The discovery thread!

[KutuzovGambit]

You got a link for that model or information?

Facebook post only so far:

ISN Audio EST50
Flagship 2 Electrostatic+ 2BA + Dynamic Driver Hybrid 2Pin 0.78mm HiFi Audiophile In-ear Monitor
2 Sonion Electrostatic driver for ultra-high frequency
1BA Knowles for high frequency
1BA Sonion for middle frequency
10mm dynamic for bass
Rated input power: 2mW
Max input power: 3mW
Impedance: 18ohm±10%(@1kHz)
Sensitivity: 100±3dB(@1kHz)
Frequency response: 15Hz-70kHz
Channel unbalance: 100Hz and 1kHz≤3dB
Connector: 2Pin 0.78mm

@Dsnuts got a prerelease graph: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/isn...t50-successor-to-the-h40.920551/post-16404869

 

[KutuzovGambit]

Just saw some pre-release graphs for that and it looks right up my alley. Now I've got another one to add to my wishlist.

RIP your wallet…

 

[TheVortex]

Facebook post only so far:

ISN Audio EST50
Flagship 2 Electrostatic+ 2BA + Dynamic Driver Hybrid 2Pin 0.78mm HiFi Audiophile In-ear Monitor
2 Sonion Electrostatic driver for ultra-high frequency
1BA Knowles for high frequency
1BA Sonion for middle frequency
10mm dynamic for bass
Rated input power: 2mW
Max input power: 3mW
Impedance: 18ohm±10%(@1kHz)
Sensitivity: 100±3dB(@1kHz)
Frequency response: 15Hz-70kHz
Channel unbalance: 100Hz and 1kHz≤3dB
Connector: 2Pin 0.78mm

@Dsnuts got a prerelease graph: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/isn...t50-successor-to-the-h40.920551/post-16404869

It looks good and thanks.

 

[mndless]

Facebook post only so far:

ISN Audio EST50
Flagship 2 Electrostatic+ 2BA + Dynamic Driver Hybrid 2Pin 0.78mm HiFi Audiophile In-ear Monitor
2 Sonion Electrostatic driver for ultra-high frequency
1BA Knowles for high frequency
1BA Sonion for middle frequency
10mm dynamic for bass
Rated input power: 2mW
Max input power: 3mW
Impedance: 18ohm±10%(@1kHz)
Sensitivity: 100±3dB(@1kHz)
Frequency response: 15Hz-70kHz
Channel unbalance: 100Hz and 1kHz≤3dB
Connector: 2Pin 0.78mm

@Dsnuts got a prerelease graph: https://www.head-fi.org/threads/isn...t50-successor-to-the-h40.920551/post-16404869

Those look surprisingly easy to drive thanks to their low impedance and not too terrible sensitivity. It does mean that they're going to see a more noticeable impact from cable rolling and source selection, though. The FR is stupidly tempting for me, because it's a very safe tuning with a bit of extra bass than the reference.

 

[Dsnuts]

EST50 is more than just compelling folks. It is the follow up to one of the best bang for buck hybrid earphones all of last year in the ISN H40. Still to this day someone show me a better hybrid for less than $200. It just don't exist. So the bar has been set pretty high due to the EST50 actually being the upgrade over the H40. I was told even they had a difficult time one upping the H40 It is tuned by pros and in the industry and lets just say this is not the tuners first time with EST drivers. I expect great things from this release and I am about to find out exactly how they sound in a few days. Stay tuned.

 

[TheVortex]

EST50 is more than just compelling folks. It is the follow up to one of the best bang for buck hybrid earphones all of last year in the ISN H40. Still to this day someone show me a better hybrid for less than $200. It just don't exist. So the bar has been set pretty high due to the EST50 actually being the upgrade over the H40. I was told even they had a difficult time one upping the H40 It is tuned by pros and in the industry and lets just say this is not the tuners first time with EST drivers. I expect great things from this release and I am about to find out exactly how they sound in a few days. Stay tuned.

Looking forward to it

 

[Dsnuts]

You guys will get the straight out of the box experience as I get it. Like I said I have very high expectations of this one.

I checked with DHL. Looks like I wont get it till the 21st.

 

[PhonoPhi]

my KZ BA10’s channel matching is pretty good but I haven’t listened to it for a long time as it has one of the worst pressure buildup and timbre is... just off.

Since some people may spend thousands on "timbre" and "naturalness", it would be interesting and instructive to hear more of your thoughts on it, as well as from anyone else would like to chime in.

If spectral preferences are subjective (Harman, etc) to start with, then the resolution and spacial perceptions add onto it.

So taking just two instruments: violin and piano, as an example.

For a good violin that built to project into large halls, the sound (overtones, etc) heard/recorded from a distance and close are quite different. Which timbre would be more natural?

For piano: recorded far away essentially as a mono source, minus, some some space/room reverbations, it is different from recordings using two microphones positioned close on different sides. With the latter recordings some IEMs can give an effect of your head being right in the piano - surely unrealistic, and then hardly "natural" and with skewed timbre but nevertheless so engaging and fun!

 

[mndless]

Since some people may spend thousands on "timbre" and "naturalness", it would be interesting and instructive to hear more of your thoughts on it, as well as from anyone else would like to chime in.

If spectral preferences are subjective (Harman, etc) to start with, then the resolution and spacial perceptions add onto it.

So taking just two instruments: violin and piano, as an example.

For a good violin that built to project into large halls, the sound (overtones, etc) heard/recorded from a distance and close are quite different. Which timbre would be more natural?

For piano: recorded far away essentially as a mono source, minus, some some space/room reverbations, it is different from recordings using two microphones positioned close on different sides. With the latter recordings some IEMs can give an effect of your head being right in the piano - surely unrealistic, and then hardly "natural" and with skewed timbre but nevertheless so engaging and fun!

My preferred recording method is binaural using a head simulacrum with the microphones mounted within, as the general size and shape of the head can actually impact how each microphone is isolated from the other. So the binaural recording setups where it's just the ears aren't ideal. All else fails, two large diaphragm condenser microphones angled away from each other with a thin layer of foam and a layer of pop filter material is adequate to pick up on room reverb with a decent natural quality. DIY Perks on YouTube actually made his own, and it's a great example. Typically, things like instrument placement are pieced together by our brains from a stereo audio feed by combining the channel balance (how much the instrument sounds within each channel) and reverb from the recording environment, and how that impacts the channel balance for that instrument. Harmonic decay is very important for determining this, as it can be more informative for placement than the fundamental harmonic is, as it will often sound quite similar just off of center, while the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary fundamentals, being higher frequencies and more prone to rapid decay over distance, will have more noticeable decay. This is why earphones with wildly distorted frequency response graphs with severely elevated treble can have challenges with imaging and stage size. There's a lot of other factors to consider which aren't adequately shown in the FR graphs, such as the driver agility (measured by decay from a solid tone to silence), transient performance (speed at which the driver can adjust from playing one tone to a different tone), and air pressure from piston actuation compared to alternate reed or AMT drivers. BA drivers, for instance, can register a high volume, but this can affect our ears differently than a pistonic DD reproducing the same tone. This is particularly noticeable in the sub-bass and bass register, and it is why all-BA IEMs with what appears to be an elevated bass response may not sound as though they have as much bass gain as their FR graph would indicate. Typically, drivers with extremely short decay and high transient performance can more easily come across as "dry" or "analytical", particularly with poorly mastered tracks that don't provide enough information to the source. This is part of the reason why people love planar magnetic drivers for mids. They have good decay and transient performance, better than a traditional DD, which lends itself to a very natural sounding vocal and instrumental reproduction. They're fast enough to sound "technical" without being "dry" or "harsh", whereas a DD, if not tuned very well, can sound "warm" or "syrupy" due to lengthy decay in the mids and treble range. It's incredibly complicated, especially since impedance changes across the FR of each driver type, which impacts the excursion of each driver type at a given input power. You also have the driver and enclosure material itself to consider, as this can color the sound slightly through driver flex, driver weight, mechanical spring force (in the case of single material DD), driver resonance with the sound cavity and rear-wave resonance, and enclosure sound absorption and dispersion. It is stupidly complicated, to say the least. I wish I understood it even better, but I haven't got the time and brainpower to dedicate to it.

Edit for even more info: despite my typical misgivings about metal tweeters, my favorite loudspeakers are from KEF and are as close to reference as I could afford to buy. I have a set of iQ90 speakers from Kef. If you want to see what a nearly reference sound signature looks like, check out this FR graph from hometheaterhifi's analysis:

 

[tgx78]

Since some people may spend thousands on "timbre" and "naturalness", it would be interesting and instructive to hear more of your thoughts on it, as well as from anyone else would like to chime in.

If spectral preferences are subjective (Harman, etc) to start with, then the resolution and spacial perceptions add onto it.

So taking just two instruments: violin and piano, as an example.

For a good violin that built to project into large halls, the sound (overtones, etc) heard/recorded from a distance and close are quite different. Which timbre would be more natural?

For piano: recorded far away essentially as a mono source, minus, some some space/room reverbations, it is different from recordings using two microphones positioned close on different sides. With the latter recordings some IEMs can give an effect of your head being right in the piano - surely unrealistic, and then hardly "natural" and with skewed timbre but nevertheless so engaging and fun!

the "plastic" timbre I complain about the all BA IEMs are more about the lack of certain properties DDs have which I have come to associate with "correctness" rather than actual problems with the BA sound. I verify this with the live recordings of the orchestras that I was part of.
As @mndless pointed above, plasticky-ness has to do with very fast decay, making notes sound weightless even if it's a warm and darker sound, the metallic timbre is also fairly identifiable in the decay of an instrument, especially cymbals. A ringing, or extended decay which is a more extreme version of "bright," that the frequency response of the driver emphasizes the treble over the rest of the spectrum.

so basically when a BA driver in IEMs fails to accurately portray either one (or both) of the attack, decay, sustain or release, the timbre can sound unnatural to a trained ear.

 

[mndless]

the "plastic" timbre I complain about the all BA IEMs are more about the lack of certain properties DDs have which I have come to associate with "correctness" rather than actual problems with the BA sound. I verify this with the live recordings of the orchestras that I was part of.
As @mndless pointed above, plasticky-ness has to do with very fast decay, making notes sound weightless even if it's a warm and darker sound, the metallic timbre is also fairly identifiable in the decay of an instrument, especially cymbals. A ringing, or extended decay which is a more extreme version of "bright," that the frequency response of the driver emphasizes the treble over the rest of the spectrum.

so basically when a BA driver in IEMs fails to accurately portray either one (or both) of the attack, decay, sustain or release, the timbre can sound unnatural to a trained ear.

Absolutely. Depending on how agile the driver is, having a recording with a lot more information can make or break it's performance. It's what some people describe as an IEM that reveals a lot about the mastering of a recording. Or an IEM that isn't forgiving to poorly mastered recordings. Etc. If you've got recordings at 16-bit 44.1Khz that sound plastic or metallic because your BAs are too agile, see if you can find a version mastered at 96Khz or even higher. Higher bit depth doesn't necessarily fix this problem, but it can improve granularity and clarity between each note. Regardless, if you've got the space or streaming bandwidth, it's worth going with the highest resolution audio file your player supports. On a related note, low bit depth audio files typically have compressed dynamic range which is meant to be expanded by the player codec. The higher the bit depth, the greater the dynamic range that the compressed file contains natively and the less expansion that occurs during playback. Lossless recordings use less compression, so there is less data loss or artifacts from the compression and decompression stages of mastering and playback. In theory, 24-bit 48kHz is more than adequate to exceed the fidelity of what the human ear can discern, but this isn't necessarily the case when audiophiles get involved with our ridiculously agile drivers and propensity to use our music to listen to our earphones instead of the other way around.

Edit because I forgot to mention stuff: typically you will most readily notice an increase in bit depth not in the treble, but in the bass performance, as it gains the most additional data points during encoding comparatively. Higher sample rates are similar in this regard. It's one of the reasons why switching from SBC to Apt-X or LDAC for Bluetooth devices seems to make it miraculously find better bass performance.

 

[Barndoor]

the "plastic" timbre I complain about the all BA IEMs are more about the lack of certain properties DDs have which I have come to associate with "correctness" rather than actual problems with the BA sound. I verify this with the live recordings of the orchestras that I was part of.
As @mndless pointed above, plasticky-ness has to do with very fast decay, making notes sound weightless even if it's a warm and darker sound, the metallic timbre is also fairly identifiable in the decay of an instrument, especially cymbals. A ringing, or extended decay which is a more extreme version of "bright," that the frequency response of the driver emphasizes the treble over the rest of the spectrum.

so basically when a BA driver in IEMs fails to accurately portray either one (or both) of the attack, decay, sustain or release, the timbre can sound unnatural to a trained ear.

Decay is something I struggle to get my head around.
From my logic, as a non-musician, the natural decay of an instrument is surely within the recording.
If a driver has fast decay does this mean they are representing what is recorded or failing to present recorded information?
I can understand that a slower decay might be preferable to some, just like using tube amps to alter the presentation is.

 

[mndless]

Decay is something I struggle to get my head around.
From my logic, as a non-musician, the natural decay of an instrument is surely within the recording.
If a driver has fast decay does this mean they are representing what is recorded or failing to present recorded information?
I can understand that a slower decay might be preferable to some, just like using tube amps to alter the presentation is.

Precisely. It's the same reason some people like vinyl. The decay can be appealing for some people, and it's why companies like JVC make wooden dome DD earphones despite the added mass to the driver. Both the material and added mass color the sound reproduction. If you have an agile enough driver and enough information in the audio file, it can mimic the decay more naturally, though initial impact may still not be as substantial due to a lack of mass and air movement/excursion height, etc. Parameters such as electrical or magnetic spring force and mechanical spring force also affect a driver's agility, since they directly determine how quickly a moving component of the driver snaps back to neutral positioning, though it also typically indicates that a driver will require more power to reach the same amount of excursion. These are all features which must be balanced to tune a speaker system. BAs and Electrostats sidestep this in a fashion by using more of a flapping reed style of driver, so they don't exactly pump air in the same way that a pistonic driver does, so they are generally considered less "impactful" than their DD counterparts despite being more technically resolving. All interesting facets of earphone design to consider.

 

[KutuzovGambit]

Decay is something I struggle to get my head around.
From my logic, as a non-musician, the natural decay of an instrument is surely within the recording.
If a driver has fast decay does this mean they are representing what is recorded or failing to present recorded information?
I can understand that a slower decay might be preferable to some, just like using tube amps to alter the presentation is.

Yes the recording contains the information, but what is in question is the physical capability of the transducer to accurately reproduce those nuances.

 

[PhonoPhi]

Thank you, all, the responses were really helpful.

My limitation is that to start with I am not able to understand how typical recordings can reproduce everything "naturally" - just the sound pressure intensity is recorded in two points of space with limitations of transducers, then converting ro digital, then back to analogue and then to the limitation of transducera!
It is an approximation at best, and some like "warm", smoothen out, e.g. "lamp", "vinyl".

In contrast to those "natural" recording at two points in the room/hall, I prefer separate instruments recorded and emphasized in recording, to feel my heas inside a piano or plucked strings. Is it natural to how one hears the orchestra in a concert hall - surely not(!), one can't move in space to hear all solo instruments up close, but it definitely sounds more engaging, more resolving.

Similarly, I strongly prefer fast, analytical and resolving - it just works better for my sound processing. DDs sound "cardboardy" to me when overtasked - how a single membrane can "perfectly/naturally" reproduce all overrone series of several instruments would be really hard to understand for me.

So to put it short - subjective enjoyment is so much more within one's grasp compared to chasing elusive unicorns of "naturalness"