A few early impressions of the Heaven IV out of an iPod Classic.
The Heaven IV's presentation is very intimate/up close out of the iPod, and the sound signature is on the bright side of neutral to my ears. I believe the 160 GB iPod Classic is known to have a warm sound signature, so assuming this is true, you may want to factor this in choosing a source.
The IV's can go deep into the music for details and nuances, such as being able to capture the texture of bowing on a cello, and picking up the pronunciation of the ends of the words on vocal tracks. This is very apparent for both opera and Pop such as Celine Dion's music. If you like a warm sound signature though, my guess is that you would have to pair them with the right amp. or move to a warmer sounding headphone.
The IVs can handle symphonic music as well as Rock music. One Rock artist that I like to use to test headphones is Daughtry just because I don't find that his CDs are well produced, not the other way around. The IVs do a great job with his vocals, and at the same time are able to separate out the instruments in his band. I have found that with many headphones, his band seems to produce a solid wall of sound behind him, making the music hard to listen to. I find Kelly Clarkson's albums similar in this respect. The Heaven iVs can deal with both well produced and compressed music extremely well, but they shine with well produced tracks.
From memory, I far prefer the Heaven IVs to my Sennheiser IE8s, although in fairness, they take completely different approaches to reproducing music. The IE8s are known for their wide soundstage for an IEM, and they have a much warmer sound signature than the IVs, plus the listener is placed much further back from the musicians. Without being too repetitive, I think the very up front nature of the IVs presentation will be something people will either love or it could be a deal breaker for them, depending on how they like their music presented. Take a track like the Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter. With the IVs, you are right up their with the Stones, in contrast to headphones like the PF IXs where you are at least 20 rows back, which gives you the sense of a sweeping musical soundstage as the song develops, which is very close to the live presentation. That being said, the Heaven IVs have tremendous clarity and you trade their digging down into each guitar note for the more unified yet still very detailed presentation of a headphone like the PF IXs. I picked the PF IXs for comparison here only because of the extreme difference in the way they present music, not to compare the two otherwise.
I haven't checked how the Heaven IV's scale with good amplification yet, but I will do so when my Pico Power amp arrives and post some impressions then. But even if they do scale well with amplification, etc., I personally would be quite happy traveling with the Heaven IVs and a DAP, and probably not miss my home rig too much, at least for a few weeks at a time!
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