3 months after my order, I'm finally joining the club of VC owners!
What I wasn't sure about was the actual look of these VC Olive. I was worried about it being too yellow or too glossy. It was very difficult to appreciate the finish with the few pictures available online, hence why I decided to take a photo as close as possible to their real appearance (touched up using a calibrated monitor). In the end, they're more light orange-ish than yellow, and not glossy at all, more like a silky smooth satin-matte finish. Silky smooth is what comes to mine when holding them. Olive wood comes out really "soft" when finely sanded. Add to this their buttery smooth mechanic, and they really do feel like a high end product (reminds me of the Empyrean in that sense)
What surprised me a bit was the OFC cable. The heatshrink was loose, enabling me to unscrew the jack and look inside. It's not a 4 wires microphone cable but a shielded 3 wires, where they used the shield as a ground wire. Unusual construction in my book by I'll defer to the experts around here to judge.
Sound wise, it's obviously too early to tell but I like what I'm hearing. Punchy, balanced, with a wider presentation than expected. No wow effect in terms of resolution (not really a surprise coming from a Heddphone...) but interestingly, showing striking differences between recordings. I can't put my finger on it but for some reason, I'm hearing differences I've never heard before, and here I'm not talking about micro details, more like the general tone of a recording, call it the sound of the studio or whatever. Overall I have the feeling it sounds "just right". Maybe that's the magic of ZMF that so many were raving about? Tom McRae's first album for example, masterfully recorded IMO, did sound quite different from all my previous experience. At the same time, I felt the lower register was sounding a bit congested but putting more hours on it should fix that.