Tin Hifi, famous for their T2 and all the siblings, recently sent me a package of a bunch of their new products. They were quite random and totally unexpected, but I'll spend this quick article to go over my impressions of all this new line from Tin.
They sent me the following products:
- Tin Hifi T4 Plus "Spaceship"
- Tin Hifi C3
- Tin Hifi C2 "Mechwarrior"
- Tin Hifi T2 DLC
What Are These?
The T2 DLC is a $59 update to their T2 line that made the brand famous. It features a "Diamond-Like Coating" (DLC) dynamic driver that is becoming popular in many different products these days. The design of the IEM will look quite similar to the original T2 and its off-spring, but with a new cable design that features 2-pin connectors instead of mmcx of old.
The C2 and C3 are new budget IEMs from Tin that go away from their bullet-style casing, and with a more traditional IEM look. The $29 C2 has an aluminum housing that is quite reminiscent of the Campfire IEMs or the old KZ copy-cats. The $39 C3 looks almost identical to the T3 Plus from Tin except with different coloring. Both of these also feature "Liquid Crystal Polymer" (LCP) coated drivers. Besides the housing differences, the C3 has a much nicer braided cable, while the C2 has a very springy and cheap-looking cable included.
Finally, the Tin T4 Plus looks like the fanciest of the bunch, taking the T2 shell design, and adding dark steel gray color with brown-ish wood and gold accents, and including a very nice looking copper and bronze-colored braided cable to go with it. It also includes a very nice case and looks like the most premium Tin set I've seen yet. This one goes for $119 and uses "Carbon Nanotube" (CNT) coated drivers.
How Do They Sound?
One look at the graph and you'll quickly see that they all sound very similarly, with a slight U-shaped balanced sound. This means the bass is gently lifted and it has a natural and even mid-range. They are a tad lacking in lower treble, but generally all the iems surprisingly make up for it with decent upper treble performance.
All of these also have pretty lack-luster depth and staging. They just don't have the technical nuances to that present dynamics in a way that give instrument notes and vocals the proper alignment that I would want. Of course, the price isn't that high, so expectations should be limited.
Of these four IEMs -- if I had to rank them, I'd take the T4 Plus (unsurprisingly) first, with the cheapest C2 as the second place medalist, and the C3 and T2 DLC pretty much even in last place. Those two sound quite similar, in terms of technical and tonality qualities.
The T4 Plus actually has very, very similar tonal balance as the T2 DLC and C3, but has slightly better resolution, better natural decay and soundstage that gives it a slight advantage in sound traits than the two lower cost siblings.
The cheapest C2 has just a tad bit more punch and qualities that make it stand above the C3 and T2 DLC.
All in all, these Tin products all sound OKAY. They all pretty much sound the same more or less, and don't necessarily bring me any unique excitement compared to each other or to other things on the market. But they are still quite enjoyable for someone new to the hobby because of their pleasantly tuned baseline. I wish they had more technical capability to go with the tuning.
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