-rowan-
1000+ Head-Fier
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- Oct 21, 2015
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My turn. Hello Quattro.
Initial impressions - only that after a few hours of listening, I’m already fairly sure they won’t be just initial. Comparisons are from memory - enjoying the Quattro so much I have no desire to A/B at this point.
Love the timbre. Easy rec for classical, jazz or any sort of acoustic instruments or voices. They have proper note weight, texture and staging that makes live performances feel so natural. Bigger soundstage than Serial with more space between notes.
Treble is beautifully handled. Penon have been on form with treble tuning since Vortex and it continues here. Here, it is by no means bright or fatiguing - in that sense it is similar to Serial, but there is a good deal of upper treble detail that contributes to the texture, imaging and positional cues.
Mids are classic Penon. There’s a pleasing tilt towards the lower mids that gives lower voices (contralto and lower) a shade of warmth, richness and depth that I don’t think I’ve quite heard in a Penon IEM since Volt.
Bass - this will probably improve once it’s had a few hours but I can already tell it will be my new standard for Penon bass. It reaches deeper than Serial or 10th. EST50 and Turbo have moar bass but this already surpasses them in terms of quality, maintaining control and texture all the way down low. If I were to nitpick, I might look for a bit more nuance and layering but that may well come with a few more hours.
The Quattro requires quite a bit of juice (and I’m in the camp that thinks the Serial needs juice and scales up well). Listening on the R6 Pro II, which drives it ok on Class A, high gain and with the volume 5 or more steps higher than I might use for Serial.
They are so enjoyable out of the box they almost make me think burn-in, schmurn-in (j/k, I’ll put some hours on them when I can get them out of my ears).
Using the stock cable and Penon Orange tips. For someone who swops out the cable of every new iem within minutes of receiving it, I’m pretty happy with the stock cable, for now anyway. It’s been 4 hours and the stock cable is still on, save for a short interlude.
The Orange tips are samples of the latest version, which are finally in mass production and now also come in black. More on them later, but my hunch after brief tip rolling is that these have a special synergy with the Quattro in terms of what they do for timbre and soundstage, and I have little to no motivation to remove them at the moment.
Initial impressions - only that after a few hours of listening, I’m already fairly sure they won’t be just initial. Comparisons are from memory - enjoying the Quattro so much I have no desire to A/B at this point.
Love the timbre. Easy rec for classical, jazz or any sort of acoustic instruments or voices. They have proper note weight, texture and staging that makes live performances feel so natural. Bigger soundstage than Serial with more space between notes.
Treble is beautifully handled. Penon have been on form with treble tuning since Vortex and it continues here. Here, it is by no means bright or fatiguing - in that sense it is similar to Serial, but there is a good deal of upper treble detail that contributes to the texture, imaging and positional cues.
Mids are classic Penon. There’s a pleasing tilt towards the lower mids that gives lower voices (contralto and lower) a shade of warmth, richness and depth that I don’t think I’ve quite heard in a Penon IEM since Volt.
Bass - this will probably improve once it’s had a few hours but I can already tell it will be my new standard for Penon bass. It reaches deeper than Serial or 10th. EST50 and Turbo have moar bass but this already surpasses them in terms of quality, maintaining control and texture all the way down low. If I were to nitpick, I might look for a bit more nuance and layering but that may well come with a few more hours.
The Quattro requires quite a bit of juice (and I’m in the camp that thinks the Serial needs juice and scales up well). Listening on the R6 Pro II, which drives it ok on Class A, high gain and with the volume 5 or more steps higher than I might use for Serial.
They are so enjoyable out of the box they almost make me think burn-in, schmurn-in (j/k, I’ll put some hours on them when I can get them out of my ears).
Using the stock cable and Penon Orange tips. For someone who swops out the cable of every new iem within minutes of receiving it, I’m pretty happy with the stock cable, for now anyway. It’s been 4 hours and the stock cable is still on, save for a short interlude.
The Orange tips are samples of the latest version, which are finally in mass production and now also come in black. More on them later, but my hunch after brief tip rolling is that these have a special synergy with the Quattro in terms of what they do for timbre and soundstage, and I have little to no motivation to remove them at the moment.