I agree. Those Azla ear tips are important. The Luna should be shipped with them!
DUNU LUNA - Impressions and Discussion
Yes, I have heard the same. The Luna likes power. At higher volume levels it really comes alive. At very low volume levels, like just background music, it loses more dynamic range vs say my VE 8 or VX. It wants your attention and makes you turn up the volume. Of course then I cannot get my work done.I thought I would also post it here.
Thank you very much @DUNU-Topsound for letting me part of the European Tour of the Luna.
The Luna is here, impressive iems, seems it totally deserves his place next to my other Kings
Interesting fact #1: after a few hours of listening, the more power your give the Luna, the more the Luna gives you (SQ of course, not just loud noise). I switched to my E1DA 9038S after some times with the QLS QA361 (praised be Dunu and their multi-connector cable that offers a 3.5 mm TRRS) and whoa ! I usually use the 9038S with large headphones because it's kind of too strong for iems but here it's a wonderful pairing !
Ha ha, I'm with you on that. I almost regret not having taken a week off when I had them. It was painful having to work from home when all I wanted to do was PLAY
Lucky in a way, though. My work load was quite light compared to the following week up until tonight. I've been hammered. Hopefully this weekend will allow me to finish my humble review.
I also have the VE8, it was very interesting to find out that I could love these two very different takes on musical engagement. High tilt and low tilt, both extremely well mastered.
I just received my VE8 this week. I may need to have the faceplate redone though. However, as you say, I feel they both live together. The VE8 definitely has more power in the bass and maybe a greater dynamic range. The Luna is great as it is smoother on some female vocals. And it just sounds good. I feel like the Luna will always work well with anyone’s fleet of IEM’s as it provides its open smooth treble while still providing excellent mids and bass.Ha ha, I'm with you on that. I almost regret not having taken a week off when I had them. It was painful having to work from home when all I wanted to do was PLAY
Lucky in a way, though. My work load was quite light compared to the following week up until tonight. I've been hammered. Hopefully this weekend will allow me to finish my humble review.
I also have the VE8, it was very interesting to find out that I could love these two very different takes on musical engagement. High tilt and low tilt, both extremely well mastered.
Cayin N8 must be an excellent source for the Luna. Lucky you.
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It’s a great source. I definitely recommend it. The interface is below par though. Tks.
Exactly right
The reason for the missing treble in those graphs is, IMHO, fairly well understood. The coupler used for these measurements (RA0401) intentionally damps the ear canal resonances. (As a result, it looks like this particular coupler is now on its way to the trash bin of history.)
The low end is more of a mystery. That should be perfectly well captured by the RA0401 and yet I hear people saying the LUNA has plenty of sub-bass. It sure looks like it doesn't. Perhaps what people are hearing is simply an adequate level of mid-bass?
As we understand, GRAS desired a system that would be somewhat backwards-compatible with their preexisting line of products. So the rings, sleeves, adapters (e.g. DB2012), etc. are all similar to what they've already had. However, they had many clients who desired a low-noise distortion measurement system that didn't produce spurious distortion spikes as a byproduct of the high-Q resonance of the coupler system. This is most important for ANC and TWS applications.
The more time and labor-intensive approach would be to re-model the acoustic transfer impedance of the outer ear, from the auricle to the tympanum. That's why we're excited by the development of the B&K 5128. Because we have a B&K 4128C HATS, we've been following the development of the 5128 HF-HATS for a while. Even B&K engineers, however, believe the 13.5 kHz resonance of the old 711 standard is problematic. In our opinion, the approach that B&K have taken with the 5128 is fundamentally sound. We're in an ongoing conversation with B&K to determine whether the 5128 system will be able to assist us in product development. Of course, new equipment acquisition is a substantial investment, so we are weighing all options. We have some small concerns about the external validity of the data acquired and whether it'll be suitable representative of a world population of individuals, but the effort they put into this project is admirable.
Here are a few of the more academic manuscripts put out by B&K and their research associates on the modeling of the human ear:
- Darkner, S., Sommer, S., Schuhmacher, A., Baandrup, H.I., Thomsen, C., & Jønsson, S. (2018). An Average of the Human Ear Canal: Recovering Acoustical Properties via Shape Analysis. ArXiv, abs/1811.03848.
- Jønsson, S., Schuhmacher, A., & Jorgensen, H.I. (2018). Wideband impedance measurement in the human ear canal; In vivo study on 32 subjects. ArXiv e-prints.
- Jønsson, S., Schuhmacher, A., & Jorgensen, H.I. (2018). Wideband impedance measurement techniques in small complex cavities such as ear simulators and the human ear canal. arXiv: Applied Physics.
Additionally, let's remember that @jude made bass measurements down to 10 Hz. The SPL at 20 Hz is the same as it is at 800 Hz. A -3.5 dB roll-off between 20 to 10 Hz is largely inaudible to most people aside from perhaps a mechanical transfer of energy to the surrounding soft tissues of the ear canal, and should prove to be acceptable when there is adequate sound pressure across the audible bass shelf. We did not tune LUNA to match a Harman-esque bass response. While Drs. Olive and Toole, and their associates did some amazing work on figuring out listener preferences, we do not feel it is necessarily the consensus in tuning. We targeted the bass response to be what we consider to be a happy medium --- not exaggerated, but not overly damped. It certainly won't satisfy everyone, but the vast majority of people wouldn't feel that it has "no bass" either.
Thanks for all of the detail. I do not know who Jude is though. Do you have a link to this measurements? Just curious. Tks.
deafenears
500+ Head-Fier
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/dunu-luna-impressions-and-discussion.923958/page-2#post-15466060
Frequency Response:
Frequency Response with Harman Target Overlay:
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Ha Ha you don‘t know who Jude is and you are in Headfi. You should find out and watch some of his videos prior to Can Jam.
Just had an exquisite experience with the Luna, playing some of Bach's organ works with Simon Preston on the 9038S.
I felt like I was in a church. No, a cathedral !
Damn they're so incredible at high volume...
I felt like I was in a church. No, a cathedral !
Damn they're so incredible at high volume...
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james444
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Looks fine to me, quite similar to my Sony EX1000 from sub-bass up to midrange. EX1000 is still a big personal fave when it comes to quality DD bass.
Very funny.
I did not realize he was referring to the originator of all of this. My bad. I thought it was someone else. I really have only watched some of Jude’s videos prior to CanJam though. He is the person that first told me about the Luna. The brain is going.
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/dunu-luna-impressions-and-discussion.923958/page-2#post-15466060
Frequency Response:
Frequency Response with Harman Target Overlay:
Yes, those small resonance peaks above 9 kHz are what @csglinux was referring to.
The GRAS RA0401/0402 have a different transfer impedance from a traditional IEC 60318-4 spec coupler.
The following diagram from GRAS illustrates the differences.
RA0045 is the 60318-4 compliant coupler; the RA0403/0404 are the new models designed to extend upon the RA0401/0402 paradigm.
The following is a diagram from GRAS illustrating how measurements from an RA0401/0402 may differ from the IEC 60318-4 spec.
For those of you who are looking for traditional IEC 60318-4 compliant measurements, they're out there already. While most third party measurements that we've seen line up a lot more closely to what our internal measurements are, give or take some minor bass roll-off due to seal issues, and differences in coupler resonance due to insertion differences, there is one recent one that is probably taken from a faulty unit (or forcibly pushed into the ear simulator). The distortion measurements are orders of magnitudes higher than what we've measured internally, and even higher than what head-fi was able to measure. There is also a huge amount of bass sag and rolloff starting from 300 Hz down, to the tune of over 4 dB, which is completely out of spec. Such a measurement would absolutely fail our QC tolerances. Our LUNA tour is ongoing, and @antdroid currently has the west coast tour unit. People will be able to reference those measurements, which should be very close to IEC 60318-4 compliant. We do not tune solely for a frequency response target, however. We take into many more electroacoustic parameters, and most importantly try to ensure we preserve specific target goals for subjective experience. For instance, with LUNA, we wished convey a very natural sounding driver response with large dynamic range reproduction and great layering. Thus, we did not wish to overly dampen driver motion.
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