Peeking contained in the Premiers is like taking a look at some sort of cybernetic system from John Connor’s future. The drivers embody, from low to excessive, 4 devoted sub woofers, eight drivers to cowl the middle-low vary, 4 midrange drivers, 4 high-frequency tremendous tweeters, and one proprietary True Tone driver designed to seize any higher harmonics and overtones current within the combine. There’s additionally a five-way passive crossover that directs every tone coming in to one of the best driver for it. The Premier are able to delivering frequencies as little as 5 Hz and as excessive as 40,000 Hz, each extremes being past the vary of the human ear.
All that componentry provides up: These headphones price $3,000 a pair. Ultimate Ears Pro is advertising and marketing the Premiers towards, nicely, just about anyone who can afford them. That contains musicians who carry out in entrance of packed crowds, studio engineers, composers, and simply plain outdated audiophiles with disposable earnings. Traditionally UE Pro has focused completely different merchandise to completely different demographics, so it’s fascinating to see it take a form of “one ring to rule them all” strategy right here. I truly already had a pair of the corporate’s final flagship IEMs, the extremely regarded UE Live (eight drivers per ear, $2,299), which I’ve used obsessively for the previous 4 years, so I used to be capable of do a bunch of one-to-one comparisons utilizing quite a lot of music gamers and music sources.
The very first thing I observed is that the Premiers are bigger than the Lives. The faceplate of the Live strains up with the airplane of my outer ear, whereas the Premiers stick out ever so barely. They really feel a bit tighter inside my ear, too, and it took me per week or two to get used to them. They don’t have energetic noise canceling, however they match so snugly that they block out roughly 26 decibels of ambient sound, a noise stage equal to the murmur of an open-plan workplace. You is not going to have any hassle listening to audio over the roar of a airplane, or actually anything. The Premiers have three holes in them: a primary channel for delivering sound, a small gap subsequent to it that helps ship further frequencies, and a tiny gap towards the highest of your ear (by the helical crus) which is completely used to vent stress (higher in your eardrums and for bass efficiency, nearly like open again headphones).
The Premiers include a swappable cable with UE Pro’s proprietary IPX67 connectors. That means you possibly can exchange a broken cable, swap in a cable with a mic to make use of the earphones for calls, and even plug in a Bluetooth cable that permits you to run them wirelessly. You additionally get an engraved carrying case and a cleansing software. For my customized faceplate I selected a multicolor splash, however wooden, mom of pearl, and carbon fiber are all choices.
Sound Check
Photograph: Ultimate Ears Pro
It doesn’t actually matter what number of drivers you cram into headphones in the event that they don’t sound good. Fortunately, the Premiers supply completely breathtaking soundscapes. Music comes via so full, and so wealthy. The separation between completely different devices is immaculate. On lower-quality headphones or audio system, you typically hear some devices duck down in quantity to create space for others. In the Premiers, every instrument appears to occupy its personal house, and every part appears to be in good steadiness.
