Radius HP-TWF11R earphone in review – pleasure pleasure, little treasure!
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Radius HP-TWF11R earphone in review – pleasure pleasure, little treasure!
If someone told me that a dual-driver earphone would catch my ear, I’d have yawned a juicy mess of contempt into their face. If, however, that person first mentioned that the dual-driver wasn’t just another ba-ba balanced armature earphone, I’d have kept my spit and contempt to myself. Sonority may be have been damned in naming Radius’ new HP-TWF11R dual-dynamic driver earphone, but the Japanese company surely show that they’ve what it takes to make an earphone sound great.
Snip and cut from review:
Sound
Sound
The 15mm woofer can move a lot of air. The second driver, a 7mm midrange tweeter of sorts, handles the upper stuff, and it does a damn fine job. I’ve mentioned in previous reviews that with current technology, small drivers just don’t pick out enough details: they don’t retrieve enough information down deep, and end up sacrificing dynamics and details as a result. With the HP-TWF11R, however, Radius illustrated that by mashing the two together, you can get really close to perfection.
Believe it or not, this earphone is very well-behaved. It isn’t a boomy monster; no, it simply rocks. Its bass is lovingly detailed, smooth and fast. Then there is texture and kick. I was expecting something along the lines of the sometimes-oppressive Mingo WM2, or the off-kilter Sennheiser IE8, but what I got was at-ear balance, control, extension, and speed.
Extremely low bass evident in songs such as Chican’s Daylight and Marus Schulz’ Mainstage, which is nearly inaudible with most earphones, is peart and lively. It’s like holding a golf-ball after slumming it with table tennis balls for years: the new sensation of pimples and divots is overwhelming. This machined bass is excellent electronic music. There is speed, space, and texture; and thankfully, no hint of boominess taints bass-driven music. That said, I want to iterate explicitly that the TWF11R isn’t a dead-flat earphone, it simply isn’t a boomy mess. At the ear, it performs pretty well in line with the ear’s attenuation of low and high notes.
While computer instruments are good, real bass, the stuff from bass guitars and kick drums is, dare I say it, unmatched in focus and liveliness. Actually, this is THE earphone for bass guitar. No, no, let me rephrase that: it is THE earphone for guitar, full stop. You can feel the distortion and the trace touch of a finger across the steel/nylon strings. Beautiful.
Between the mids and highs there is an interesting dip, but before that is detail and space. Guitars, male vocals, piano – they all make it in and each is sweet, spacious, and mesmerising.
How can I describe it? Ever played deadman’s finger? You and a friend place your index fingers together and stroke the pair: one half responds to the touch while the other is ‘dead’. It is eerie and exciting. That is what music through the HP-TWF11R is like. You have the dead weight of volume and impact in the low and mid frequencies, but on the opposite side is feeling, attack, and sensation. Simply put, I’ve not experienced such full, lush, and exciting sound in an earphone before.
It is sweetly smooth like the Monster Turbine Pro, textured like the Victor FX500, and emotional like the Mingo WM2. But, unlike the others, it doesn’t have any real weaknesses. Its bass is powerful, but just right; its midrange, velvety smooth, and its highs are extended in a pretty straight line to past 17Khz, but can start to ‘sizzle’ past that. Stragely, however, despite excellently sharp piano resonance and great extension, female vocals lose a little poise in comparison.
One thing which surprises me more than anything else is how well Radius captured texture, depth, and fluidity despite throwing two drivers into such a tight body. My experience with deep, bass hound earphones has largely been negative: they emanate forceful, dark and boomy while darkening the sound. I’m not sure what magic substance Radius have laced the HP-TWF11R with, but maybe it doesn’t matter: this earphone is the antithesis of what I expected and unstoppable in a number of categories.
If you happen to have an older iPod or own a Cowon or Zune, you will be happy to know that this Radius responds well to amping, but paired with a clever DAP, an amp isn’t needed for anything but cleanup. This earphone has a lot of class and doesn’t bloom or leak, so tightening up the bottom end will only help the most helpless of DAP’s achieve a tight frequency response and a little more clarity between instruments. I’d not worry about that fraction of a performance difference, however, if you have an iPod touch or iPhone.
Finally, at 105dB of sensitivity, the HP-TWF11R doesn’t hiss too much, but noisy sources will let through the snake in the grass. With the iPod touch 2G and its analogues in the non-iPod realm, hiss is minimal. What it won’t do is block external noise very well. This earphone isn’t a fully open design, but it lets a lot of noise into your music.
Out and about
I’ll sum it up like this: stay indoors with The HP-TWF11R. It just doesn’t do movement. There is too much touch noise in the cable, and the barely-secure earphones might blow away as a car hurriedly passes. But even if your ears are moulded to these awkward earphones, wind noises hammer the drivers to crinkle obnoxiously. This earphone just ain’t made for the commute.
Conclusion
For the price, there may not be a better sounding earphone on the market. Add a hundred or more dollars and the same probably still holds true. Radius have soundly done their homework. Balance, speed, space, and atmosphere: near-perfection abounds in the cramped housing of the HP-TWF11R. Unfortunately, aside from a nice case and strain reliefs, there is little to praise about Radius’ design. The cable is simply horrible, fit follows suit, and the earphone’s isolation is laughable. This Radius earphone looks portable and sounds glorious, but no matter how much I want to enjoy it whilst out and about, I can’t.
If Radius can fix the fit and replace the ridiculous cable, they will have THE portable earphone. Until then, however, the HP-TWF11R is an esoteric introduction to prodigious sound at the expense of: fit, comfort, and isolation.
