Etymotic Evo Earphone review – Refined Balance
Evo
$499
Pros
- Excellent build, mastering signature
- Solid shells, Cool modern design
- Transparent neutral detail
Cons
- Cable thinness a concern for durability
- Nozzles pretty long, so care needed
- Upper region harshness with less warm sources
Now we know that the package is pretty solid lets see if the Lucid Audio engineers have done justice to the History of Etymotic.
The sound character is targeted towards the professional mastering audience along with the audiophile technical users that like linear, well balanced, sound frequency styles. The Evo’s although being multi driver, they have a clean coherent well unified sound character.
Care has been taken to keep everything in alignment creating a well calibrated balanced sound. I don’t think flat would be the right term to describe these but more natural and detailed. What you get is a non coloured sound style that has a a reference element delivering detail, transparency and resolution.
With the correct tip selection and fit as mentioned before, you do get tight clean bass character, not your jaw breaking resonance but a much more textured tight emphasis and gives enough presence to deliver the correct lower end weight. This gives some body and range scale especially on lower frequency range focused music.
I wouldn’t call it a bass heavy in ear monitor but more of a tight energetic clean texturing style, adding to the layers of audio experience.
I think the original fans of Etymotic should find this signature not too far from what they are familiar with but with just enough technical nuance to provide a different flavour to the musicality.
Airflow dynamics and transition is fast and clean, able to navigate complex layering while keeping image positioning correct.
The Evo’s do have technical prowess, lending to the pace of movement, you can certainly see the producer, editing and monitoring audience demographic attracted to these great looking in ear monitor earphones.
The strong focus on detail and resolution feels precise and well controlled, microdetail is not clinical and is of a low enough level to satisfy most audio fans of the precise signature styles.
