What do you think of the Final Audio Tonalite? Gimmicky, or a good step forward for earphone technology? Has anyone tested a pair yet? I watched the soundguys video review, and the changes to the treble that it made on the reviewer and 5128’s head was not what I expected. I noticed he didn’t speak to whether the changes sounded good, so perhaps that’s telling.
I think its potentially really cool but I myself am a bit skeptical it was implemented right. Andrew should have one on the way to him, not sure he got it yet.
Moondrop Old Fashioned First Impressions
Just got my pair of Old Fashioned in, thought I’d throw a few impressos in here to wet the whistles of all of the people who’re waiting to get their hands on em.
First things first, the packaging is supa simple, just comes with the headphones with pads pre-installed and the cable in a baggy.
Since the Old Fashioned is obviously going to be compared to the PortaPro, I must say the drip factor is critically low here. While I think its a nice enough take on the “cyberpunk/industrial-fun” aesthetic, I’m not a fan of that visual package once it actually has to go on my head. Much prefer the outward facing parts of the PortaPro (and even the KSC75/KPH30) design.
People are obviously gonna be curious about the driver with this one, because its 40mm unlike the Koss (iirc) 35mm driver. Gotta wait for my partner to get home to take a side by side pic w the Koss driver (the PortaPro is hers), but for now here’s a picture of the Old Fashioned driver. Notably absent the titanium coating of the KSC75 or the metal casing/front grille of the Portapro and KSC75. In fact it almost looks like it has a sticky coating like some Beyerdynamic drivers, maybe to mass-load the moving diaphragm to lower the Fs?
Was excited to try this cable since it uses the extremely low-profile connectors used on the Truthear GATe/Hola cable, but looked even thinner in the wire (which I personally like). Good news is that the wire is indeed thinner… bad news, its a bit memory-prone and not exactly very good feeling to use. IMO the GATe cable is still better enough to be worth buying the IEM for it.
First fit/listening impressions
Not gonna lie, I was having a bit of a hard time fitting it on my head at first. Thankfully like the Parts Express headband people often fit onto the KSC75, the metal band itself is eminently bendable to get it to the right level of shaping/clamp force for your individual head. Once I did that (and rotated the pads a bit so the thickest part was towards the front, to better fit the angling of my pinna), I was in business.
People are going to assume it is basslet, and of course they’ll be right, but this obviously changes somewhat with clamp. On my head with the clamp adjusted, its getting down to 60 Hz or so fairly easily, it seems.
What I wasn’t expecting was how dark it is in some spots. The PortaPro definitely has some palpable mid-treble darkness, but the Old Fashioned seems to have a quite relaxed low-treble (4-6 kHz) region which then pops up to a 6.3 kHz peak rather quick, averts a 7 kHz dip that usually occurs on my head (maybe not present due to driver distance?), then rises in magnitude into a peak in the 10 kHz region, then the 14 kHz region, then rolloff.
Overall the treble of Old Fashioned sounds pretty good aside from the 6.3 kHz elevation committing a bit of extra graininess and bite that i’d rather not there, especially since there’s not much bass under 100 Hz. The mids are roughly what you’d expect, solid enough though perhaps a little thin due to a bit of extra 1-1.5 kHz. The bass is… not why you buy this.
Overall seems like a reasonably compelling alternative to wired PortaPro, though I think it’s probably too bright for me still in the 6 kHz region in particular. I’ll update the thread with impressions vs. PortaPro and some measurements tomorrow.
Bless you bb for posting the driver! Looks like one of those you’d see in a beyer, but my guess is it’s actually integrated into the actual membrane as with a lot of these kind of drivers have been doing from China lately. It’s a bit weird, but it’s meant to mimic the whole idea of not needing a sticky coating at all and help with distortion. IDK though, could just be silly guesswork.
Looks like the units are numbered? You have what seems to be unit 32, unless they all say that!
Something about the design does throw me off. The whole retro clear plastic thing really only worked for the GBC imo. But sound impressions kinda make me feel like this won’t be the removable cable porta pro I was hoping for. Wonder how padswapping might change things. Will be looking forward to the squiggles.
Moondrop Old Fashioned Impressions: Day 2
So, the more I use these the more I vibe with their sound quality… when fit properly. I cannot stress how important fitment is with this headphone—and others like it—not only for the overall tonal balance, but for the channel balance. This is kind of annoying because the whole point to a product like this, IMO, is that I can just pick it up and quickly throw it on when i wanna listen to music from a portable device, but having to fiddle with fit when first putting it on is kind of annoying.
Another note on fit, the larger overall drivers (and thus, the larger surface area touching your ear) leads to a comfort profile I actually prefer. More of the weight is distributed to the outer floppy parts of the pinna instead of resting on the inner parts and the meatus (lol, meatus).
TL;DR Try to wear the thing a bit shifted forward so the rear of the pad aligns with the farthest-rear part of your pinna. That’s the position that stopped it being shouty/bright.
That said, I think reception of this headphone is likely to be mixed. I think some people are going to see it as essentially having the main downsides of the KSC75 and PortaPro respectively in that it has the precipitous bass rolloff more similar to KSC75 while having the preternatural darkness of the PortaPro.
Personally (perhaps charitably), I digest the sound of this headphone as something that’s a pretty decent—if imperfect—middle ground between the two: not as annoyingly bright as the KSC75, not as cloyingly dark/warm-tilted as the PortaPro. That said, I think if I had to choose one of the three it would still be PortaPro, but I would absolutely take this over KSC75. All told, I’m enjoying using it, though of course due to the darkness it comes across fairly “low res,” I like that the darkness is balanced by there not being much bass to overwhelm. I’ll keep listening and living with it, but for now my tentative conclusion is this:
Better comfort than PortaPro due to larger surface area and no dual-bricks on the headband top, better sound than KSC75 due to the basslet-ness being balanced better by darker treble.
For $25? Nubbad!
Below are my measurements of the Moondrop Old Fashioned on my Clone KB006x + Clone IEC-60318-4 rig, where you can get a glimpse of the positional variation I was referring to. You can check the measurements yourself, as well as compare to my measurements of the KSC75 (with stock pads and using earclips) and the PortaPro (Wireless, stock pads).
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I actually like the clear plastic part, but yeah the colors/text I’m not a fan of.
Interesting response in the treble. The primary ear canal resonances at about 3, 9, and 15 kHz appear very well defined. But the concha effects seem to be missing or reduced.
Have you (/anyone on the team) tried the Aune AC45/AC55?
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Not tmk! Resolve and GoldenSound may have tried it at Munich/Dallas but I wasn’t there.
Kiwi Ears Orchestra II Impressions
Got the new Kiwi Ears Orchestra II in, many thanks to James at Linsoul for hooking up an open box unit to be sent to me to test at home.
Comes with a very generous complement of tips, a very pleasantly heavy cable with swappable 3.5mm TRS or 4.4mm TRRRS Pentaconn terminations, and faceplates that look somewhat like the new Tanchjim or KZ IEMs, but with a very subtle iridescent rainbow-tinted plastic(?) under the hexagonal “grilles” that looks really fetching under certain light. However, the font they used for the “Orchestra II” on the left ear is bad enough that I cannot endorse the look of this IEM and would never want to wear it in public. Truly a terrible choice, which stinks because I think the clear resin of the rest of the shell and the faceplates aside from text are quite handsome.
Comfort is reasonable, if a little bigger overall than I’d personally like. Guess that’s the compromise that is necessary to fit 10 drivers. Well actually I guess the real question there is: is the sound good enough to justify the comfort compromises inherent to having to fit 10 drivers per shell?
IMO it’s not. This to me sounds like an Orchestra Lite—which already wasn’t great, with its main asset being a well-controlled, polite treble response—but with a bunch of unnecessary treble added to the mix. While the Orchestra Lite was much less comfortable than this, it had a much more defensible sound profile that focused on texture in the midrange above all else.
By contrast, Orchestra II comes across especially incoherent due to having a rather prominent bass bump that lacks any overtone representation in the low midrange, a rather honky/boxy sounding representation of pianos and voices due to the upper-midrange prominence, and a noticeably over-boosted upper treble response. The treble in particular here is a big issue, its very tizzy and makes all drums and vocals sound problematically crunchy.
Where the Orchestra Lite had at least one interesting thing going for it, I don’t really perceive Orchestra II to be at all better than $20 IEMs that both do this sort of “W-shaped” response better and cheaper. The Truthear GATe which has a more coherent midrange integration with the bass and upper-treble that isn’t quite so over-boosted, and Kiwi Ears has IEMs in their own catalog (KE4, Orchestra Lite) that are either better versions of this kind of signature, or just better IEMs overall, for less money.
Score: 2.5/10
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In case anyone didn’t catch it, I recently participated in the 2025 Tier List with Andrew and Cameron, but we also made our own ranking lists which’ll be hosted on Headphones.com for the foreseeable future.
Listener’s Headphone Ranking List
Listener’s IEM Ranking List
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Thieaudio Hype4 Mk2 Impressions
Got the Thieaudio Hype4 Mk2 in a few days ago and did some live impressions on our Members Only livestream with Andrew, but wanted to make sure I also put some information out there for the people who aren’t yet members of the YouTube channel. Many thanks to Linsoul for sending it in for evaluation, and importantly further thanks to James from Linsoul for also sending a Hype4 Mk1 to re-familiarize myself with it and make some comparisons
Build / Comfort / Accessories
So the Hype4 Mk2 comes with fairly typical stuff; you get a hard rectangular zip case similar to what comes with a lot of chifi in this price range these days, you get a set of S/M/L AET07-like eartips (and a set of foams), and you get a cable with swappable terminations between 3.5mm and 4.4mm.
Main things to note here:
- The cable is quite heavy and thick. I tend not to like cables like this; they may feel premium in an unboxing, but in every day use they can get pretty annoying to handle and live with. No issues with microphonics though.
- The eartips are… fine. The sound section may give some inklings as to why they included foam tips instead of another silicone tip.
- The case is also fine but the outer suede-like material isn’t exactly premium feeling. Kind of feels papery, to be honest.
Sound
So the original Hype4 was an unapologetically V-shaped IEM, with a surprisingly engaging bass profile, reasonable (if slightly thin) mids, and a crap load of treble. The Hype4 Mk2 improves the midrange, but IMO it kind of made every other aspect a bit worse.
The bass is notably smoother and less punchy here—which would be a tradeoff worth making if it were more coherently integrated with its now excellent midrange—but I also think there’s simply too much bass for the midrange to really get any chance to shine or define the presentation here.
And the treble… it was always Hype4 OG’s weak spot for me, and IMO it’s even worse on the Mk2. Even though, to my ear, Hype4 Mk2 is actually less bright in the low treble, it sounds much less coherently bright on most recordings. It is, typical of most V-shaped sets that came out in 2025, firmly upper treble emphasized in a way that coaxes you into a false sense of security because it doesn’t outright destroy vocals… but then a cymbal or snare drum comes in sounding like a bee’s nest or wet paper (respectively), and you realize you’ve been New Meta’d.
The mids are indeed quite nice, but like most of the sets that have followed this trend, it doesn’t matter how good they are because most of the time, any texture or nuance in the midrange is overwhelmed by the bass boost. And if it isn’t overwhelmed by the bass boost, it’s punctuated by little moments of uncomfortable tizziness due to the upper treble boost.
Conclusion
Some people will probably like it, for me its just another piece of metaslop to add to the pile. Definitely not terrible, because nothing with a midrange this reasonable can be, but can’t really say this is any better than mid, and probably isn’t worth the money over something like a Daybreak or a KE4.
Sound Score: 4.9/10
Reminder to all, you can find this IEM and others ranked on my IEM ranking list, and make comparisons between this IEM and others on my measurement database.
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Hey man, I love the LCD4 as much as you do but good units are hard to find and obviously there’s no warranty.
I was wondering if a Heddphone 2 GT with EQ could get close enough to the incredible bass response, impact and detail of the LCD4?
I’m in Spain so if I buy the Audeze and the drivers die getting them fixed will be like $1500 including shipping!
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With EQ, absolutely. No question it could arrive at a similar (or better) bass presentation.
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