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Unfortunately not I'm still sworn to secrecy, but there's one other headfier that knows and has heard this particular IEM. You could try pestering @moedawg140 for information - although I think he's also sworn to secrecy(?!). My best guess is the company in question had second thoughts. This IEM sounded better (to my ears) than all their flagship IEMs, but will/would have been very reasonably priced. You'll see why, if it ever happens Maybe they were worried about it cannibalizing their TOTL IEM sales? If it happens, for sure I'll post about it here. It isn't/won't be as small as the Xelento, but it has some sonic advantages.Any updates on this?
Many thanks to @angpsi and @utdeep for the information on the fake Xelentos. I knew the day when fake Xelentos popped up was probably inevitable, but it's also a bit sad. Somebody advertising genuine Xelentos and then putting fake Xelentos in the box...? That's way beyond sketchy. @utdeep, you should really do the community a service and flag your seller. That behavior isn't just immoral - it's illegal in most countries. In the US it's illegal to even send counterfeit goods through the post.
I'm very dubious about any of these knock-offs. It's not just that they undermine the hard work and R&D of the company being copied, but in my experience, they never sound as good as the originals. I don't believe this DIY earphone lab claim that the sound is 100% that of a Xelento. They've even proved this isn't the case if you look carefully enough at their website. They claim that it measures similarly to Jude's Xelento and show plots to prove this. But read more carefully...! Jude's measurements were made with a GRAS RA0401/2 coupler. This is GRAS' so-called "hi-res" coupler that strongly damps the half-wave canal resonance. For shallow-insertion IEMs in particular, this gives a very different measurement from that of a traditional 711 coupler. Those differences are explained in more detail here:
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/audio-measurements-on-a-headfi-budget.893084/page-4#post-15229239
It looks like they deliberately used 1/3rd octave-band smoothing to try and make their plots look closer to those of Jude's, even though those two graphs should never be expected to match Their 1/3rd octave smoothing still doesn't account for the differences in the treble when compared to an authentic pair of Xelentos when measured on a traditional 711 coupler. Red and green are the authentic Xelentos (narrow-band and 1/3-octave-smoothed, respectively), and blue are the DIY labs knock-offs (1/3-octave-smoothed):
These knock-offs seem to have an early roll-off at both ends and the mid-range is off too. I doubt it's an authentic Tesla driver. If they had to make a fake copy of the shell, it seems highly likely they're making a fake copy of the driver too.
P.S. It's curious that the psychology of the faker always causes them to leave at least one time-bomb in the counterfeit. Big Big Train wrote a nice song about that. It's worth listening to on your (genuine!) Xelentos:
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