tomscy2000
Headphoneus Supremus
Looks like Nuforce has finally announced it formally: http://primo8.nuforce.com/
Is there still going to be a pre-order discount?
It's available now (see Amazon); I think we're past the pre-order stage.
The pre-order is there but at $499. I thought that was the regular price?
Chris Marten just published his First Listen on the HiFi Plus web site.
Let me just jump right in and declare, unequivocally, that the Primo 8 is different to, and light years better than, any other earphone NuForce has ever built. I’ll also go even further to suggest that the Primo 8 will very likely prove to be a strong contender against all comers on the worldwide stage. In fact, my preliminary listening experiences lead me to think the Primo 8s may do certain things better than almost any other universal-fit earphones on the market regardless of price.
...snip...
So what does the Primo 8 offer the listener? Well, it provides pretty much scrupulously neutral tonal balance (more on this in a moment), excellent resolving power and transient speed, plus a truly remarkable, overarching quality of lucidity and focus. I can’t say for certain, but I strongly suspect these pleasing elements of lucidity and focus are both directly attributable to NuForce’s linear-phase design.
...snip...
the look of the optimally focused Hasselblad image is the visual equivalent of the sound of phase coherency as captured, in this instance, by NuForce’s Primo 8. As a result, I found the Primo 8 effortlessly pulled deep into the interior of good recordings, where all the richest of subtle details and musical ‘secrets’ reside. This, to my way of thinking, is why the Primo 8 is likely to win friends and lots of them within the audiophile community.
Candidly, the only sticking point may be the Primo 8’s tonal balance, which—as I mentioned above—seems neutral, almost to a fault. Usually, this is the point where the audio journalist takes a step back to inform you that the product in question sounds “bright and a bit lean,” but that’s actually not what I want you to understand about the Primo 8. What you do need to know, though, is that it absolutely, positively will not add so much as a faint whiff of extra bass energy, if that energy is not in fact present in the recording.” Is the Primo 8, then, ‘bass-shy’? Absolutely not. The earphone can deliver tons of bass, including very low frequency bass, provided that that information is present in the track being played.
I mention this point, then, simply because I find that the majority of earphones (even ones billed as ‘monitoring’ earphones) tend to add at least some measure of bass enrichment—in some instances quite lot of bass enrichment. If, down deep (no pun intended), you need, want, or simply prefer a touch of bass lift, then the Primo 8 might not be the earphone for you. But if you love a pure, ‘all-the-truth-and-nothing-but-the-truth’ approach to music reproduction, by all means give the Primo 8 a listen. I think you’ll find it is pretty special.
...what I am ashamed about is that he was able to condense the basics of the Primo 8's essence into a much shorter and easier to read review, which was even easier to edit down into the 5 paragraphs above.
Sadly the cable without mic isn't yet available. Any ETA for it?