I was privileged to be allowed to review the revolutionary IN TUIT headphone (alpha prototype) and was given permission to share my findings exclusively with the limited select audience that comprises the readership here. The review venue was restricted to the "skunk works" secret development laboratory of IN TUIT. No photos were allowed.
IN TUIT promises to be a threshold-breaking headphone. It most certainly exemplifies the words of the acronym IN TUIT, "I Need The Ultimate In Transparency," that is the basis of its name.
I will review not only its sound, but also its comfort, appearance, and ease of use.
COMFORT: Top headphones strive for such a level of comfort as to cause the wearer to forget that they are there. The IN TUIT actually achieves this goal. They have essentially zero weight and zero clamping force. There was no sweating when I used them outside the IN TUIT Labs building, despite the full sun, and their cordless design left me free to wander from my music source at will.
APPEARANCE: These are the first headphones I have ever encountered to be entirely clear. One can see objects on the other side of the headphone with NO distortion, not even a surface reflection. This applies to all parts of the headphone... ear pads, ear cups, the transducers that they contain, and headband. It is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish a picture of a person wearing the IN TUIT from a picture of the same person without them.
EASE OF USE: As previously mentioned, these headphones are cordless. They are also buttonless - their smart circuitry selects volume and connection parameters automatically, without need for user fiddling of controls. They can work with a vast range of amplifiers, or even no amplifier, equally well. Their circuit design obviates the damping factor problems that can be caused by an amplifier output impedance that approaches the value of the headphone input impedance.
SOUND: IN TUIT truly achieves its name: the sound is so transparent and uncolored that you cannot tell that you are listening through headphones. The ambient noise around you sounds exactly as you hear it without headphones -- positional imaging preserves width, height, and depth location of multiple sources. Sound quality is completely free of spectral tilt or peaks. Detailed blind A/B tests proved that the perception of ambient sounds with vs. without the headphones are identical within the statistics of the tests. A rogue former member of the IN TUIT team confided that this transparency is achieved by designing the IN TUIT to use and leverage the ambient sound environment, rather than fighting it by placing opposing sounds between the environment and the ear as done by lesser headphones.
Read more at http://www.innerfidelity.com/
