Well, the hype beast has finally arrived, and I have to say…wow, it’s pretty damn good. Obligatory disclaimer that these are first impressions and are subject to change as I put more time into my evaluation of the Odin.
Empire Ears has never struggled to bestow upon their IEMs the ever-elusive “intangibles,” and the Odin bears no exception. Positional cues are rendered to an extremely high degree, rivaling - if not surpassing - my benchmark, the 64 Audio U12t. As a whole, imaging encroaches on breaking the “walls” of the stage, and there’s ample center image diffusal despite the absence of a dip (notably, the opposite) to the upper-midrange. This is a likely example of imaging and “depth” being much more than just a product of frequency response. Sheer resolution is also nothing short of excellent, no doubt partly in due to the upper-midrange tilt.
And yes, the polarizing midrange. Well…I really don’t think it’s that bad. It’s poking the hornet’s nest, but not at the expense of outright sibilance. The midrange suffers from a slight lack of weight and comes off a tad unnaturally bright, but a lot of the edgy transient behavior that the EE Hero exhibited has also been cleaned up. Treble is smooth if not lacking extension in the utmost highest frequencies; admittedly, I wouldn’t have called it if I didn’t have a FR graph to go off of. And really, “smooth” is an apt descriptor for the Odin. It is a very cohesive IEM, that is to say well-rounded, indeed.
Now for the bad parts:
- Empire Ear’s subwoofer, the W9+, has always been distinctive to me for its bombastic slam - it always felt like it was almost trying too hard. Well, the Odin’s tuning neuters this trait and then some, relegating it to the opposite end of the spectrum: Not necessarily lacking, but just… there , and unremarkable if not well-done.
- Dynamic contrast seems somewhat lacking. The transitions are very quick, yes, but the Odin fails to scale as low as the 64 Audio U12t to my ears.
- I could see the Odin being fatiguing. It’s a smooth IEM, which the lack of dynamic contrast ironically pays compliment to; however, the upper-midrange tilt borders hot for my tastes.
While the Odin certainly isn’t lacking in that “wow” factor, I can already tell - to a good extent - that it’s not an IEM that meets my sonic preferences. At the IEM “summit” as I like to call it, I think it mostly comes down to a matter of tonal preference; unfortunately, the Odin doesn’t hit mine as close as I’d like.
But I have no trouble asserting that the Odin is a top-tier IEM, one that stands at this summit. In my eyes, a “top-tier” IEM is not necessarily a reflection of price - after all, there’s no shortage of flagship IEMs that sound like, well, garbage (in my humble opinion) - but rather, a reflection of an IEM’s sound quality on its own merit. So overall, a job very well done by Empire Ears. They seem to have taken the shortcomings of the Wraith (which were quite a few to say the least) to heart and knocked it as close to out of the ballpark as possible.
As crappy as 2020’s been, it’s been a great year for the IEM world, and the Odin stands as one of the highlights.
