I got my Hifiman Svanar TWS yesterday, and I've only done some preliminary testing so far.
Not sure what I think honestly, maybe my expectations were unreasonable because of the price being so steep, but I'm not exactly blown away.
I think the soundstage is impressive, that's where they definitely shine in my opinion, it's somewhat large and 3D-ish with good separation.
But I think the rest of the sound, even on high fidelity mode straight out of the box was bizarrely bad to me even on LDAC + Hi-Fi Mode, but with some EQ through Wavelet it can definitely sound great. But it doesn't sound as good as its price would entail pretty much, and there are some staggering flaws that makes it not worth the asking price.
But yeah, sound is great if you EQ it, not unparallelled, unbeatable greatness, but sure, great.
They are also very comfortable in my opinion, and I like the look of the actual earbuds themselves.
But for the negative parts:
1) The eartips included in the box are... I don't understand, they have like 6 pairs or something, but they were all smaller than the ones that came with the earbuds, and those were too small for me. What is this, TWS for ants?! Jokes aside, my ear canals are big but they're not monstrously large, I usually wear size L tips with the occasional size M working and sometimes a size XL depending on the overall tip shape, but this sucked. I switched over to some Spinfits CP360 and now I have a great fit.
2) The fact that they don't sound that great out of the box makes an app very much on my wish-list for these earbuds, I'm happy that I'm on android and can use Wavelet etc, but if I was using an iPhone I'd be kinda miffed about that.
3) They were very much cutting out like crazy at first, the sound was glitchy and weird but it seems to have gotten slightly better now for some reason, this happened especially on LDAC.
4) I made fun of the shape of the case awhile back, and now that I have them... Yeah I still want to question why they went with that shape?
To make it look luxurious? Well, it's a flippin' dumb shape for a set of portable earbuds that people usually put in a pocket. Yeah wow it's really cool that it looks like an abstract oyster and is also as difficult to open as one, but it sure as hell isn't user friendly and I think they could've gone slightly more normal with it. Like make the casing mostly metal to fit with the earbuds but make it rectangular, circular, not, idk what shape it is, octagonal?! Hifiman pls.
5) Really wish they had AptX of some sort, I can honestly say that I think that earbuds with the LDAC codec rarely sounds the way I want them to, it's super weird. There's something about the upper mids and treble that usually gets a bit sharp and metallic-sounding that I don't love.
6) The sound between the hifi-mode and the ANC mode is way too drastic in my opinion, it's just too much of an EQ shift, because it makes you want to like EQ the different modes in different ways which isn't great.
I'm sorry for ribbing on some of y'alls current favorite earbud, but yeah.
I will give it this: It does sound a lot better to me now than it did when I first started using them, so I will pretend like it just needs some burn-in (mental or physical depending on what you believe
) for it to reach its full potential. I will update with what I think of them as I use them more.
Also getting my Aviot TE-Z1PNK today, we'll see what I think of those!
