Yes the Volur is advertised as being inspired by an evolution of the Nio. Your mistake is considering it the Nio2.
This is an odd complaint to me. Reading through 64 Audio’s website, there’s mentions of the Volur starting off as a “Nio 2” and becoming a “new creation” because of some driver changes with their True Isobaric configuration. But it doesn’t actually explain why it’s not a Nio 2. Vague statements like “We improved the quality of the bass and treble!” don’t mean anything. Of course they had to change something to justify a whole new product and charging $1,000 more.
Either way, this is frankly speaking just a question of semantics. I’m providing context for readers that the Volur is a “Nio 2” but if you read the review, I don’t ever reference the Nio after the introduction except in the comparison section. You can delete the word Nio from my article and it doesn’t actually change anything.
In the head-fi community we differentiate between basshead bass, and just really high quality and present bass. FatFreq are advertising to bassheads, the Volur is not. Having excellently textured and quality bass, which is what the Volur is advertised with, is certainly not basshead marketing.
I almost fully agree but I think there’s a nuance here - there’s good basshead bass and bad basshead bass. To be good, you need to both have quantity and quality. Bad only needs quantity. 64 Audio’s website for the Volur speaks to both quality and quantity.
it should be reviewed with the m15 which it came with installed.
Alright, my bad. I assumed you meant m12, not m15, given that the difference between the m15 and m20 modules is only about 1 - 1.5 dB at 20 Hz. My question is - how do you think it would have changed my opinion of the Volur to make it a more fair review? I speak positively of the Volur’s bass. My complaint is with the treble which the modules do not affect. I’m a little puzzled why you believe the m15 module would change my opinion of the Volur or significantly improves the review.
But the way you did I felt was unfair. You said you can hear treble up to Xkhz and then said it was too much. But that is simply not the case. Just because one can hear treble up to Xkhz means nothing, UNLESS you are sensitive to it.
I think this is a misunderstanding or you missed the prior sentence. Here’s the exact wording from my review again:
“Doing a sine sweep by ear, I found that there was only one wide-ish peak around 12 - 14 kHz instead of a consistent airiness all the way up to highest octaves. For reference I can still hear up to around 18.5 kHz. … So how does this peak translate to the listening experience?”
I’m not saying that because I can hear up to 18.5 kHz that the treble is bad. I’m saying that (in contrast to the frequency response graph) I hear a wide peak around 12 - 14 kHz. And then I go on to describe what I hear as the result of the big peak. The 18.5 kHz comment is there to mean that, to my ear, there aren’t peaks at e.g. 16, 17, or 18 kHz. This is important in the context of the frequency response graph because we do see another large peak at around 16 - 18 kHz and I’m trying to say that no, it’s not actually there. I’m actually fighting the case that people shouldn’t worry about the treble in the graph, which should be taken with a grain of salt to begin with.
Also, while yes, some people have said they are sensitive to the upper treble in the Volur, it is definitely a minority compared to those who say they aren’t - at least from the many hours of reading I have spent on 64Audio IEM’s especially the Volur recently.
Whether or not it’s a minority, it’s my role to report on my experience. As mentioned, I’m quite tolerant of treble and I can listen to the Volur for hours on end. But being tolerant of treble doesn’t mean I don’t subjectively hear a timbral imbalance in the Volur from the treble which is my primary complaint. I even say that the Volur “isn’t painfully sharp”. You can disagree with me if this timbral imbalance actually exists but that doesn’t change my experience.