Westone Audio Mach Series Review
Mach Series
$299-1599
Pros
- 8 Models to suit all price brackets and sound styles
- Beautiful high quality design and build
- Solid range of tuning and high grade audiophile level signatures
Cons
- T2 Cable people may take time to get used to
- No wireless connections supplied in the series
Westone Audio Mach 80
MACH 80 is the pinnacle of flat and accurate featuring an overall even and balanced sound presentation; smooth, punchy but still crisp – a rich listening experience.
The MACH 80 features a proprietary eight-driver system with dual low, dual mids, and quad highs and a 3-way passive crossover.
Retail price: $1599.99
The Tech specs are:
3-way Passive Crossover
DRIVERS: Eight Balanced-Armature Drivers
FREQ RESPONSE: 5Hz – 22kHz
SENSITIVITY: 104dB @1kHz
IMPEDANCE: 66 Ohms @1kHz
Asking the engineers about their thoughts on the Mach 80 model:
The Mach 80 is a flat and revealing earphone. That will appeal to listeners that want to really hear the recording, particularly if they have a good sounding system upstream.
The Mach 80 just radiates class with is accurate tuning configuration. Without sounding pretentious you need bit more of a refined ‘ear-palate’ to fully appreciate just how good these really are.
Having a flat linear presentation the Mach 80 shows off music just how it was meant to be relayed. All the engineers strive to find the unattainable holy grail of as close to flat as possible, thankfully the Westone Engineers specifically Dave has done a fantastic job in this.
The accuracy is very musical while maintaining an extreme level of precision. You will find yourself revisiting familiar tracks time and time again as something you didn’t notice was present previously is revealed.
As with Red wine they seem to mature with age and as you scale up the Mach Series range it’s like sampling a ‘Romanee-Conti’, when you step up to the Mach 80 model.
Prepare to drown in the refined subtleties of this Westone Audio universal flagship offering.
The Mach 80’s bass has balanced extension and is rich in its texture, relaying an ease of transitioning, quick to attack with coherence across the frequency spectrum.
Supporting all variety of styles and rhythmic paces, always sounding musical and true to the mastering.
While body is not huge, the immersion is more about accuracy and feeling very well balanced with complex layering blending.
The Mid range area is again clean and precise sounding, providing more focus especially to female vocals. There is an intimate feeling of air flow representation, delicate nuisances within live vocals are relayed expertly while staying natural in style, accompanying instruments are rich and vivid.
Again this directs the listeners focus in a controlled and balanced style adding emotion to the Mach 80 signature style.
A character of crisp precision remains present throughout, without straying into harsh territory, always staying in the flat lanes created by the ‘alchemist sound tuning engineer’.
As you can tell the earphonia.com team is pretty impressed with the Mach series and can see that 8 models in the range (5 covered in this review), there should be something for all musical preferences and levels, from entry level to music enthusiast to hardened audiophile.
Lucid Audio have done themselves proud on the Mach Series and are now custodians of the legendary Westone Audio legacy, striving to not be complacent and shape the future of high end in ear audio for many years to come.
Celebrate the artist in you
One of the Westone Audio’s brand taglines is ‘Celebrate the artist in you’, let me try and do this to conclude the review.
As I don’t play instruments, sing or produce music, I have decided to do this by listening to the Mach 80, focusing intensely on the sound and just writing expressively what comes to me.
Here I go…
Soaring highs, elevated, skimming the clouds, leaving various nuisance dissipated artefact’s of audio sheen, in the wake of it’s frequency surfing paths.
A multitude of micro air pulses, orchestrated with the effortlessness of a huge starling murmuration to create a detailed sound tapestry of shifting phases, deep with purposeful unison.
The soulful infused Octo drivers morphing the airwaves to comply to their will. Subtle delicate audio beauty infused in the layered coherence leaves you with a burning desire to return.
You are hooked, deep neural pathways carved with electricity. Don’t fight it, you do deserve this audio pleasure.
Future and past is irrelevant, Now is all that matters, in this moment of everything time freezes, you are free.
The King is dead (W80) long live the King (Mach 80)
