble-accented presentation, which they indeed do – even too much so.

Which one to choose?

Let’s start from noting that on Gold nozzles MS5 offer a “reasonably” coherent presentation. The Dynamic Driver in charge of the bass is well harmonized with the BA also in charge of the same segment, and that’s very good. Not the very same however happens when we consider the 2 BAs in charge of the trebles. The end result is decent in terms of timbre homogeneity but not much more than that: MS5’s timbre is on average lean-ish, a bit better bodied towards the bass, and oppositely quite anemic towards the treble. The general tonality is bright although not excessively so (treble exaggerations are a separate discussion, see below).

So much for Gold nozzles. As trebles are MS5’s most prominent Achille’s heel (again, see below), Silver nozzles furtherly enhancing treble are a quite obvious no-no. I guess that will stand for die-hard treble heads too, however personal tastes are sacred of course, so…

Red nozzles sound (pun intended) like a viable alternative to Gold ones: they change the general timbre making it “woolier”, and make tonality much less bright, mure like “bright-neutral” indeed, but the presentation gets definitely duller.

Long story short, MS5’s nozzles remind me a “pick your poison” scenario: Gold nozzles for a bright tonality on overly thin timbre. Red nozzles for a less thin, less bright but also less engaging experience. Silver nozzles… just bin them. In the end I “preferred” the Gold poison option, which is then what all the following notes refer to unless, where explicitly otherwise indicated.

Sub-Bass

Rumble is very present and not excessive, thanks to the good deeds of the Dynamic Driver

Mid Bass

The midbass is arguably the best part of the product. Here a very good job has been made in making the BA and the DD drivers work together coherently, resulting in mid bass notes which are at the same time snappy, punchy, textured and bodied. No overshadowing of the mids ever takes place, and a correct balance is also kept vis-a-vis the sub bass rumble.

On Red nozzles the entire timbre gets a perceivable bit less sharp, more “wooly” so to say, which files off some of the bass thumpness. Not wonderful but not a tragedy either.

Mids

Mid frequencies are uninspiring, mainly due to a definitely lean timbre making them lack body and credibility. They are clean, and that’s a plus of course, but highmids tend to be often too prominent, and sibilant in many occasions.

On Red nozzles the tonality situation gets sensibly better, whereby mids come across a bit (not much) more bodied and natural, and highmids cease being sibilant and excessive in most occasions, however clarity gets a severe hit.

Male Vocals

Male voices partially benefit from the good deeds of the low-range BA (and possibly of the DD too?) so in terms of tone they come across as reasonably organic more often then not. Microdynamics are however basic if even present, and texturing is meh.

Red nozzles make them a bit better, if a tad softer.

Female Vocals

MS5 is not the driver you want for female voices, that’s clear as the sun in the sky. Too lean, even ethereal, very often sibilant, and totally inorganic. Red nozzles make them less tragic, almost viable.

Highs

Trebles are a mixed bag of very diverse stuff. On one end there’s some good energy, a lot of detail, and a lot of speed. On the flip side there’s way too thin body, and a sharp and frequent tendence to get unresolving and even messy, screwing layering and in the worst cases imaging too.

On Red nozzles the situation gets miles better, thanks to a quite dramatic taming of the frequencies between 3 and 5 KHz. Imaging comes out much more organic and credible, and that’s another plus. The downside however is that the positive energy is almost entirely gone, and Red-tamed trebles make the entire MS5 presentation much more “ordinary”, almost “dull” – a true pity.

Technicalities

Soundstage

Soundstage projection is not more than average for this price class, mainly focusing on horizontal and vertical axes, and hardly any depth.

Imaging

Macrodynamics (imaging) are not bad in general on MS5, and they would be even very good if it weren’t for the mids and most of all the trebles too often paddling in the wrong direction. Red nozzles make the situation better on this chapter.

Details

Detail retrieval is, together with bass, where MS5 show their best. Both bass and highmids+trebles do deliver tons of good details

Instrument separation

MS5’s proweness on detail retrival on one end turns into outstanding resolving power. The down side – very common on not particularly sophysticated BA-sets, and MS5 is not an exception – is a quite dramatic lack of microdynamics, mainly on the high registers. So MS5 offer very good instrument separation but at the high cost of too cut-out notes which is particulary detrimental on acoustic music of course.

Driveability

Thanks to their 104dB sensitivity MS5 are not difficult to drive, but beware their superlow impedance in case your source has an output impedance of 1 ohm or more – that might result in some unwanted midbass pushup

Physicals

Build

Housings are realised as a one-piece aluminum container, which appears at time solid and very elegant. Very stylish is the faceplate (its appreciation of course depends, even more then the rest, on personal tastes).

Fit

MS5 housings are quite bulky and they don’t sit properly into my concha: in spite of their quite long nozzles their shape and size are such that they keep protruding quite a bit towards the outside, which makes their firmness somewhat wonky.

MS5 also are quite tip sensitive, and (not uncommonly) none of the 3 different types of bundled tips are ideal for my tastes. After the usual long rolling session I decided that best match are JVC SpiralDots as they tend to tame the treble excesses while also offering a bit more tightness to the bass.

Comfort

Their shape and size make MS5 fit only “partial” as described above, which generates some light discomfort over medium wearing time for me

Isolation

Passive isolation is light, in my case mainly due to the housings not “filling” my concha appropriately

Cable

The stock cable is – like the housings – no doubt very nice to look at. Not the same I can say however in terms of practical use. Its creative 2-pin plugs can be annoying (they are in my case). The cable structure is very thick and wont be liked by those preferring smoothly flexible chords. Last but not least, I see no excuse at this date for offering a 499$ MSRP set (even if 25% discounted upon launch) bundled with a non-modular termination cable.

Specifications (declared)

Comparisons

Penon FAN2 ($280)

FAN2 offer an almost neutral presentation with a punchy bass emerging off of it without however warming it all up too much. The timbre is quite bodied although south of lushy – however miles more solid than MS5’s. Most of all, FAN2’s timbre is coerent across the entire spectrum, while MS5 is far from that target.

FAN2 bass is very good, punchy and somewhat rumbly, yet MS5 is better on both counts. Mids and moreover trebles are totally obviously better on FAN2 in terms of timbre, tonality, texture and organicity.

Detail retrieval is superior on MS5, microdynamics and layering are obviously much better on FAN2, which also leads in terms of imaging sharpness and realism. Neither is a monster at stage projection however FAN2 has much better distribution especially in the sense of depth.

Fearless S8F ($489)

S8F are a mid-tier full-BA set. Their main, probably single serious downside (a total turnoff for many, however – me included) is the unforgiving BA timbre and consequent scarcity on microdynamics, which is mostly common to MS5 however.

S8F tonality is well balanced, marginally even better than S8F. In spite of its above-mentioned “imperatively BA” nature, S8F timbre is anyhow less lean and most of all much more coherent compared to MS5’s. MS5 offer a better structured bass line. Vocals are better on S8F, females in particular. Detail retrieval is about on par on highmids and trebles with S8F sounding a bit better thanks the somewhat better control in the presence and brilliance sections. Soundstage is no biggie in both cases, S8F being less wide but a bit deeper.

Tanchjim Darling ($419)

Darling are based on 1 DD + 2 Sonion BA, in lieu of the 4 Sonions adopted inside MS5. Very simply put, Darling deliver correctly on pretty much everything MS5 fail on.

Darling’s tonality is bright-neutral, with a much more coherent and bodied, acoustic timbre compared to MS5. Darling bass and sub bass are extremely good, fast, punchy yet rumbly and textured – nothing worse than MS5. On Darling highmids and brilliance trebles are wonderfully cablibrated and deliver clarity, detail, sparkles and air while always avoiding fatigue – the polar opposite of what happens on MS5. Female vocals are very good and therefore much better on Darling, male vocals are just marginally better though.

Separation is probably on par on the two sets, but Darling win big on microdynamics and soundstage, and less big, but still have an edge, on imaging.

Final A5000 ($279)

A5000 represent a possibly even more significant comparison then even Darling are, as they deliver on many counts even better results than MS5 within a very similar bright-neutral base target tuning, all of that by employing just 1 (one) driver, and at a sensibly lower price.

A5000 first of all offer an almost impeccable timbre coherency accross all the spectrum. Their bass is similarly punchy, with even better texture but a bit less rumble compared to MS5. Low mids are somewhat recessed on A5000 and a bit lean too, however their timbre and note body is way more organic and natural-sounding that MS5’s.

Highmids and treble are superbly calibrated on A5000. Certainly detail retrieval is less articulated on A5000, but in exchange microdynamics are all there where they are supposed to be – within a fast driver category, surely – instead of MIA as on the MS5.

From the tonality standpoint a valid criticism on A5000 is that highmids are too enhanced compared to mids. What’s interesting here is that moderately pushing central mids (1 – 2KHz) up with a wide eq filter closes the gap on that transition, delivering a more balanced result free from excesses (shouts, splashes or zings). Not the same happens on MS5 when you try (via the Red nozzles or via EQ) to similarly rebalance: the result is a more fluid tonal transition, yes, but still accompanied by lack of refinement both on the highmids & trebles, and on the lowmids & midbass (read more above).

Instrument separation sounds more detailed on MS5, but much more enjoyable on A5000 thanks to the less arid timbre, and better microdynamics.

Considerations & conclusions

As I tried to outline, I found MS5 a more than acceptable product, presented in a quite elegant and rich way too. Bass, detail retrieval and instrument separation are surely commendable, so is the adoption of replaceable nozzles to offer pre-defined “tuning variations” to the more curious users.

The timbre, however, is off, both in nature and coherence. Note body is too lean, trebles can obviously use more work upon, so do soundstage projection and microdynamics.

In conclusion MS5 are not disdainable at all, however they don’t seem yet to have what it takes to stand out of their existing competition, sometimes even costing significantly less.

Based on the very plesant communication I’m having with them I can testify Hidizs sounds strongly committed on their IEM program, for which they of course aim at the same market recognition they deservedly conquered on the budget DAP segment. I’m very sure they will come up with better and better proposals on the IEM market too in the near future. Let’s stay tuned

Our generic standard disclaimer.

The post Hidizs MS5 Review (2) – It’s A Long Way To The Top appeared first on Music For The Masses.

At-a-glance Card

Full Device Card

Test setup and preliminary notes

Sources: Questyle QP1R & QP2R / Sony NW-A55 mrWalkman / Questyle M15 / Questyle CMA-400i – JVC Spiraldot tips – Stock cable – lossless 16-24/44.1-192 FLAC and DSD64/128 tracks.

Signature analysis

Tonality

EA500 feature a clear and light-noteweight timbre, and a choice of two different stock tonalities realised by installing two alternative pairs of screw-on nozzles, identified by different colored rings.

“Red ring” nozzles closely follow the Harman 2016 target aiming at balanced all-rounder tonality. “Black ring” nozzles instead cater to Simgot’s “house target” i.e. the same used for tuning their higher tier models EA1000 and EA2000. Such tuning differs from the H2016 one insofar as mid and sub-bass are more enhanced, so are high-mids and somewhat presence trebles too, with the intention to deliver an obvisouly brighter presentation delivering better detail retrieval, separation and female vocals.

In my views black ring nozzles’ intention is pretty overambitious when paired the EA500’s light timbre: the result is excessively open, etheral, uncospicuous. For my taste “red ring” nozzles pair much better with this particular driver nature, the result being still bright but more down to earth and not dramatically distant from organicity.

Sub-Bass

Sub bass is present and well calibrated vs the midbass. This applies to both nozzle cases.

Mid Bass

EA500’s mid bass has good energy but only average texture and detail, also due to not particularly tight transients. Such effect is more evident with the red nozzles, while the black nozzles offer a whiff tighter bass speed in addition to more energetic highmids, all contributing to putting the midbass a bit more at bay in the general presentation economy.

Mids

Mids are a bit recessed from the middle down, and get more upfront on their upper part. Their tonality is reasonably organic, their main limitation being note leanness. Guitars are better on red nozzles vs black nozzles. High mids do have a tendence to get shouty sometimes.

Male Vocals

Male voices on EA500 are somewhat too much in the back to take good part to the ensemble. They are quite often put on second layer either by the midbass’s lack of tightness or the high mids’ energy (the more so on black nozzles).

Female Vocals

Female singers on EA500 come across much better than male ones, especially on black nozzles. Their notes are almost always reasoably bodied and organic.

Highs

EA500’s treble is energetic and somewhat sparkly, but also perceivably grainy and sometimes shouty. Small detail resolution is present, but also quite limited. Last octave is also not partcularly well extended.

Technicalities

Soundstage

EA500 cast a reasonably sized stage, mainly on the horizontal axis however. Depth is severely lacking, height is hinted.

Imaging

Imaging is above decent: instruments are, per se, quite credibly positioned in space. A limitation is more coming from lacking separation.

Details

Detail retrieval is OK-ish on highmids and trebles, however something better might be done even at this price. Black nozzles help but at the frequent risk of scanting into sibilance and some splashyness. Mid bass detail retrieval is very basic due to lacking texture.

Instrument separation

Instrument separation and especially layering are average at best, or I should say basic, really. Again the black nozzle with his extra brightness certainly helps discerning treble instruments better by adding some more clean air between instruments, if you can accept their sonic characteristic.

Driveability

EA500 are reasonably sensitive at a generally workable impedance, and can therefor be decently driven by very many sources, including some phones or low power dongles.

Physicals

Build

Housings are nothing short of beautiful to see and manipulate. Of course there’s some problem with fingerprints like it obviously happens due to the (well executed) mirror finish. The screw-in nozzle system is well realised, and the nozzles also have an eartip retention ring.

Fit

EA500 fit me very nicely, as they strike that golden (and very personal) balance amongst size, shape, weight and surface smoothness to almost perfectly adapt to my outer ear. YMMV of course.

Comfort

I find EA500 extremely confortable once fit, I could use them for hours without any mechanical fatigue.

Isolation

Due to their shape they realise a quite nice passive isolation in my case.

Cable

Stock cable is very much in line with the market standards at this price level.

Specifications (declared)

Comparisons

Final E3000 (€86 from Amazon in EU)

Even on red ring nozzles EA500 is tuned to be a priori brighter then E3000, which of course may make the comparison not relevant. Also, with their lower sensitivity E3000 come with the non-secondary aspect of requiring a less “common” source compared to EA500 to deliver their full potential.

Once all that’s considered, E3000 are obviously better in terms of note weight, and most of all space projection, instrument separation and layering. Their trebles are less extended and energetic – in this EA500’s being better – but also always well controlled, never sibilant or splashy. Bass on E3000 has good texture, and better detail retrieval then EA500 which however has the lead on the highmid and treble details side.

Intime Sora 2 (€52 + circa € 25 refowarding costs from E-earphones)

Sora 2 offer a quite similar stock tonality compared to EA500 “red” option, with an evidently more solid, organic note weight. Mid bass is more controlled and more textured on Sora 2. Highmids and trebles are similarly sparkly and energetic, with Sora 2 not scanting into grainiess, and in general delivering more realism – thanks for sure to Intime’s exceptional ceramic tweeter.

Even more difference comes out from layering and separation, where Sora 2 excels hands down (even compared to E3000 by the way). Both drivers, on the contrary, don’t offer big wonders in terms of stage depth. Lastly, Sora 2 is not heavily marketed on western markets, so european and american fellows need some proactivity to even know about them, and buy a pair.

Maestraudio MA910S (€73 delivered to EU from Amazon.jp)

A less energetic, flatter presentation, silkier version of the Sora-2, Maestraudio MA910S are also a great alternative to EA500. For the distracted ones, Maestraudio is the other brand owned by Ozeid, the same owners of the Intime brand, and their IEMs employ the same base technologies.

Again, layering and separation on MA910S and on a higher category compared thanks to the evidently better driver and implementation. Trebles are expressive yet totally ungrainy, bass is combed, not very snappy, vocals are very balanced, the lot is ideal for a more relaxed but yet still good quality listening. Stage is equivalently mainly extended on the horizontal axis on MA910S and EA500, but MA910S have way better height, and a bit more of depth (not much). The recently released MA910SB (featuring balanced termination for a price marginally passing 100€ delivery included) are also a very interesting alternative.

Considerations & conclusions

Choosing to compete on the <150€ market is a tough challenge for anyone, and that’s even for two reasons, not one alone.

First: on technical grounds final audio literally devastated the competition on this segment when they decided to enter it already a few years ago. E1000, E2000, E3000, E4000 (for the Harman-ers) and A3000 (for bright-tuners) represent such a wide, solid, complete offering that may make many not bother looking anywhere else, and rightfully so at least in terms of result vs effort ratio.

Second: probably due to the previous fact, a very thick army of manufacturers keep on trying their skills on this playground, making it if possible even more difficult for anyone to stand out of the big contenders crowd, busy as they all are with their endless, almost daily (!) flow of “yet-another” releases.

With EA500, Simgot put in place a solid first attempt at the sub-100€ budget playground, featuring some good personality to begin with. Easy nozzle-based tonality customizability is surely a good bet, in principle, which is made even better by a correct execution as in EA500’s case. Tonal coherence, also, is well carried out. The driver itself, however, does not seem fully up to the task when compared to established similar priced staples. They will make it better, I’m sure. I’m curious to assess Simgot’s future developments !

Our generic standard disclaimer.

The post Simgot EA500 Review – Budget Attempt appeared first on Music For The Masses.

At-a-glance Card

Features and description

Externals

GO Link is seriously small and lightweight, really barely more conspicous than a mere passive USB cable, and much more flexible thanks to the braided structure given to its external wires.

It comes with a single LED on the chassis, which is supposed to indicate its power ON state while idle, and the resolution of the digital content being played while working, according to the following scheme:

On the main chassis a single 3.5mm phone output port is available. On the opposite end of the white braided cabling, a single USB-C male connector is present.

Lastly yet very importantly GO Link comes bundled with 2 USB accessories: a USB-C to USB-A adapter, and a USB-C to Lightning adapter.

The Lightning adapter in particular is a quite expensive item when purchased separately, and it’s a crucial resource for Apple ecosystem users as it perfectly matches iPhone and iPad requirements, thus avoiding them the need for the bulky Apple Camera Adapter.

Internals

Not diverting from their habits, iFi releases just macro-information about GO Link internals, but hardly any finer details.

GO Link is built around an ESS SOC-class chip, namely the ES9219MQ/Q (data sheet) which, within the inherent limitations of a SOC chip, is a quite interesting model. It features for example “QUAD DAC+” internal structure, which iFi exploits big time within their smart “S-Balanced” scheme (see more below).

Another ESS9219 feature which GO Link puts to good use is Dynamic Range Enhancement (“DRE”). In GO Link case this results into a 6dB DR enhancement, which is quite significant for a product in this price class.

The rest of the components are coming from the usual manufacturers normally enlisted by iFi, first and foremost Murata and TDK (capacitors).

Input

GO Link is a “pure DAC/AMP dongle”, so its sole accepted input is digital, via the USB connection.

As previously mentioned, the package includes a native USB-C male plug, a USB-A adapter and a Lightning adapter, which considering the very modest total asking price are a huge added value.

Output

GO Link’s sole output is its analog 3.5mm connector, which of course accepts any 3.5mm single-ended terminated load… and something else, thanks to iFi’s S-Balanced technology implemented behind it.

I already covered this iFi proprietary technology multiple times on my articles regarding other iFi sources (here, here and here). You can alternatively refer to iFi’s own white paper, here.

Simply put S-Balanced is a smart way to route the analog signal inside the device such to realise a sort of (give me some rope here) “fake” balanced scheme even with a single amp stage (vs two independent, parallel ones as they are used within “real” balanced schemes).

S-Balanced offers the same benefits of a true Balanced scheme in terms of lower noise and distortion, and none of its drawbacks (to know why… RTFWP!) when it is connected to a balanced-wired (TRRS) load.

In addition to that, unlike a true Balanced scheme, S-Balanced is fully backwards compatible with single-ended (TRS) terminated loads.

And more: single-ended (TRS) terminated drivers plugged onto an S-Balanced port will get “some” improved sound quality (50% reduced crosstalk) compared to the same dac-amp circuitry organised following the “ordinary” single-ended flow.

So you understood well: GO Link’s 3.5 output port (same as Nano iDSD Black Label’s, for that matter) does accept both single ended and balanced ended terminated IEMs/Headphones.

But… how do I connect a balanced-terminated cable (typically ending in a 2.5mm or 4.4mm male plug) to GO Link’s 3.5mm phone out? With an adapter of course !

Now for the really odd part: iFi does not provide such adapter – neither within GO Link’s standard bundle, nor even as a separately-purchaseable part.

Be as it may, the 3.5 mm TRRS wiring you want is what is also called “Hifiman standard”. See here for reference.

I do have such an adapter (3.5mm TRRS male, 4.4mm TRRS female) from back in the days when I was using the Nano iDSD BL, and I can relate the “trick” does work: pairing the same balanced-wired IEM to GO Link once via a 4.4 to 3.5 TRS single ended adapter, and then via the 4.4 to 3.5 TRRS adapter, results in an obviously improved sound in the latter case.

Host power requirements

GO Link absorbs 1W = 450mA (max) while playing and 0.7W = 375mA while idle.

These are not the lowest figures in the industry – the champs always being the Dragonflys here, followed by E1DA 9038SG3 and 9038D – yet these are still to be considered quite modest values, which won’t make too quick shame of your phone’s battery. Yes, iPhones included (via the Lightning adapter supplied as a freebie).

Volume and gain control

GO Link does not offer a physical on-device volume control. Its volume control is interfaced with the one on the host platform (I positively experienced Windows and Android).

The situation is potentially problematic on Android which – by default – divides the USB device volume range in only 40 steps (or even 25 for the latest Android releases…), resulting in the last ticks converting into way too big SPL variations.

Luckily, those better featured player apps (e.g. UAPP) which you would normally anyway use for a number of other reasons one above all bypassing standard Android audio drivers do also allow for re-defining the number of steps Volume control is divided into (up to 250, on UAPP) – which solves the issue.

Other features

MQA Rendering

I won’t spend a word on what MQA itself is, of course. Google around if you wish and you’ll be overflooded with info.

What matters here is: GO Link is a “MQA Renderer”, so it can fully unfold MQA tracks on its own hardware, which is an upgrade vs the default represented by having the music player host do the unfolding, and only limited to the first 2 folds.

Firmware

Like all other iFi devices (well at least all those I know of, but the list seems quite comprehensive…), GO Link allows for the user to easily change/upgrade the device firmware.

At present time, on GO Link this option can only be actionated with the purpose of installing incremental firmware updates aimed at feature optimisations or bug fixing.

Package

I already covered this en passant above, but for the sake of completeness: GO Link comes in a small box but with the right bundle accessories, and premium quality ones at that too.

• USBC-Lightning passthrough adapter
• USBC-USBA passthrough adapter

Sound and power

GO Link sound quality is basically in line with what one would expect from a latest generation ESS SOC chip – such as what you get off of a Shanling M0 Pro, which I recently reviewed – with some little bit of further enhancement.

Who wants to go the extra mile is cordially encouraged to get a TRRS 3.5mm adapter and plug balanced-terminated drivers onto the GO Link. The improvement in terms of noise reduction, clarity, stage drawing and imaging will be quite obvious.

GO Link’s output power is not huge yet not weak either: it delivers 2V on high impedance loads (300+ ohms) and 1.5V (70mW) onto 32 ohm loads, making it an absolutely viable option for 95+% of the IEMs out there and much of the cans, too. Just avoid planars, and particularly current-hungry IEMs (E5000, B1…), and you’re a happy camper.

Considerations & conclusions

With the GO Link, positioned at just € 59 EU retail, iFi clearly aims at marketing a ultra-portable, not-necessarily-audiophile-tier “smartphone audio upgrade” device, offering all users of no-wired-analog-out phones an option to plug their wired drivers, and a sound quality and/or output power upgrade to all others.

After assessing it I can relate that iFi indeed went much, much beyond such intention.

While surely south of the top dongle market levels reached by the likes of Questyle M15, Apogee Groove, Dragonfly Cobalt and iFi’s own GO Bar, iFi GO Link offers very interesting output quality and power, full MQA rendering, instant matching with Windows, Android and/or Apple hosts, and even an extra option to pair with balanced-terminated drivers (via a third party adapter) for even wider compatibility, and even better sound.

What more an occasional user might ask for € 59 retail I frankly wouldn’t know.

Our generic standard disclaimer.

The post iFi GO Link Review (1) – What More ? appeared first on Music For The Masses.

At-a-glance Card

Important foreword

I feel it’s appropriate to extend an informative preamble here, you’ll understand why as you read on.

As you might (or might not?) know, the people at final do take a quite scientific approach to acoustics, and to their headphones design in consequence. If you didn’t yet, I warmly recommend you to spend a couple of hours (or more) on this article.

Until a few years ago final’s strategy line was to develop “in-ear versions” of their flagship D8000 headphones aiming at delivering something as close as possible to the “allrounder” archetipe. Such was, and still is, their E-series.

Later on, final took a different approach: investigating specific musical genres and their listeners’ preferences and/or requirements as a basis to develop IEMs focused on each particular situation.

Final A- and B- series are the results of such different strategy.

Final shared some more detail regarding their studies and consequent choices.

First and foremost they put attention on the aspect of “distance perception”.

When listening to some musical genres – namely orchestral classical or big band jazz – more than others spatiality is key. Thinking to the “real thing” (the orchestra in the theatre) you expect, and therefore you want , to “feel” their music “in a big room”, and perceive the different distance the various instruments or instrument grups are placed at from your seat, and from each other.

Oppositely, when one listens to hard rock, pop, or even small-group jazz (think to a trio in a smokey canteen) widespread 3D spacing is not important as indeed it does not correspond to “the real thing”. In such situation you indeed expect a group of voices playing physically close to one another, and what you want is not hearing them artificially scattered here or there, rather you want them to be rendered “sonically well separated” from one another.

When at a live venue of a small group you do in facts always discern the guitar from the bass and the voice even if they are all standing on a stage less than 10 square meters – such discernment capability is instead too often “lost in translation” while we listen to corresponding audio tracks.

Another key element that final focused on is what techies call the sound’s “dynamic range”.

Vulgarly translated, think to dynamic range as the number of distinguishable shades of a certain physical quantity. A box with 12 colored pencils from dark red to black is an example of a much tighter dynamic range compared to a big box of 144 Caran d’Ache, still going from dark red to same black.

Ported onto audio terms, a wider dynamic range sound is what you want to appreciate all the most minute variations Maria Callas was able to issue while warbling, or Uto Ughi can deliver from a Guarnieri del Gesù.

Oddly enough, in some cases a wider dynamic range is less desireable. Using only 12 colored pencils, in facts, it is much easier to tell a red from an orange, even if they are drawn one adjacent to the other, for the simple reason that there is apriori only “one” red and “one” orange in your palette, not a dozen different intermediate nuances of each.

When you have “a lot of space” in between two color (or sounds) spots, one blue the other red, you can have each reproduced with more subtle nuances. Oppositely if the two spots are closer to one another, or even overlapping each other, your first priority is to avoid they mix into a violet!

Thinking in these terms, orchestral music, or anyhow music composed of many “voices”, be them acoustic or electronic, coming from multiple, spread-out physical positions will better require higher space reconstruction and dynamic range capabilities.

Oppositely, music generated by very few instruments/voices/sources playing shoulder-to-shoulder will rather want all voices to be “more or less in the same spot”, and that’s when the highest available proweness in rendering them clearly distinct from one another becomes crucial.

The B series has been developed exactly thinking to such last mentioned applicative scenario: small groups acting on physically small stages, with overlapping sounds and voices – calling for relatively lesser need for “spatial amplitude” in exchange for much higher sonic separation capabilities.

This graph taken from final’s web site is at this point quite readable.

The term “Clarity” in this case is used in the sense of “being able to tell different sounds apart from one another”.

For completeness: the opposite scenario is the typical big orchestral setup, involving many voices positioned on a quite (or very!) sizeable physical stage. In such case priority #1 is rendering the amplitude of the original, real scene. Technically, translates into micro-managing sound timing, and rendering distant sounds as clean and articulated as close ones. That is final A-series ballpark, instead.

At the end of this lengthy preamble, I hope I made its very reason obvious: don’t blame your Fiat Panda turtle speed and deafening noise if your purpose is covering 50.000 KM/year on motorways, nor criticise your BMW 530 if costs your a pretty penny of gas in the messy downtown traffic.

Full Device Card

Test setup

Sony NW-A55 mrWalkman / Questyle QP1R / Questyle M15 / E1DA 9038SG3 / Questyle CMA-400i – Stock Final E tips – Dunu DUW-02S silver plated cable – lossless 16-24/44.1-192 FLAC and DSD 64/128/256 tracks.

Signature analysis

Tonality

B3 are just a bit on the bright side of neutral, with a presentation I would call roughly W-shaped. The timbre is very interesting: notes are clear and bodied, detailed and meaty – not simply “analogue”, rather “organically lifelike”. Veeery different from what’s commonly called “BA timbre”.

Sub-Bass

Sub-bass reflects the inherent limitations of BA drivers: its extreme end is in facts modestly rolled off. Not a big deal for my tastes: standup bass rumble is there anyhow. I can make it a bit more evident with some light EQing, which B3 bear with a certain tranquillity.

Mid Bass

Mid bass is very good but before that it’s… surprising. The BA driver reserverd to B3’s mid and low frequencies yields solid body and relaxed-calibrated transients, delivering still fast and punchy yet – very uncommonly for a BA – textured, flowery and meaty notes. For my personal taste B3’s midbass is at times even a tad too “imperative” – first time I hear such situation on a BA driver. Again, this can be easily corrected by some light EQing.

Mids

Mids are just spectactular: moderately forward, bodied, textured, articulated. Acoustic piano, guitar and tenor sax benefit most from this tuning.

Male Vocals

Baritones on B3 sound natural if just a whiff too much bodied to come across as “totally” realistic. Tenors are better in this sense: less “flowery” then baritones while still very much organic.

Female Vocals

Opposite to the male case, female voices are very good and cured, yet a purist might say they could use a bit more butter. And that’s true, in a sense, but in such case the rest of the tones “around” the soprano would have to be adapted too, to avoid losing coherence.

Highs

One of the two BA drivers is exclusively dedicated to this segment, with the quite obvious target of delivering an engaging and detailed experience while staying rigorously south of excesses. And boy did they succeed! A very good compromise has been reached here between note body and fine granularity, livelyness and unoffensiveness.

Technicalities

Soundstage

Unsurprisingly considering their apriori design choices, B3’s soundstage is not more than average for it price class. It is however, if modestly, extended in all directions including some depth. Caveat: stage size also depends on fit – deeper push-in = narrower scene, as always.

Imaging

All instruments are well cut-out from the ensemble – for how closed-in may it be – and realistically cast on the scene with good body, to a very organic result.

Details

Detail retrieval is very good on B3, however you shouldn’t expect a “detail monster” effect, whereby details are thrown at you as “the first thing you hear”. It’s indeed the other way around here: on the frontline you hear main-bodied notes, while back layers bring you the details that complement the sound richness.

That’s very likely the consequence of the precise tuning choices operated in particular on the trebles, where as I mentioned above an evident succeeded effort has been applied to delivered the highest possible energy while never scanting into excess and fatigue.

Instrument separation

Layering and instrument separation is arguably where B3 deliver their best. Capitalising on their timbre clarity, on the accuracy of their tonal calibration, and – why not – on particular driving hardware features, they deliver a really uncommon separation quality. If their design purpose was to render small, closed-in groups with the maximum single-voice definition, they no doubt hit the bullseye here.

Driveability

It’s not so easy to drive the B3 due to quite modest sensitivity (102dB/mw). Nothing as hard as a nasty planar however – a modestly amplified source is basically enough.

Physicals

Build

Housings are produced by Metal Injection Moulding, a process involving mixing steel powder with another element to form a resin which is then moulded at high temperature into the desired shape. The result is solid and sturdy, and aesthetically very pleasing at least for my tastes.

Fit

A 3-contact-point fit between the housing and the outer ear has been designed by final aiming at the best compromise between wearing firmness and light stress accumulation over time.

The design idea is quite brilliant to be honest, the rationale being: you need (just) 3 grip points to obtain stability. One is the eartip umbrella, inside the canal. Another one is the housing’s short front side vs the tragus.

And the third can be any one of the possible 4 contact spots between the housing’s shaped back side and the concha – depending on one’s ear particular shape that of course will happen on one or another position. I would say that for my experience it works as intended.

What I just find sub-ideal is the nozzle length which is a tad too short and makes tip selection pickier than it should. In my case the working trick luckily “just” stays in choosing a bigger size for my left ear: that gets me a firm grip and seal even if the tip stops “just in” the canal, relieving the need to push the housings too much into my left concha.

Comfort

B3’s particular housings size, their 3-point-fit design, and their external finish all contribute to a good comfort once I found my right “personal” position.

Isolation

Passive isolation is quite nice once B3 are properly fitted, but not more than that as the housings are not designed to “fill up” the concha, which would of course block more of the leak.

Cable

Stock cable is Final C106, a Junkosha silver plated copper with fixed 3.5 termination – it’s the same cable bundled as stock on A8000 and E5000. I recently focused how sonically limited such cable is – it’s at best on par with some quite cheap chifi alternatives, with the bad difference of it retailing for like 200$ when purchased alone.

In addition to that no modular termination plugs are available, so pairing B3 to a balanced source requires swapping it anyhow. To this day in 2023, and for packages like B3 starting to cost around 500$ list, I think final could do better.

After some cable rolling for my experience better stay on silver plated – pure copper “combs” B3’s trebles a bit too much – so I find Dunu DUW-02S an adequate quality option for B3. Compared to stock layering and note contouring get obviously better, and bass is better defined, less flowery.

Specifications (declared)

Comparisons

I’ll list a few comparisons down here, trying to be (for once) quite succint while hopefully informative enough

final B1 (€699 EU list)

Insofar as another member of the B-series, B1 follows the same apriori musical pairing indications as B3. Featuring a Dynamic driver in the mid & low frequencis in lieu of B3’s BA driver, B1’s timbre is full and lush, tonality is obviously warm and V-shaped, their bass is viscerally deep and authoritative (even too much), mids are more recessed, and trebles are relaxed. If B3 pleases those like me longing for organic, unadultered acoustic renditions, B1 obviously caters to people liking bass-colored, energetic playbacks. B1 is also very tricky to drive, requiring much more current than most portable sources are able to deliver, and when underbiased they sound dark and quite ugly (E5000, anyone?).

final F7200 (€ 469 EU list)

To me F7200 are [even more] specialised drivers, particularly dedicated to vocal performances like songwriters singers etc. Pretty much the single best driver I ever heard on that application. B3 offer more bodied, natural and more extended bass, and a bit better trebles.

Intime Miyabi (JPY 21000 + import costs)

Miyabi offer a more “classical-all-rounder” presentation with stronger bass personality, and those unique piezo-trebles-without-piezo-timbre. A close call on layering and separation with the edge probably in Miyabi’s favour, if not by much. Mids are better on B3, which also deliver “silkier” notes all over the spectrum, but cost twice as much.

final A5000 (€ 299 EU list)

As I tried to outline in the foreword up above, A-series stems from a polar-opposite design intention (rendering big bands instead of small groups) – no wonder then how B3 and A5000 sound different like day and night. A5000 draws a much wider space, and cast instruments all over it with a lot of clean air in-between one another. Notes are dryer on A5000 all accross the spectrum, its timbre is leaner, detail retrieval is “more upfront”. High mids and trebles may be “hot” for some on A5000, which do react very positively to EQ however. TL;DR: A5000 and B3 are fundamentally “complementary”.

iBasso IT04 (€ 499,00)

IT04, too, feature particular proweness on layering / separation, and prefer casting a more intimate scene with band elements imaged as more closed-in to one another. A very good job was done on IT04 bringing the 3 BA driver’s tonality close to their DD one, which however deprives IT04 of that little % of “treble life” which is there on B3 instead. IT04 has an open-V shape, warm-ish presentation in lieu of B3’s more W-shaped, bright-neutral one.

Oriveti OH500 (€ 499,00)

OH500 offer a U-shaped, warmer presentation compared to B3. Both ends (bass and treble) are more evident on OH500. Layering, separation and detail retrieval are better on B3, more so in the low end. OH500 are (even) pickier to drive then B3.

Dunu EST112 (€ 489,00)

EST112 has slower and fuzzier (bur more visceral) bass, not as full vocals and a bit more tamed trebles (which are in my books EST112 Achille’s heel tbh) compare to B3. Stage casting is a bit wider on EST112, layering is better on B3.

Considerations & conclusions

B3’s main cyphre is realism. When applied to the music they were designed for they gift their owner a stunning sense of physical presence on the scene. Instruments and players are cast near you such that you can almost reach out and touch them.

Even more importantly, B3 deliver a note discernment capability over the music being played which gets surprisingly close to that of your own ears when you are sitting in the front lines of a live venue. All of this paired with a deliciously organic timbre on a bright-neutral tonality.

As my eighteen readers know I am not a collector. Life is too short, and I have too little free time to spend any of that on second-best options, when I am lucky enough to have more than one availalble. B3 are part of my (very) short best-option list.

Our generic standard disclaimer.

P.S. – for the record: as any truly affectionated user knows spelling, “final Co., Ltd.” lowercase (“final”) is not a typo 

The post Final B3 Review – Realism For Real appeared first on Music For The Masses.

An M0 Pro has been sent to me for review by the manufacturer. You can find specs and full official description here. It currently retails for €155 including shipping from China and Italian VAT. Here’s my report.

The Shanling M0 Pro was provided by Shanling for my review – and I thank them for that. You find more information on the product page.

At-a-glance Card

Features and description

Externals

The M0 Pro is amazingly small an featherweight : a bit less than 44 x 45 x 14mm and just 37g. Fits an Italian espresso coffe cup. For reference, an Apple Watch is minorly thinner and lighter…

The screen is 1.54″ (a bit less than 4cm diagonal) and offers a 240×240 pixel map. Definition is quite nice, and brightness (which can be sw-controlled) is OK for sunlight visibility.

Globally taken, M0 Pro exhudes design and build quality. The aluminum chassis is extremely well conceived in terms of ergonomics and haptics, so is the screen on its front face, which is even slightly curved at its edges to better connect with the housing.

Managing the GUI via that tiny screen may seem discouraging before trying, but it oppositely proves incredibly efficient thanks, I guess, to good hardware and some quite smart tap and swipe implementation choices (more on this later). Be as it may, using M0 Pro’s touch screen is easy and straighforward.

On the upper right side there’s the sole physical control being the general on-off / screen on-off / volume up-down button.

On the bottom panel there’s a slot for an SDC card (up to 2TB), a USB-C port and the 3.5mm phone out port.

Accessories

It’s not an “accessory”, but the carton packaging M0 Pro comes in is amongst the better designed, more captivating and nicer looking I ever met – at any price by the way. At Shanling they evidently care about consistent communcation and they – correctly – properly invest in the right complements to their main product to reinforce the positive user’s impression about the care they put in their products.

M0 Pro comes with a good quality factory-preinstalled screen protection film. A spare one is supplied too, it can be found inside the flat box containing product literature.

Part of the package is also a good quality USB-A to USB-C cable .

My sample unit was also supplied with a leather “jacket” – which is normally sold separately and in facts came in a standalone package. A very nice add-on, both for quality and even more for looks.

One thing worth noting is the jacket “embraces” the devices, and ends up “overlapping” the front screen by like 2 / 3mm on both left and right sides, and it’s like 1mm+ thick. I presume there’s little to do with such sizes / measures as long as one wants to keep the same raw material and manufacturing quality, however I feel it’s worth noting that the jacket prevents both horizontal thumb-swipe gestures to swing all the way from/to the very screen border(s). Tapping really close to screen borders is also nigh impossible – this, even to people with relatively lean fingers like myself.

Regarding horizontal swipe “span” – so to call it – Shanling support pointed my attention on the fact that on-screen swipes on M0 Pro do indeed work best (as in: more precise and responsive) when initiated from the center of the screen, not from its sides. And that’s true (I checked)! So once taken such habit, the jacket’s presence ceases to represent a hurdle for effective horizontal thumb swipes.

It stays however extremely hard (too hard, really) to tap very close to screen borders, which means that those “…” icons on the far right side of Album or Track lines on the GUI are de facto inaccessible when the jacket is on. A venial sin in my effective use case, yet still worth noting.

Lastly: considering how small and lightweight the device is, I find it a bit odd that no shirt-clip, nor wrist-strap addon/option is available. Not too difficult to find adaptable third party ones. however – also considering how nice the rest of the package is – I reckon the average M0 Pro user may reasonably expect “something” in that direction to be included within the box. I shared my thought with Shanling and they told me they are working on this.

Internals

The M0 Pro is based on an Ingenic X1000 SoC (System on a Chip). It’s an ultra low power microprocessor – take it as the mini-mini-brother of the CPU inside your smartphone. Spec sheet here.

The X1000 takes care of everything the device does (display, USB I/O, BT 5.0 I/O etc etc) bar the sole sound part, which is delegated to a pair of ESS ES9219C DAC/AMP chips (data sheet here), working in team.

The ES9219C is 32bit quad-dac audio SOC, one of those chips which are commonly used inside budget and/or small size audio devices where there is little space (economical and physical alike) to include separate components and tunings.

ES9219C processes PCM data up to 32bit / 384KHz and DSD native data up to DSD 128. Talking about DSD, accepted formats include DSF, DFF and even ISO.

The ES9219C sports brilliant power features considering its minuscle power requirements : 1,7V on 32 ohm corresponding to circa 90mW, and low output impedance (0.4 ohm).  By integrating 2 of them in a Balanced scheme the M0 Pro can deliver up to 235mW @32ohm with a still interestingly low output impedance (0.8 ohm) when a balanced ended cabled driver is connected.

The dual chip option is also obviously the one to go in terms of sound quality: DR and SNR get better by 2dB, and most of all channel separation improves from 70 to 109dB.

The ESS SOC includes 4 standard and more programmable FIR filters, and M0 Pro offers a choice of 2 : a linear phase fast rolloff and an apodizing fast rollof – sadly no slow rolloff option available. (If you are unsure about FIR filters, you can read my piece here).

The M0 Pro includes a 640mAh battery which offers is up to 14h play time on single ended and 10h on balanced ended – which are plate figures as always. My direct experience talks more about 7-8h play time on Balanced which is still a good figure for such a tiny and small device. M0 Pro also offers weeks of sleep time thanks to negligible absorbtion when the device falls into deepsleep mode.

Software

M0 Pro has a surprisingly complete operating system and audio playback application.

Apart from the necessarily “miniaturised GUI”, resolving into totally excusable concessions for example in terms of labels readability and such, the vast majority of the key features regularly available on much higher end DAP are available to the user, and even some ones that are not so common to find on any DAP, too.

I’ll mention here those I consider most interesting / handy. Take into account that what follows is not a complete list (!).

A 10-band graphic equaliser is present, featuring separate attenuation control, 12 pre-defined profiles and 3 “blank” ones. All profiles (13+3) are customisable and get saved once modified. Their names cannot be changed, that’s the sole real limitation.

There is a Low / High Gain option switch, and a Gapless playback switch too.

A switch to select one’s preferred FIR filter is also available.

It’s possible to define a Max Volume. This is handy if you know you’ll be using very sensitive IEMs and don’t want to run the risk to pierce your eardrums by mistake. On a similar line, it’s possible to set the Default Volume, i.e. the volume which is set when you turn the M0 Pro on, irregardless to what value was it set at when you turned it off.

On DAPs I normally use folder-level navigation onto the library. For those who are rather keen on using tag-level navingation, M0 Pro gives you the possibility to choose amongst Artist or Album Artist sorting – which is crucial for my experience.

You can customise after how long the screen turns off, and wether the Volume wheel will stay active or not while the screen is off. You can also set wether the device is to just go to “sleep” after 1 min of inactivity, or it has fully shust down after 1 or more inactivity minutes.

A switch defines if the 3.5mm connector delivers Headphone output, or Line output. In the latter case, the volume control is set to Max Fixed.

Another switch defines how the USB port is supposed to behave: just allow for battery charging, provide USB digital output (e.g. to connect a dongle or a DAC/AMP), or receive USB digital input (e.g. to connect the M0 Pro to a PC or a phone as an external DAC/AMP.

When set for digital USB out, with another control you also switch between fixed and variable (digital) volume – the latter being handy of course when the downstream DAC/AMP does not have its own independent volume control, the former being best (higher output quality) in the opposite case.

An android (only) companion app is available which allows for remote-controlling playback on M0 Pro from a smartphone. It’s called Eddict Player and can be downloaded by the public Google Play store. It’s in fact a full-blown music player, offering a feature set very similar to that of HiBy’s HiByMusic, if you know that.

The remote controlling mechanism also works very similarly to HiBy’s case : you need to enable a SincLink option under M0 Pro’s Settings menu, in addition to BT communication – once that’s enabled, the Eddict Player app will be able to “find” the M0 Pro as a pairable device, and take control of it. Once the M0 Pro is under control, you can select music, and manage basic playback (play, stop, pause). Nothing else, sadly – so no remote access to advanced features like EQ, filter selection etc is available.

Last but likely not least I must note how commendable is on-screen swipe gestures’ implementation on M0 Pro. Given how tiny the screen is, a very accurate tuning must have been run on this aspect to find the right compromise in favour of the user’s comfort.

Tap is of course the way to “click” and “drill down” the various options, and right-swipe is the way to “back-track up” from any tree branch. The latter potentially being a bit tedious (it takes 5 right-swipes to get from Track-being-played all the way up to the main menu), long-tapping on any screen brings you straight to Home screen (Yeah I know, that’s unexpected. What can I say? RTFM…)

Up/down swipe is of course the way to scroll through lists (folders contents, settings options etc). That’s probably where some “hand” has to be taken at first to “calibrate” how the “short swipe” stroke you want to command a quick scroll: making it “too strong” makes the scroll “too wide”. Nothing that can’t be managed in more than 1 day of direct experience.

Input

The main way to feed music to the M0 Pro is of course by means of an SD Card. The most recent ones are accepted, up to 2TB capacity.

Two altenative input routes are also available: Bluetooth and USB.

When used as BT 5.0 receiver M0 Pro supports LDAC, SBC and AAC codecs (no APTX available in receiver mode). LDAC connectivity in particular is for my experience very stable and works with no glitch with my Samsung phone.

Considering how small the M0 Pro is, it can in pratice be used as sort of “addon BT receiver” for otherwise wired-only headphones/earphones.

The less-than-desireable thing about BT-receive mode is that it is essentially modeless. The sole thing you can do when a source is streaming music to M0 Pro via BT is adjusting volume. The EQ, for example, is not available. Nor any other GUI controls.

The M0 Pro also can be used as a USB DAC/AMP. I.e., you can connect it to a PC, Mac or Linux host, to an Android phone via an OTG cable or to an iPhone via the Apple Camera adapter. When connected, those sources will “see” the M0 Pro as an external DAC/AMP.

Similarly to the BT situation, no sound control except volume is available while USB-receiving. You can however decide via a switch if you want or not the M0 Pro to get recharging power from the USB connection while playing.

An odd difference between BT and USB input cases is the following: while the M0 Pro is in BT-input mode, swiping on the screen makes a pop-up appear asking the user if they want to stop BT transmission – so one can just tap NO in case of mistake; no pop-up happens when swiping while in USB-input mode – so an unwanted swipe produces an automatic sudden break-up of the stream.

M0 Pro is a pure DAP, there is no way to feed it with analog input. You cannot use it as a mere “amp”.

Output

M0 Pro’s main output is – of course – the analog 3.5 port on its bottom panel.

By default, that port provides single-ended Headphone output signal.

A GUI control allows for switching into Line Out mode. In that case the output volume is set to Max-Fixed. This mode is what you want to set the M0 Pro at when using it as a pure DAC, or DAC+Preamp, connecting it to a downstream amplifier.

Last but certainly not least, M0 Pro’s 3.5 port actually has a special internal structure allowing for a special 3.5 pentaconn-male to 4.4 pentaconn-female short adapter cable, purchaseable separately. Via such adapter you can plug any 4.4-balanced wired driver (or, by means of a further adapter, any 2.5-balanced driver, too).

Considering M0 Pro’s super-tiny size I guess this was the sole available way to provide both single ended and balanced ended connectivity, so that’s understandable. Of course having to (separately) purchase an adapter is less than ideal but there’s little to complain given what just said. Sole oddity: Shanling only offers the 4.4-female version of the adapter, no 2.5-female version available – at least for now.

In addition to its analog output, M0 Pro also allows for BT and USB interfaces to be used as digital outputs.

It’s possible to connect BT 5.0 compliant devices (TWS drivers, or BT streamers) to M0 Pro. In this case LDAC, SBC, AAC and APTx codecs are available.

And finally, it’s possible to connect M0 Pro to the USB input port of a standalone DAC, DAC-AMP, or to a dongle, defacto using it as a tiny transport.

Of course in the built-in battery being calibrated for the needs of the M0 Pro itself will do what it can when a high power requiring dongle is connected – so appropriate countermeasures with a side-battery and a Y-USB cable better be taken in that case.

Sound quality and power

Very much in the line of most devices offering both single ended and balanced output, M0 Pro shows a dramatic difference between the two cases in terms of sound quality.  Long story short: this is yet another case where balanced output is the sole one you really want.

From its balanced output M0 Pro sounds way above decent. Of course it won’t replace a mid-tier DAP, let alone a high end one, however the sound quality compromise vis-a-vis this little boy’s minuscle size and convenience is waaaay acceptable.

M0 Pro has a quite relaxed sound presentation, nicely extended bass, and nice treble. No signs of shoutyness in the highmids, indeed the opposite, if something – a tad relaxed and tamed, overall “soft”.

Aa for output power capabilities – from the Balanced ended port – the situation in terms of voltage swing is very good, while obviously limited in terms of current delivery.

M0 Pro’s power vs the “usual” 16 to 30 ohm impedance, 105++ db/mW sensitivity IEMs is way enough not to bother about this piece of info. For the more curious, M0 Pro delivers 236mW on 32 ohm, which is “good”.

On high impedance loads – like an HD600 for example – M0 Pro deliver almost 3V, enough to make those cans sing properly when the original digital material is not particularly tamed – which is the most common case. There’s only little room to compensate for low tracks volume (e.g. vinyl digitisations, DSD conversion compensations, pre-attenuations due to important EQ compensations).

On the opposite end M0 Pro – like most of its similar priced peers, and most DAPs in general indeed – won’t be able to properly feed < 16 ohm, < 100 dB/mW drivers. Although I didn’t (as always) bother measuring it, it’s quite clear that the system quickly runs out of current under a certain threshold load condition. The usual workbench E5000 sound tamed, dark, unresolving. Simply put: forget M0 Pro for such type of “job”.

Considerations & conclusions

I am more than impressed by M0 Pro. It’s a unique, very well made DAP featuring minuscle size and weight, paired with a bold feature set and way more than decent sonic performaces at an affordable price.

When looking at its totally reasonable price point, and the countless features it offers, I’d get as far ahead as stating that whoever is not excessively concerned with “top-audiophile-level” sound quality may easily be find M0 Pro the one DAP that makes sense owning.

Weighing output capabilities (quality and power) vs price M0 Pro comes out as a remarkable offering in the DAP market. To my experience it’s quite tough to do better with a € 150 tax included nowadays: also considering Sony A55 is sadly discontinued, DAPs delivering significantly better sound and features cost almost 2, better 3 times more.

All in all, M0 Pro gets my solid recommendation as a difficult-to-beat allrounder DAP for non-extreme audiophiles. And even those with a more audiophile tooth – so to call them – may consider M0 Pro when looking for a super-portable if a tad relaxed-sonic-quality companion for outdoors or such.

Our generic standard disclaimer.

The post Shanling M0 Pro Review – Mini Wonder appeared first on Music For The Masses.

It is customary for us in these cases to write a rather succint piece to avoid too much replication of the previous article’s contents but I’m going for an exception here. These little ones do in facts make me feel compelled to share my extended opinions with my few readers. I know, it’ll be boring. Few readers, however, means little damage. So let’s just get down to it.

Just for the record: Akoustyx S6 are currently on deeeep discount sale (like: 50% off) on Drop.

The manufacturer’s official page is instead here.

At-a-glance Card

Full Device Card

Test setup

Apogee Groove / Sony NW-A55 mrWalkman / Questyle QP1R / Questyle M15 / Questyle CMA-400i – Final E tips – Stock cable – lossless 16-24/44.1-192 FLAC and DSD 64/128/256 tracks.

Signature analysis

Tonality

S6’s timbre is natural, sculpted, muscular and well bodied, and stays so all across the spectrum. There’s above decent microdynamics, and no sign of “artificial” aftertastes. This, alone, would be worth closing my article with a glowing rec.

S6’s tonality indeed deserves some articulated comments. The manufacturer underlines S6 are intended for “studio reference acoustics”. Talking through with them they reported they tuned them closely following the Harman IE2017 target (see below) – and I must say it does show, big time. The presentation I hear from the low mids all the way up is definitely that. Sub-bass elevation is only more modest on S6 compared to the theoretical target.

Simply put IE2017 is not my personal preference, period, and this for two main reasons.

One: the circa 11+dB value gap between the 1Khz and 3Khz points results in highmids being slapped hard into my face when I raise volume beyond a very moderate level, and

Two: the depressed lowmids values convert in a very dry, too dry tonality – I do prefer bright neutral to warm balanced, but IE2017 is below neutral, it’s almost aseptycal.

This has to do with the target itself. Then, depending on the particular driver technology and/or implementation accuracy or lack thereof on this or that driver the “actual” result will be for me moderately bad, very bad, or downight unbearable.

Now, the good news is that planar drivers in general bear tonality corrections by means of equalisation with a certain ease. And, S6’s driver is very flexyble (pretty much in Audeze iSine or RHA CL2 league), so first thing I did of course was bringing tonality more in my preferred ballpark, and a bit off the effing IE2017 “thing”.

Here’s the scoop:

My experience with S6 refers to the first 2 corrections (3K and 4K) imperatively applied. I will outline differences when the optional ones are applied too.

Sub-Bass

S6’s sub-bass is fully extended and quite present. Typical snappy planar transients apply without distortions here so there’s little more to squeeze off the onion so to say. That said those who prefer an even more visceral rumble can experiment with a Low Shelf correction from 50-ish Hz, +3dB (or more) and a very wide badwidth (0.3 or so).

Mid Bass

S6 midbass is seriously good. Oh well, of course it’s good if you like technical acoustic bass as I do. Distorted overbloated bass lovers should never buy S6, period.

Transients are well managed here and while they stay in fast, precision-rendering territory as you expect from a planar, they are not overly snappy and do deliver some body and microdynamics.

Applying the aforementioned warmth correction (Peak 200Hz +2dB wide bandwidth) does exactly what it says: midbass (and not only) will heat up a good 20%, coming across as a bit more bodied and flowery.

Mids

Mids are spectacularly sculpted yet organic and detailed. Guitars and tenor sax benefit most of the situation delivering good nuances and microdynamics while staying precise and seprated (see Separation below).

Highmids is where the IE2017 – and S6 which follow that very closely – loses my personal approval and that’s why in my books S6 strictly require the EQ-based retuning I mentioned above.

Once that’s done however the magic happens in all its splendor: high mids are energetic, detailed, sparkly and controlled (!!), even when you pump the volume up significantly, which is indeed a way to open the presentation up and let S6 give its musical best

Male Vocals

Tenor vocal lovers will be those finding the Wamth correction (see above) most desireable. Without that there’s too much dryness to call delivery really organic.

Female Vocals

Female voices are natural and organic, although not flutey. Good texture available and good microdynamics for a planar.

Highs

On a corrected S6 trebles are integral part of the nice show. Well extended, quite airy, snappy without excesses, not zingy, not tizzy. Love them. Apply the “Extra Air” EQ correction to add further airiness. Don’t be scared nor shy: experiment. Try +3dB, +4dB, +8dB if you want. Only stop where you like the sound best : S6’s driver shall anyhow follow you like a doggie.

Technicalities

Soundstage

S6 cast a nice sized stage both accross and in depth – a bit more or a bit less depending on fit depth (the deeper the fit, the smaller the room).

Not the absolute widest projection I heard but very good anyway.

Imaging

Macrodynamics are beyond good. Intruments and voices are well scattered on the scene and there is nice air inbetween

Details

This is a point of excellence. S6’s detail retrieval smoothness is easily top rank for my experience on sub-500€ drivers. While I can name other “detail monsters” around, they all will “cost” some or a lot of fatigue and, before that, distraction from the music flow. S6 deliver fine and subtle details without slamming them onto your face nor covering you with “metallic noise dust” as other much leess refined drivers do.

Detail is also good from bass, although to a lesser extent: down there I guess planar-snappy transients do represent an apriori limitation to low frequency microdynamics. Something can be obtained with some light EQing but that’s it. Not “bad” however, just not so outstanding as to point it out as key plus. If you want special bass articulation and nuances get a high end DD.

Instrument separation

S6 execute separation very well. Crowded passages stay perfectly readable at all times, thanks to very controlled transient behaviour, and that glowing compromise mentioned above between snappyness and microdynamics.

Layering is top class: you can follow second or third voices with ease at all times and that’s not trivial to get – at any price, let alone with this small budget.

Driveability

In the “planar drivers” world S6 are probably the easiest to bias I found. You can even drive them from a phone, although you won’t have much headroom to compensate for low recorded materials (e.g. some vinyl digitisations, DSD conversions etc).

That said, their presentation opens up to more details and microdynamics when submitted to somewhat higher power. Once I apply my EQ corrections and the highmids excess goes for good, S6 offer a wonderfully smooth SPL progression. Indeed I find that even “dangerous” insofar as they cease any shouting, and you don’t get any “too high volume warning” so to say when pumping them up. Be careful… we all have only one hearing system you know that, once screwed you can’t fix it…

Like any bright/bright-neutral drivers S6 pair best with relatively warm sources, or at least with non-analythical ones. A special mention for Groove: the pairing with S6 is beyond spectacular.

Finally, a last important point of attention regards the equalisation requirements: your source need to be capable of at least “some” EQing.

Physicals

Build

The cylindrical part of the housings is in titanium alloy. The supersmooth outside finish is a titanium-oxyde based treatment. The backside is realised of a special polymer, in angled shapen, to properòy house the MMCX connector. Very stylish at least in my tastes, and covered by some patent too.

A red/blue colored ring helps easy identification of the right/left piece. Depending on fitting that ring might end up covered by the Earlock structure (see Fit below), however.

Lat but not least S6 housings are extremely lightweight: once selected the right size/type tips, and worn on with Earlocks etc they virtually “disappear” from your perception. Superb.

Fit

Stock silicon tips are not bad for the job. It’s not so easy to rotate others in as S6 nozzles are quite slim. In the end I settled for Final E (black) as they tend to tame trebles and bring mids forward a bit, which of course helps on re-estabilishing my preferred balance in this particular case.

Technically speaking a good alternative would be Spiraldots too, but their stem diameter is too wide so who wants to adopt them onto the S6 must be ready to apply a tight rubber ring onto the nozzles first, then the tips. Couldn’t be fussed personally, as I found Type-E’s more than good enough.

As you may reacall I am not in general a foamies lover but S6 is one of the few exceptions: here the typical foamies effect (“combing” thinnest treble notes and making bass a whiff “matte”) resolves in a very pleasant timbre nuance alternative.

Once again stock tips are of very good quality – very soft and quickly reactive material, classic cylindrical style – so you can easily go with those to begin with. My effing left canal is always creating problems though so in my particular case S stock tips is too small and M is too thick :-/ My best option is Comply TS200. YMMV needless to say.

Last but certainly not least in importance: the Earlocks. Those are totally brilliant. Think to the IEM version of those “comma shaped” rubber thingies you fit onto earbuds to help the stay put in your concha – and add twice the design accuracy.

These EarLock® silicon “rings” realise several contact points on the outer ear to (literally) lock the housings in place and fit the same way every time. The item comes from a company focusing on hearing protection aids for people involved in very loud noise situations (including law enforcement, army etc) aiming at guaranteeing that the noise attenuator/plug/intercom – whatever stays in-ear – won’t ever budge let alone pull out even in case of sudden hard movements, pullbacks, rush etc etc. And boy do they work!

Simply put: the Earlocks (provided in 3 sizes S-M-L) fit perfectly and “disappear” in/onto the outer ear, I don’t even perceive them as being there once worn, and S6 housings get a 100% firm stability in place, whatever I do however I move etc. This not only means that they won’t entirely slip off, but also and probably even most importantly that they won’t budge even as a consequence of mandibular movements while talking or eating which – in my case it does happen – may produce loss of seal and/or need to reposition.

Long story short: now that I tried them I want something similar for all my IEMs !

Comfort

Subjective differences apart, bullet shapes are normally considered “comfortable”. Amongst their downsides there’s typically stability which is totally fixed by the Earlocks in this case (read above). S6 are not particularly “long” in the bullet shaped category however they do support mid-deep fit, as a free choice user option.

As always: the deeper the fit the softer the trebles, the more relevant the bass, and the narrower the stage. Pick your poison

Isolation

Using foam tips and Earlocks to guarantee stable fit, S6 reach a whopping 34dB passive ambient noise reduction (NRR 28dB). That’s a lot! We are in professional NR aides territory indeed – these values are indicated for people working on tractors for example, or in some noisy industrial plants. Fantastic. Just be careful walking outside : you won’t hear traffic (!)

Cable

S6 stock cable is an unassuming-looking yet very sophysticated 16 core Oxygen Free Copper conductor. According to the manufacturer it is accuratly impedance-paired with the drivers. Be as it may, it sonically pairs spectacularly well with S6. I tried rotating some others – OFC is definitely the right choice, SP-OFC adds on edgyness which is not required here, Grafene does not pair well either.

As it often happens on low budget packages the cable has a fixed 3.5 termination only (the company is working on a multi-plug alternative to bundle on future versions but that’s on the drawing board yet).

Considering how well the cable pairs with S6 I recommend swapping only to those who are in dire need as all their sources sound best exclusively from their balanced otuputs. In such case a very inexpensive, decent option is the good ol’ ultracheap NiceHCK 16 core High Purity Copper (aka “Ugly Cable”). Alternatively a Linsoul HC08 will do well. Or, wait for Akoustyx to deliver their own

I guess something more is also worth saying about the cable.

One: the Kevlar sheath may easily be a love/hate thing. The material itself is beyond wonderful, super resistant etc. On the down side it’s badly microphonic (which is probably why the manufcturer strictly recommends over-ear cable install – RTFM…) and it’s quite springy at first. For the latter issue the good news is that the sheath gets obviously softer and malleable after a quite short time.

To quicken such “break-in” period you can frictionate harshly the cable in between your hands after coughly “coiling” it – don’t worry it won’t break – do it a few times and it will already get much better.

Two: the MMCX connectors offer a very firm “click-in-fit”. This may sound like a detail but for my experience it is not (!). Without going too far, this is one of the very few points of structural weakness I underlined on my Miyabi analisis (here). The down side on low quality MMCX options is of course micro-discharges resulting in subtle craclking noise while listening or worse.

Don’t take me wrong here, I’m not saying S6’s stock cable is the one and only good cable out there – I’m just saying don’t discard it quickly replacing it with “just any other one”, as – unlike what too often happens with cables bundled with budget-tier drivers – Akourstyx put a good one in here…

Specifications (declared)

Comparisons

7Hz Timeless ($ 199 Drop deal)

Simply put, S6 are miles better. Timeless have bloated, untextured midbass, a generally artificial timbre, scarce microdynamics (aka invasive “planar timbre”), very modest layering and separation. They also don’t seem to react particularly well to EQing, although some correction do make them a bit better. They do cast a wider stage compared to S6, there’s that. And they are more expensive.

TINHIFI P1 ($ 169)

P1 offer a smooth, nicely balanced and inoffensive tonality. Possibly a bit “too inoffensive” – one of their limitations for my tastes being that I find them a bit boring. S6 are obviously sparklier, much more engaging energetic and “brilliant” – they do require EQ correction ootb however, which is not an “absolute requirement” for P1 instead. Other major differences are the timbre – P1 being desperately “planar” vs S6’s much better microdynamics – and the driveability – P1 is much harder to bias.

Ikko OH1s ($ 74 promo on Amazon.com)

Recently price-repositioned by Ikko (I’d like to think: also after our suggestion), OH1S are based on different driver tech (1 DD + 1BA) but offer a general presentation and tonality similar to S6.

OH1S don’t require EQ corrections to deliver good bass, mids, vocals and some technicalities – all coming close to S6, which still has the edge on pretty much all counts, even if sometimes by not much. OH1S fall more evidently short of S6 in terms of imaging, and most of all energy. They are also very much tip dependent, and may not be so easy to fit.

final A3000 (€ 129,99 on Amazon.it)

By far my sub-300€ clear-timbre, bright-neutral tonality reference. A3000 are built on a custom-developed DD essentially sounding like a planar, and specially tuned prioritising equal clarity on sounds both closer and farther away from the listener position – which is particularly beneficial to acoustic music from large orchestras or groups.

As a direct consequence A3000 win big on sounstage drawing vs S6 – and pretty much any other sub 1K$ driver I heard tbh, solely bar their siblings A4000, which I find however less pleasant for my tastes on other counts (won’t digress here).

Tonal homogeneity, phenomenally nailed compromise on details vs musicality on trebles, layering proweness and well calibrated snappy transients are on par between the two. S6 offer higher note weight and whith that a more energetic, muscular, lively musicality while A3000 are obviously silkier. S6 sound if you wish… american, while A3000 so japanesely discrete-yet-deeply-sophisticated.

A3000 do not “require” EQ out of the box, their few shortcomings however can’t easily be fixed by EQing. Opposite situation on S6, which need to be put hands onto, but can be EQ-pushed/pulled/stirred in so many different sonic flavours, such argubaly being their most solid upper edge.

Considerations & conclusions

Building low priced, low quality products is not too complicated. Building equally low priced products carrying some more quality as to trigger a user’s attention on “price/performance compromise” grounds is already a bit less easy. Building, again, equally low priced products featuring however the same quality of a market-top product and just scaled-down features… this is a challenge. Taking and winning it requires serious, original industrial competence.

Some 2-3 years ago I auditioned my first planar IEM and I was kinda puzzled. Then I heard another. Then another. And I gave up. Most of all, they were drowning me into “planar timbre”, i.e. [almost] complete lack of microdynamics. A total turnoff for me. Simply put, I could see no reason why one would prefer one of those to a much more expressive and/or refined fast-transient DD or (quite rare, on low budgets) good BA.

Then in spite of my disappointment for the category last year a friend convinced me to audition a pair of RHA CL2, and that’s where I finally “got” planars: different beasts, indeed. And not at all “inexpressive” as the previous ones I tried.

Too bad that a) those CL2 babies cost a pretty penny, and what’s worse b) they are not in production anymore. “Alright too bad” – I said to myself. At least now I know “what” I look for “can” exist in a planar IEM, and that I was right on disregarding lower rank / quality alternatives.

Finally, in came Akoustyx.

Simply put, their S6 are truly hightech planar drivers built into a scaled-down, very modestly priced, stellar value package.

I sharply disagree on the apriori choice which as been made in favor of the IE2017 target. In my very modest personal opinion I don’t find it neither studio-neutral/reference, nor pleasantly musical. I was even more disappointed about stock CL2 tuning, however !

The outstanding things with S6 are their spot on native timbre, and their great elasticity vs EQ corrections.

No they do not deliver “precisely the same” technical proweness I heard on RHA CL2. They come seriously close however, with that indeed representing a credible, significant, differently flavored alternative to DD or BA technology budget drivers – that is, at a fraction of CL2’s price.

If you ask me, S6 are indeed worth their full 250$ MSRP, and then some. At their current deal price on Drop ($129) they are on “steal” category.

Our generic standard disclaimer.

The post Akoustyx S6 Review (2) – …This ! appeared first on Music For The Masses.

As per our standard in such cases I’ll keep my piece a bit less descriptive as most of the general product information is already well covered by the original article. I’ll of course fill the pros&cons table, and I will add personal notes and considerations that might – hopefully – add something new to the reader’s benefit.

At-a-glance Card

What’s good for me

Sound

First a foremost, when judged vs its reference price V6 sounds good. Imaging (microdynamics) in particular is very nice. Extension is more than acceptable, and there is no significant sign of shoutyness or other “overdoings” from the 3KHz up. Well done.

The general device timbre, furthermore, is pleasant. It transmits a sense of silkyness – notes are well defined yet rounded. As a consequence V6 pairs best with bright / analythical drives.

On the flip side V6 is not the most resolving or microdynamical source you can get for the money – although quite likely the best one in form of a standalone DAP. On such regards it must honestly be kept in mind that miracles not being allowed, limited resources imply compromises. Cutting it with an hatchet, but not going far from reality, experience tells us that you “either” get good imaging with limited resolution, “or” a shaper accent on details but a fuzzier imaging, and fatigue on the midterm. Getting both at the same time requires different hardware (starting from the power module), therefore – by the way – higher budgets.

Power

V6’s balanced output delivers some very nice power, which turns into a lot of good flexibility. I find its almost 4V voltage swing OK for my HD600 in most if not all occasions, and 610mW on 32ohm are a great reservoir of power vs the overwhelming majority of IEMs out there, solely barred uncommon cases like Final E5000 or RHA CL2 – and fullsize hard planars, of course (more on this below).

Audio-specific system foundations

In exchange for being stuck with Andoid 8 (more on this below), V6 can adopt the full suite of audio-specific Android customisations originally developed by HiBy.

The most important of those is no doubt the bypass to Android’s stock audio driver, which “locks” all standard Android devices onto max 48KHz sample rate output – barred aposteriori interventions by clever apps e.g. UAPP, or, more recently, Roon ARC. On custom Android 8 there is a sort of “direct path” available between audio hardware and any higher-level apps, allowing the latter to fully exploit the former’s potential.

Another extremely interesting feature available at system level on these custom Android 8 distros is HiBy’s own user-friendly parametric EQ system called MSEB (as in “Magic Sound Eight Ball”)

The same feature is indeed included with HiBy’s music player app (“HiBy music”) – yet having it implemented down low at system level means you can exploit it also when using any other player app. Not a small thing at all.

Other nice audio features

V6 offers full access to its DAC chips’ 6 (six!) different built in filters: Sharp Roll-off, Slow Roll-off, Short Delay Sharp Roll-off, Short Delay Slow Roll-off, Super Slow Roll-off and Low Dispersion Short Delay.

By the way: for an explanation of what reconstruction fiters are you may want to grab a coffee, then go read my article on the subject (I recommend: in the listed order…). Full AKM AK4493SEQ specs are instead available here, after some registration.

V6 has 4 (four) separate analog audio outputs: 3.5 and 4.4 headphone out, and 3.5 and 4.4 line out.

It’s worth noting that unlike other devices V6 does not offer S/PDIF (digital) coax output from its 3.5 jack port. To get S/PDIF out from V6 you need to pick it from the USB-C port, via an adapter.

While talking about digital ouputs (and inputs), V6 offers them both on Bluetooth and USB channels.

Bluetooth in particular is at level 5.0 and supports most advanced codecs including LDAP and APTX-HD. No APTX-LL however. BT in general is well implemented and I could get good connection stability both in and out on LDAP.

And good battery support

V6 carries a 4500mAh battery, which taken per se is one of those pieces of info that really mean nothing.

It becomes good news when we consider that

• The battery itself supports QC3 fast charging : with the right charger in just 1 hour you get up tp 70%
• The device consumption is quite modest. Based on my typical usage I could get more than 12-13h effective play time.
• Android’s deep sleep is correctly implemented: you can leave V6 “on, but sleeping” (like your phone) and it will last weeks
• Last but not least, 4000mAh are enough to cope with powering a not particularly hungry dongle (e.g. E1DA 9038SG3, Dragonfly Cobalt) in case you want to use one to sensibly upgrade V6’s internal sound quality

What’s not

Android

In spite of the audio-specific customisations – one above all: the proprietary patch allowing for bypassing of Android’s own audio drivers – Android still impacts negatively on sound quality.

How do you know? Just try. Take the very same track and play it once on the DAP, and another time from a good quality transport after connecting that DAP as an external USB DAC: the latter will transit through at a “lower” level, and will be audibly cleaner, airier, livelier. Do the same with a non-Android DAP and the differences, if any, will be much less evident.

That being said, Android brings a lot of additional convenience to a mobile audio player. Sure! So does the smartphone I already carry with me everywhere however. So why should I use carry dedicated mobile audio player (DAP) ?

Long story short the sole valid fundamental rationale is: because I want better sound quality. Correct.

Just be warned: a) on even price conditions you can and will find non-Android DAPs sounding significantly better than same-priced Android ones, so much so that b) there is no Android-based DAP seriously rivalling top sound quality DAPs (Questyle QPM, Lotoo Paw Gold Touch).

Android 8.1

Amonsgt the few really interesting possibilities opened by adopting Android (or iOS) is using the device as a mobile Roon terminal via the recently released Roon ARC app. Very true, very important. Too bad that Roon ARC requires Android 9 (or iOS 12)

Why is the overwhelming majority of the existing Android-based DAP still adopting Android 9 ? Quite simple if you think about it : no one wants (is able / can budget-justify) to develop new audio-specific kernel modifications. Everyone is forking / licensing the same original patches – hence they are stuck on that kernel version.

Limited system resources leading to limited system performances

As mentioned above, Android is supposed to bring flexibility as its main advantage. Key to that is the possibility to use multiple different applications to run different tasks, and do that concurrently, read: at the same time.

To reach such target a certain amount of system resources (computing power and RAM) are required. And that’s what V6 sadly falls short of. The Snapdragon 425 SOC is a 6 year old model – which is a loooong time span in the mobile gear CPU chips market. Furthermore, it’s equipped with just 2GB of RAM. By comparison my everything-but-TOTL Samsung A52 phone runs a 2020 SOC (Snapdragon 720G) on 8GB RAM.

Surely choosing an outdated SOC and very little RAM contributes keeping market price down – no question about it – however it also hampers applicative performances especially in terms of multitasking.

Long story short: V6 works OK when you launch one music player, and use it to its full extent (including some EQ etc), but it starts showing “fatigue” (slow UI responsiveness) or “serious fatigue” (sluggish UI, stuttering etc) when you keep more than one music player and/or other (e.g. messaging, video etc) apps up together.

Other (common) shortcomings

From some point of view V6 is a genuine son of its time – so I guess we should be mild on its main shortcomings as they are common to most if not all the rest of the market offering at the same prices, and sadly at higher prices too.

Much like most of its peers, V6’s Single ended output should be considered “there just in case you can’t but use it”. Sound quality with some meaning exclusively comes out the Balanced output line, really.

Additionally, while V6 is able to deliver some very significant output power onto high impedance (almost 4V swing on 300ohm) and mid impedance (610mW on 32ohm) loads, its architecture quickly drops the battleaxe as load goes down: current output vs sub-16ohm drivers is seriously limited, so much so that it does not pass the E5000 acid test. Again: V6 is in great company ! It would then be too severe to point this out as a shameful limitation or such. Just be warned that – as always – money matters, and “there ain’t such thing as a giant killer”^(tm).

A couple of significant comparisons

Sony NW-A55

Simply put, NW-A55’s worst defect is that… it was recently discontinued. Until a year ago it was still on sale as new and, while already good in itself, thanks to a great humanity benefactor anyone could (and still can) even upgrade its internal operating system adopting more sophisticated versions Sony normally dedicates on their higher tier DAP models, turning A55 into a real sound quality masterpiece for a very modest budget (a bit less than 200€ retail).

A55 is worth mentioning as a part of our discussion today as it’s a glowing example of how a much lower priced device, free from the Android “burden” (see above), in terms of sound quality, audio features and UI/UX can closely rival a (good!) Android DAP like the V6 costing more than twice as much. Indeed in my opinion A55 still surpasses V6 in terms of sound definition and UI, while is succumbs as for sound extension, sheer output power, flexibility and compatibility.

HiBy R5

Also recently discontinued to be replaced by the much more expensive “R5 II Gen-2”, R5 was HiBy’s lower end Android-based DAP.

Lastly priced at the exact same ex works price as V6 ($369), the original R5 is extremely similar to its Tempotec competitor in terms of internal system hardware (same Snapdragon SOC, same system resources, same Android distro, same standard mods and apps), the meaningful differences consisting essentially in the audio section, whereon R5 is equipped by two CS43198 instead of V6’s more modern 2 x AK4493SEQ, complemented by 2 x ADP8397 opamps vs V6’s OPA1688.

R5 also has a smaller form factor (and screen), BT 4.2 instead of 5, and is minorly less powerful in terms of output wattage… details, really.

What’s most important: V6 sounds better. Not like day / night better, no, still very much audibly better. R5 sounds edgier, grainier, less refined.

Again, what matters to our discussion today is that the two devices are very similar under multiple design aspects, and they mainly differ insofar as V6 adopts a more modern DAC chipset. The existing although not excessive differences I find correspond quite exactly to my apriori expectation.

Wish I had a chance to audition HiBy’s latest R5 iteration, the R5 II GEN-2. I’m ready to bet it will be… very similar to V6 again – this time the gap being even smaller between the two, and it will be a close call wether one or the other can be called “better”.

Why do I reckon so ? Because R5 II is… pretty much again the same piece of base hardware (same Snapdragon SOC, same Android 8.1, same sw suite, same… etc), this time complemented with a more modern DAC chip set (2 x ESS9219C) and a Class-A output stage which will likely provide a tad better (cleaner, livelier) sound at the cost of a much higher power consumption.

How much difference will such more modern componentry make? Tough to say – as the burden represented by the antique (!) underlying hw and sw architecture will surely drain part of their good deeds…

Considerations and conclusions

Taking solely output audio quality in consideration the DAP market offers better quality for the dollar on proprietary-OS DAPs vs Android-based DAPs.

That said, for many adding more applicative flexibility to their pocket audio player device is a priority, and that’s where a general-purpose OS like Android comes into the equation.

Android DAP lovers don’t seem to really care about compromises in terms of sheer sound quality, or in terms of higher price budget, or both. Their (legit) mindset calls for Android-based DAPs to be considered (paraphrasing you-know-which movie line…) a separated ballpark, if even the same sport compared to custom OS ones.

All that recalled as a crucial preamble, as I tried to outline today Tempotec V6 clearly represents a solid staple in the sub-1K€ Android-based DAP panorama.

Its original introductory price of $280 made it into an absolute no brainer to be honest. At that price V6 was “the” budget Android DAP to own – full stop.

Now that the launch campaign is over V6 retails for $369 ex works, converting into a whiff less than €450 including EU VAT – which means stiffer competition, which however won’t likely significantly outrun V6 in terms of overall quality, leaving it as a still solid choice in its category and price segment.

Our generic standard disclaimer.

The post Tempotec V6 Review (2) – Second Opinion appeared first on Music For The Masses.

At-a-glance Card

Full Device Card

Test setup

Sources: Questyle QP1R / Questyle M15 / E1DA 9038D, 9038SG3 – Final B tips – Stock high purity OFC silver plated cable – lossless 16-24/44.1-192 FLAC tracks.

Signature analysis

Tonality

Ara’s timbre is clear and almost crystalline, however at times scanting into ethereal. Tonality is definitely bright, and the general impression is that of technical monitors striving to deliver as much uncolored transparency as possible.

Sub-Bass

Sub bass is extended and rumble is present, although lean and sometimes not authoritative enough

Mid Bass

Midbass is probably Ara’s worst part. Flat, only slightly elevated, and unforgivingly BA-fast, it is sharp, edgy, too snappy, not remotely punchy enough to be credible and most of all often hollow. Due to all this, of course texture is severely lacking.

I am not in audio tuning, you know, but situation makes me wonder what was the intended purpose for the adoption of even four (!) independent BA transducers for the low frequencies. It’s also worth noting that these BA drivers also lack in flexibility/latitude: they react quite poorly to EQing, giving back more/less loudness but hardly any real improvement in tone/musicality balancing.

Mids

Very quick and dry, somewhat lean in the lower part and get more bodied from the center up. Guitars are rendered well for the most part.

Male Vocals

Tenors and even more baritons suffer from Ara’s lack of body in the lower mids. That aside, they sound nice and detailed – they just lack true realism.

Female Vocals

Unlike male voices, female vocals on Ara are a point of excellence. Reasonably bodied, they take advantage of the driver in the right way this time and deliver a night-organic result, with enough room for texturing

Highs

Vivid and energetic, especially up above (brilliance). Ara’s trebles are very crisp and clean, full of air, never zingy – a real good job has been made here. This is of course where the BA drivers give their best in terms of snappy transients (especially attack). The limit gets hit upon raising the volume above comfort level, when some sound gets dangerously close to shoutyness.

Technicalities

Soundstage

Ara project a good stage, mostly in the horizontal and vertical direction, a bit less in the depth direction. The listener tends to perceive the room even grander due to all that air in the treble.

Imaging

Imaging is just stunning on Ara: instruments and voices are cast on the stage with razor sharp precision, there is never any fuzzyness, and most of all there is a lot of “clean air” amongst them. This, and layering, are no doubt the most outstanding features of the product.

Details

Detail retrieval is very very good from the trebles and the high mids, while just average from the bass due to those extrasnappy transients down there, cutting much of the texture and nuances from sounds below 3-400Hz.

Instrument separation

Separation and layering is close to as good as it can possibly get. Ara are capable of virtually telling all members of an orchestra or a chorus apart, however crowded might be the musical passage. Some exception might take place in the treble area, at very high listening volume levels – which I still tend to consider user’s misuse, not a device’s fault.

Driveability

Ara are tricky to properly bias as they carry very high sensitivity (94 dB SPL : 7.094 mVrms, corresponding to circa 118db/mW at their 8.5ohm impedance) which makes them hiss with quite a few different sources, and extremely low impedance, which requires extremely low output impedance pairings to avoid setting the bass tonality off. When paired to a powerful amp, an IFI IEMatch used on Ultra mode may help here.

Physicals

Build

Housings are literally built like tanks, made of titanium and assembled with evident attention to solidity. MMCX connectors exude quality.

Fit

Ara feature quite long nozzles, which is a piece of good news as their housings shape, size and edges might not totally easy to wear by “everyone”. They are also quite tip-dependant, although for once I must clap to the manufacturer for having included really pertinent tips with the product: both the bundled Final Type-E silicon tips and the Campfire foams do pair very well with the Ara. Being a nitpicker I find Final type B tips a tad even better than Type E, but that’s really a subtlety.

Comfort

As I mentioned above, Ara’s housings are not particularly small nor smooth so finding them comfortable is a hit or miss. To me it’s… a half hit. YMMV.

Isolation

After wearing them in a way to make them somewhat comfortable, Ara don’t offer much passive isolation to me

Cable

This part is a bit disappointing. Not much from the cable structure standpoint, as after rotating quite a few alternatives I don’t find the stock litz silver plated copper wire bad sounding at all, rather on the value side: at this point in the market evolution, a high budget product like Ara shuould, or I’d say “must”, be offered with a modular termination plug cable…

Specifications (declared)

Housing	Machined titanium shells. “Tuned Acoustic Expansion Chamber” internal structure
Driver(s)	2 BA for high frequencies, 1 BA for mid frequencies, 4 BA for low frequencies
Connector	Custom Beryllium/Copper MMCX
Cable	Campfire Audio Litz Cable – Silver Plated Copper Conductors with Berylium Copper MMCX and 3.5mm Stereo Plug
Sensitivity	94 dB SPL @ 1kHz: 7.094 mVrms = circa 118 dB/mW
Impedance	8.5 Ω
Frequency Range	10 – 28000 Hz
Package & Accessories	Campfire Audio Sustainable Cork Earphone Case – Final Audio Tips (xs/s/m/l/xl) – Campfire Audio Earphone Tips(s/m/l) – Silicon Earphone Tips (s/m/l) – Campfire Audio Lapel Pin – Cleaning Tool
MSRP at this post time	$1299,00

Comparisons

Campfire Andromeda 2020 (discontinued – was $1099)

Andromeda 2020 have a more neutral-balanced tonality, vs Ara’s distinctly bright-clear sided one. Andromeda have a more elevated bass and sub bass line, although note weight is not heavier by the same amount. Conversely, Ara’s high mids, and female vocals, are obviously more bodied, organic and pleasant then Andromeda’s.

Ara’s technicalities are clearly superior to Andromeda’s which, although very good, don’t really compete especially with Ara’s proweness about layering and imaging. Both drivers are tricky to correctly pair with sources due to their very low impedances and perniciously high sensitivies.

Both suffer from som excessively perceivable BA timbre. At the end of the day Andromeda 2020 is more musical, Ara more technical.

Fearless S8Z ($599)

Very simply put, S8Z can be seen as cheaper, less refined Aras. The two devices have in common a full-BA architecture (8 drivers for S8Z, 7 for Ara), a (too) prominent BA timbre, lack of body in the bass and lower mids, good trebles and both give their best on imaging and separation/layering. The differences are on “how well” the two carry out their jobs, Ara being – well… – better.

In particular, S8Z’s trebles are much less controlled compared to Ara’s and their imaging and layering capabilities, although often very good, are negatively impacted by excessive treble energy and occasional shoutyness.

Conclusions

Campfire Ara are no doubt remarkable IEMs, carrying a strong personality and some truly outstanding features – along with a quite significant price tag however.

The main reason to love Ara is their absolutely theatral capability to put every sound and every voice, however feeble or hidden, in its correct spot on the scene, keeping it separated and intelligible from the others and the ensemble. At the same time some (me included) may criticise their excessively light tone, ethereal at times, resulting in a somewhat aseptic presentation.

Even net of its shortcomings, Ara are anyhow a remarkable piece of audio engineering. Listening to Beethoven’s 9th on Ara is definitely an experience. I recommend anyone liking acoustic music to find a way to at least audition them, at least once…

I am thankful to Campfire for the review opportunity. Ara can be purchased from multiple distributors worldwide, or from Campfire direct shop, here.

Our generic standard disclaimer.

The post Campfire Audio Ara Review – Everything In Its Place appeared first on Music For The Masses.