My quick impression for Nightjar Acoustic Duality, I will provide a full review with more pictures later.
Thanks for the watercooler tour arranged by the
@Rockwell75 and thanks for
@Chang from Nightjar to provide the tour kit.
As my taste in audio gradually evolves, I find myself still deeply rooted in basshead category. From my collection of IEMs, ranging from Z1R, Trifecta, to XE6, they are all sharing the same fame in their bass performance. I also almost bought EE Legend X and EE Legend EVO for the same reason.
The last IEMs that took my attention were Fatfreq Maestro SE (MSE) and Grand Maestro (GM). In the end, I found MSE being too niche and GM a much better choice. Unfortunately, GM turned out to be a nightmare for fitting to me. It started to hurt me after just a few minutes of listening.
There comes the Nightjar Acoustic Duality, the latest legend of bass king. I heard so much praise before duality being formally released and finally, I had a chance to listen to Duality during CanJam SoCal 2024. It was a jaw-dropping experience for me. However, the short demo is not enough for me to fully assess the performance of duality other than its unworldly bass.
Fast forward to April 2025, I received a private massage in head-fi that the Duality kit will be coming to me. I have to say that for so many tours I had before, this is one of the most anticipated ones.
How does Duality sound? I have a mixed feeling that Duality is an exceptional specialist, and being so special even in the specialist category, I will hesitate to make up my mind to buy it.
The tuning of duality is L shape, but without the too dark or warm feeling of the typical L shape IEMs. This could be one of the secret sauce from Nightjar Acoustic.
First, I have surprises. Before I received the duality, I already had some boiler alert that duality could be a pony of one trick. However, after spending time listening to many different genres, I found that duality is performing well outside the bass category. Although at its current price level, the Mids and Treble could be better, especially compared with its bass, it may bring some disappointment for people expecting a complete TOTL performance from duality.
Another surprise is actually in the bass itself. I found the bass of duality has one special sauce that I might give 6 out of 5 for its performance: its sub-bass. The reach, the quality, and the quantity of the sub-bass is simply out of this world. So much so that if you put the switch to bass position and use the included impedance cable, the sub-bass in hip hop will make even the most hard-core bassheads crying out “too much”. Imaging you stop at the traffic light along with a car installed with the sub-woofers, and the driver of that car is playing some very loud hip hop music, and your entire body was physically shaken by the sub-bass. That is what you will be experiencing.
However, my real surprise comes from the mid-bass of duality. The quantity of mid bass is so shy compared to the sub-bass, I found the bass performance of duality is not consistent as a result. I actually found either my XE6 or Trifecta much, much more satisfying in mid-bass than duality.
As a result of the tuning and design of duality’s bass performance, extremely powerful bass does not bleed into the Mids and make the mids clean and clear. Also because of that, the mids are not as thick as I expected. It could be both good and bad. Good in the sense that duality’s vocal and mids performs wonderfully even with much lifted sub-bass, but bad in the sense that the contrast makes the entire music performance not very consistent.
As a hard-core bass-head, I would like to see more mid-bass, but I can totally understand Nightjar’s tuning decision to make it so unique.
Here are some of the tracks I used for duality (thanks for many watercoolers in the thread to provide those tracks, including
@zikarus and
@goldwerger)
The following two tracks provide enough sub-bass for you to fully enjoy the duality
Cordae - Jean Michel
Symba - Power Ranger (prod. by Mistersir)
Female vocals are wonderful from duality in the next track
Divine Marina Rebeka climbs up to C6, D6 and Eb6 in Albinoni's Adagio
Here is the example that in many old fashion music, such as the Polk Salad Annie live by Elvis, there are not much sub-bass but the mid-bass punch from duality is not as enjoyable as XE6 or Trifecta:
Elvis Presley - Polk Salad Annie Live
Another classic track for bass:
Big Boi - Kill Jill ft. Killer Mike, Jeezy
The next few tracks provide more genres for you to see the duality’s performance outside the bass category:
Take Five Kenichi Tsunoda Big Band
Desire ♫ Boz Scaggs
Poetry Man” by Queen Latifah
Finally, I was wondering if the interactions between our audiophiles and the Nightjar Acoustic play some role here. I remember that after my demo in CJSC last October, Chang asked me what I thought about Duality, I just expressed my jaw-dropping regarding the sub-bass and mentioned this is THE best bass I have ever heard. However, I think Chang should continue to ask me if duality is the IEM I would like to buy. I know for most of the interactions between listeners and the IEM designer, the solicitation could be sufficient here since my response was very positive. But given the duality is such a specialist, I am wondering if our reactions misled Chang in some way. I believe most people who talked with Chang during CanJam did not express their overall assessment since it was too short in a busy and noisy setting. Most of the positive responses were probably like mine, they were just about that bass, or more specifically, just about that sub-bass. Positive responses for an all-rounder IEM could be enough, but for niche player, if I were Chang, I would be more careful or press for confirmation from the overall performance from the listeners.
However, I believe there will be many people who will buy duality simply because there is nothing like it at this moment. Also from Nightjar Acoustic’s perspective, they have successfully developed a secret weapon that they could later used in the next implementation that will cater for a much broader audience.