Kinera Verdandi Review: What More to Ask?
What comes to your mind when talking about Chi-Fi? The general audiophiles including myself would often think of cost-effective, cheap, or a bang-for-a-buck that sacrifices some quality to achieve better performance. Kinera used to be one of those that seemed rather flimsy in style and build yet had good performance for the cost. Well, as apparent as it is, Kinera is that that Kinera we used to know.
Not only in absolute sound quality but also acquiring brand, product concept, and creativity is what defines what Kinera now is. Kinera Loki is a significant flagship, though when counting in the performance for price ratio, Verdandi is never no less in value.
Verdandi is the most recent flagship earphone by Kinera that sits right under Loki, their summit flagship model. Verdandi is a quadbrid IEM priced at $1199. Let’s take a look at Verdandi and see how it sounds and compares with other earphones.
Packaging
Verdandi comes with Kinera’s classic hexagon-shaped packaging. The package box is beautifully done with concept art that is designed for Verdandi, with the inside including the Verdandi earphones, 2 sets of modular plugs (3.5mm / 4.4mm), 3 pairs of AZLA Crystal tips, 5 pairs of Final E-Type tips, 3 pairs of Kinera K-07 tips, a pair of foam tips, a leather case, and a product description booklet.
Probably the most Beautiful Earpieces
Verdandi sits among the Kinera Imperial series, the premium line-up of Kinera products. As mentioned earlier, Verdandi is a quadbrid IEM sporting 1DD+2BA+2EST+1BC drivers. The 6mm liquid diaphragm driver is responsible for the lows, 2BA Knowles drivers for the mid-highs, and 2EST Sonion tweeters for highs and super-highs. Lastly, the BC (bone conductor) driver plays simultaneously with the dynamic driver to play the lows.
As for the design aspect of these earphones, additional comments almost seem unnecessary to my eyes. Verdandi is perhaps one of the finest resin arts possible for an earphone, with three-dimensional colors and groove art working beautifully with semi-transparent shells to give a glimpse of the complicated driver setup. The earpieces are a bit chunky which concerned me about the wearing experience, yet the earpieces fit nicely into my slightly smaller-than-average ears. It has an average thickness for a resin earpiece.
Flash Acoustics Stock Cable for Verdandi
Using a quality cable (and the right cable) is important for perfecting an earphone’s sound. Kinera has prepared a well-cared cable for Verdandi by collaborating with Flash Acoustics, an uprising popular cable manufacturer from Hong Kong. Verdandi comes with an exclusive Flash Acoustics stock cable which is specifically tuned and produced for Verdandi. The cable has a 2-stranded structure with the wires comprised of 4N pure silver and single-crystalline copper.
Despite the custom cable-grade material and build quality, this cable is light and smooth and has similar convenience of an average stock cable. The cable barely causes any microphonics and is very easy to handle. The last feature is the modular plug system, which allows the cable plug termination to be swappable in either 3.5mm or 4.4mm. I’d personally wished to see 2.5mm included, though it is what it is, as the balanced output trend has now been finalized to be 4.4mm.
Verdandi’s special acoustic structure
One of Verdandi’s unique features is that the earpieces actively vibrate even if you touch or gently tap them. You could feel the entire earpiece ringing in both the sound and feel, which is perfectly normal as they’re designed to be so for the bone conductor driver to do its best work. This was another concern of mine before actually using these, as the earpieces vibrate so easily – too easily that the vibration may tickle or cause discomfort while listening. However, that wasn’t the case, as both the wearing and hearing experience were just as same as any other IEMs.
But of course, Verdandi’s actively vibrating shells do impact the sound significantly. We’ll talk about this further on the next page, though Verdnadi’s bone conductor driver lets you sense that the bass doesn’t simply produce sound but really vibrates for you to acknowledge. It’s not only a “hear” but also a “feel”. This makes the music listening more dynamic and realistic, especially for the bass. Though again, let’s reserve further details for the actual impressions… upcoming right now.
Next Page: Sound Impressions / Comparisons