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First Listen: RHA Audio T20 earphones

First Listen: RHA Audio T20 earphones

If you’ve followed Hi-Fi+ coverage of the Scottish earphone maker RHA Audio, then you already know that we hold the firm’s well-made and value-priced products in very high regard. In the past, we’ve favourably reviewed both the £89.95 MA750i (click here to read the review) and more recently the £149.95 T10i (click here to read the review). The common denominators linking these models are that both are built using very high quality materials (stainless steel earpiece enclosures, for example), offering exceptional fit and finish, with an excellent and useful mix of accessories, and deliver surprisingly well-balanced and sophisticated sound quality for the money.

First Listen: RHA Audio T20 earphones

The problem with saying a product is good for the money is that the expression seems to convey a faint whiff of snobbery and elitism—or perhaps the condensed essence of the idea that ‘faint praise is damning’ (even in cases where that wasn’t the intent at all).

First Listen: RHA Audio T20 earphones

All of which brings us to RHA’s new flagship model, the still very keenly priced £179.95 T20 universal-fit earphone. Well, let me deliberately get ahead of myself by telling you that last night about three hours in to my ‘getting-to-know-you’ introductory listening session with the T20s, I stopped what I was doing, broke into a wide grin, and then involuntarily blurted out, “Man, these are really good earphones!!” Full stop, no qualifiers. It was one of those rare moments that brought together a listener (me), a really fine pair of earphones (the RHA T20s), and good, old-fashioned sonic excellence—pure and simple.

 

Naturally, this forces a basic question. If previous RHA models have been very good, then what makes the T20 so dramatically better? The answer centres upon the T20’s radical new DualCoil dynamic driver. Unlike most dynamic drivers, whether in loudspeakers or earphones, the DualCoil driver features not one but two voice coils per driver. In turn, the driver diaphragm features both inner and outer apexes (that is, points were the voice coils attach to the diaphragm), so that, says RHA, ‘the voice coils are able to manipulate the different areas of the diaphragm to generate sound waves’.  

First Listen: RHA Audio T20 earphones

An internal crossover network splits incoming audio signals sending bass and low-mid frequencies to the inner voice coil and upper-mid and treble frequencies to the outer voice coil. The net effect, then, is somewhat like having a miniature two-way array of coincident drivers (kind of like an exceedingly tiny KEF Uni-Q driver in your earphones), except that in this design the ‘tweeter’ and ‘mid-bass’ voice coils share a common diaphragm. RHA claims this distinctive driver’s design enables it to ‘outperform the conventional driver in clarity, resolution, and detail, and (to) deliver refined audio with neutral tonal balance’.

First Listen: RHA Audio T20 earphones

When I first unpacked and powered up the T20s my initial reaction was to think that they might be a bit bright and thin-sounding and also a bit bass shy. Within just an hour or two, this situation quickly righted itself, with highs becoming noticeably smoother, better integrated, and less forward sounding, while bass became more full-bodied, free-flowing, well-defined, and punchy.  All the while, however, the thing I marvelled at was not only the amount of musical information the T20 could retrieve (quite a lot more than the T10i’s or the MA750s as it turns out), but also the beautifully coherent and cohesive manner in which that information was presented.

First Listen: RHA Audio T20 earphones

As so often happens with improvements of this type, one of the most obvious sonic benefits was that the earphones demonstrated soundstaging characteristics (and especially retrieval of reverberant or spatial cues in the music) that I found reminiscent of the sound of really good (and thus, typically, really expensive) full size headphones. I’ve run across a handful of CIEMs carrying four-figure price tags that could deliver this sort of holistic sound quality, but never anything as affordable as the T20’s. And this, really, is what makes me say they are just plain good—not merely good ‘for the money’.

 

As my first T20 listening session continued late into the evening, there were a couple of moments where I found myself chortling out loud (kind of the way you might do if you discovered you’d won the lottery). I kept thinking to myself, ‘You could spend more—a whole lot more—than the T20s cost and wind up getting less earphone performance in an absolute sense’.

First Listen: RHA Audio T20 earphones

As always seems to be the case with RHA, the T20—like its lower-priced siblings—comes with ten pairs of accessory ear tips in various sizes, a garment clip for the signal cables, and an attractive leather case. Then, following a trend that began with the firm’s T10i model, the T20 comes with three pairs of RHA’s signature, screw-in, metal-sleeved, colour-coded, sound tuning filters.

First Listen: RHA Audio T20 earphones

The earphones come with one set of Bass tuning filters (black) that lend a somewhat darker and more bass-forward character, one set of Treble tuning filters (copper-coloured) that add more high frequency shimmer and sparkle, and one set of Reference tuning filters (silver) that give the T20 (and for that matter, the T10i) the most neutral tonal balance overall. Thus far, virtually all of my listening has been with the Reference tuning filters in place, though your mileage may vary. The effects of these filters (performance graphs for which are included as part of the T20’s packaging) are relatively subtle as such tuning devices go. Even so, my educated guess is that most audiophiles will sooner or later gravitate to the Reference filters for self-evident reasons (i.e., tonal neutrality is its own reward).

First Listen: RHA Audio T20 earphones

If you’ve heard and liked RHA earphones in the past, but found yourself wishing for a model that could turn its imaginary ‘Performance’ control knob up to 11, then the firm’s new T20 may well be the earphone for you. (Just be aware that it might sound a tad ‘uptight’ until it’s had an hour or two of run-in time.).

We’re still in the early days, here, but assuming nothing changes for the worse, I anticipate that we will be declaring that RHA has scored what my American countrymen would surely call, a ‘Home Run!’ For those of you who don’t happen to speak ‘baseball’, please feel free to substitute the appropriately British expression for doing something stupendously good in the timeless and classy game of cricket.

First Listen: RHA Audio T20 earphones

Either way, I feel confident in saying that RHA has (another) winner on its hands—one that I suspect will send more than a few makers of higher priced earphones back to the proverbial ‘drawing board’.

Watch for a full review of the RHA T20i to appear in Hi-Fi+ Issue 126.  Until then, happy listening.

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