The thing is, I’m no longer confident that it’s just the pads that have changed. The official word from HiFiMAN is this:
“There is no official version 2 of the HiFiMAN Sundara. Neither the drivers nor the cups have had any changes or silent revisions to them in the past calendar year. The only changes have been a cosmetic improvement to the dust cover, as well as improvements to the pad structure to ensure reliability and longevity. There have not been any changes to the pad material.”
Here’s my suspicion with all of this - note that this is just a hunch, I don’t have any more inside info, and if anyone has additional information about this by all means post it below and I’ll revise this post:
Several years ago, there was a revision to the Sundara driver - likely to improve reliability. Fang Bian assured me in February that they hadn’t done any changes to the driver in at least one calendar year. He said there may have been some structure changes to the pads - also for the sake of reliability but that’s it.
Then, you have competing reports from reviewers about the sound, and this is where this whole thing gets a bit tricky. So far, every reviewer I’ve spoken to about this who got their review unit from a dealer all got the latest revision - meaning they got the one that you would expect to get if you bought one.
Then there are some reviewers who got their units directly from China. This is what I’m unable to verify but… in some cases (not all), they measured closer to the older version. This also matches my own experience, where two units I evaluated (and measured) that came directly from China were the old version (and they also measured identically to one another so it’s not just unit variation). Contrast this with the unit I got through a dealer for my more recent review and it was clearly the newer revision, as it both sounded and measured differently.
Now I suspect that if you were to buy a Sundara directly from HiFiMAN today (or anywhere else for that matter), it would be the same revision that everyone else is getting through dealers. I can’t confirm any of this, but this all just looks like a situation where some of the review/loaner units that got sent out even in the past year were pulled from old stock. This makes a certain amount of sense, especially if it doesn’t seem like there’s much of a difference between the two revisions on paper - it just looks like the same headphone - but it may have been a bit of an oversight given some of the measurable sonic differences that do exist.
In any case, all signs indicate that they’ve long since moved to the more recent revision for dealers, but there may still have been a bit of a stock delay gap for reviewers specifically, if they’re still sending review units out from old stock. I imagine this isn’t the case anymore, since it’s been so long but I can’t be sure.
What I would advise for anyone looking at buying a Sundara is this - regardless of where you are in the world:
- Be careful about buying used at the moment - that’s the most likely way to get the old version
- Buy from a reputable dealer
- Buy from somewhere with a return policy
Again, I don’t think physical pad measurements are going to be as indicative as it first seemed, because any pad structure changes that have occurred may not have coincided with the older driver revision.