Counting back, I’ve probably listened to and published impressions of Twistura’s multi-driver all-BA flagship at trade shows more than seven times now. Along the way, there were shifts in tuning style, ups and downs in technical performance, and even changes in driver count and the number of SKUs. They originally planned two models—an 8-driver and a 6-driver version—but the 6-driver version has since disappeared, and pricing kept fluctuating. The final product served up is the Omega: a 10-driver all-BA IEM priced at ¥5,999, available in a purple domestic version and a gold overseas version, officially positioned as “highly optimized for ACG music.”
Actually, you can see Twistura’s caution with the Omega—or, to put it negatively, hesitation or indecisiveness. For some users, this could be a minus, because a mature brand should have aesthetic confidence. If the R&D and tuning cycle drags on too long, some will interpret it as perfectionism, while others will interpret it as a lack of capability. As for Twistura, I think their multi-driver R&D capability is indeed somewhat lacking. In fact, most dynamic-driver models, or simple hybrid designs like the Sigma, are their comfort zone. Among the hybrid multi-driver projects they’ve initiated, including unreleased engineering units, only the Omega mentioned in this article counts as a relatively high-level work—yet its R&D cycle also exceeded a year. That said, before the Omega launched, their most expensive product was under ¥1,000, so another point of hesitation was fluctuations in “market demand.” I can guess that the Omega might be a model requested by overseas distributors (their main sales are not in the domestic market). They have to make that money, right? Only a fool wouldn’t. But in this industry, wanting to make money while standing tall isn’t easy. Although China isn’t their main sales force, whether at huge expos or small audiophile meetups, you can always see their staff looking travel-worn. I think this is at least a brand that’s very sincere about its products, so I’ve said this much in the preface today because I feel such a sincere brand deserves a chance to be noticed.
Twistura is a brand that does an excellent job in attention to detail, which is evident from the unboxing experience. And this time, as their flagship, they made some “big moves.” Many brands include a huge box in the unboxing, but after unboxing? It’s impractical and takes up space. The Omega’s packaging box, if you “hollow out” its contents, is actually a super-large storage box itself, and the packaging also includes divider boards. You can also buy different types of dividers to partition the interior space, perfect for storing large players or a massive number of IEMs and accessories. Although this box is not made of real leather but PU leather, the build quality is still quite good. If you like it, you can buy it separately for only ¥199—cheap and generous. Of course, besides this big box, they still include a white zippered leather pouch, also of very good build quality.
I’ve complained more than once that many brands still like to use those particularly small and hard-to-open pouches for accessories, which ultimately end up being torn apart by me and thrown in the trash, and then I have to figure out separate storage for these things. But Twistura, even for very cheap models, will make good fixing devices for these ear tips. The Omega even includes several different types of ear tips and corresponding independent storage boxes. You can choose to stuff them all into the big box at once, or take out a few pairs and put them in the storage net pocket of the small storage box as spares.
The stock cable uses very solid materials, and the cable sheath and metal parts are also exquisitely made. The color style and surface finish echo the shells. It uses pure copper gold-plated connectors. The pin tail end has a step, and the female socket is also recessed, providing “double insurance” level connection stability. The cable itself is an 8-wire hybrid of silver-plated monocrystalline copper and silver-plated monocrystalline copper, with good softness and easy storage, especially when connected to the gold version, presenting a very harmonious visual appearance.
When I write reviews, I generally don’t describe the appearance of products much, and I try to talk as little as possible about beauty or ugliness, because for today’s products, recognizability is always more important than beauty itself. But Twistura has done this very well—at least this is an IEM that can be remembered at a glance. The tech-heavy mecha-style design, with embedded patterns on the surface resembling scales. Purple itself is a color that is relatively difficult to make look good in industrial design, but on the Omega it comes across as quite premium. The protruding independent Twistura logo on the surface is a finishing touch, and its five-axis CNC aluminum alloy craftsmanship is also top-notch. However, the drawbacks are also obvious: the Omega’s shells are somewhat large, and the nozzle depth is not very long, so when wearing them, the fit of the ear tips matters. If you feel the fit is not secure, you need to appropriately increase the ear tip size by one. For users with smaller concha cavities, it’s quite discouraging.
On the hardware level, the Omega is a standard solution for a mainstream multi-driver all-BA flagship: two large-size Sonion low-frequency balanced armature drivers per side, four custom mid-frequency BA drivers, and four custom high-frequency BA drivers, plus what is called a hand-wired point-to-point discrete crossover network. In the context of BA IEMs, this refers to a passive crossover network assembled with flying leads/point-to-point wiring instead of an SMD PCB. Its advantage lies in each branch having its own capacitor + resistor + inductor, strictly dividing frequency bands and isolating electrical signal crosstalk between drivers. The design of independent multi-bore tubing and phase alignment is actually also based on the crossover principle to ensure at the final sound outlet that sound waves from all frequency bands reach the ear canal simultaneously, smoothing out the phase discontinuity at crossover points. What is involved here is the technical handling of coherence and phase consistency. However, I once said in a Softears review that phase consistency and coherence are things that only started being discussed at the table in the hybrid era. But the real information gap is that as long as crossover is involved, coherence is inevitably involved. In the early years, many pure BA IEMs had terrible coherence issues, even worse than hybrids. Therefore, excellent multi-driver BA IEMs, like hybrid units such as dynamic-BA hybrids, need to consider acoustic phase consistency, as well as the coordination of timbre across the three frequency ranges—a more subjective, mystical level of coherence handling. In this regard, I think the domestic purple Omega does better than the overseas gold Omega. But the protagonist of this article is still the domestic version; I’ll discuss the comparison part near the end.
The Omega’s sound, in my view, isn’t a particularly high-recognition style, and its control of timbre is on the conservative side. It’s roughly an 80% technical-performance IEM and a 20% listening-pleasure IEM. You can feel that they tried to make it a fairly comprehensive and all-rounder sound, and on that basis slightly optimize the vocal texture and mass appeal. As for the word “grabby,” there are indeed relatively few traces of it to be seen on the Omega. In terms of the bass that the general public cares about most, the domestic version of the Omega has moderate quantity and a nice sense of looseness in the fundamental frequency range. In fact, it doesn’t fully exploit the advantages of Sonion’s large-excursion low-frequency BA drivers. The sub-bass quantity is on the lower side, and the extension has a certain depth, but it’s absolutely still quite far from “deep and profound.” Fortunately, it does create some sense of relaxation in the fundamental range of the bass, so it doesn’t present an obvious BA flavor or stiffness in the listening experience. It can deliver a bouncy, slightly enveloping bass atmosphere in ordinary pop tracks, and the foundation is very clean.
The Omega itself isn’t hard to drive, matching the easy-to-drive nature of BA IEMs in the broad sense, and it actually isn’t all that picky about pairing either. Its own sound expresses the boundary between modern and analog rather vaguely: it’s fairly modern in terms of transparency, extension at both ends, resolution, and density, but the relaxedness of its bass and its rich yet not unbalanced vocal timbre completely distance it from keywords like “Science-Fi” and “monitoring.” A dongle like the iBasso Tonfa, which is itself very relaxed and smooth, can give it a denser, sweeter vocal texture. Or, if you have higher expectations for the Omega’s euphony, it’s not that it can’t deliver—it really does need the help of the front end. Its vocal orientation is on the versatile and balanced side. If one must choose between male and female vocals, it should be a 40/60 split—indeed, the delicate, refined Asian-style vocals come across as a bit more outstanding, while male vocals have a slight brightness without being overly youthful or thin. If looking for a reference among their own products, its vocal presentation is actually quite similar to their first product, D Major, and the later Beta: priority is given to clean, clear timbre, followed by reasonable sibilance reduction and excellent detail retrieval. On that basis, there is no extra “secondary processing” for details like breathiness and throatiness.
Let’s talk about soundstage and treble together. For Twistura, the area where they are actually most cautious in tuning is the treble, because they once had that comical situation where overseas KOLs were satisfied when listening to the sound, but after measuring the frequency response curve, they angrily blasted them (mainly the peak above 5k). This is also what brands doing overseas markets, especially European and American markets, worry about most. And even the domestic version of the Omega actually handles the treble presentation in a relatively softened, smooth way—not so much “typical BA.” At least it’s definitely not the cold, thin sound of early UE, but it’s also not Shure’s extreme HuFi that completely disregards treble imaging and extension. But if you say it’s like Westone, well, it’s a bit smoother than Westone. If I were to draw an analogy, I’d think of the JH13 V2 from back then, or the style of Phonak’s PFE112: in terms of treble imaging roundness, angularity, and brightness, it’s relatively balanced. The timbre is bright but not sharp; the expression of instruments is slightly vivid but the sense of energy is quite restrained. Any more energy and it would be on the edge of “aggressiveness.” So if you’re a user who is relatively sensitive to treble peaks and harshness, and at the same time doesn’t like a dark, soft, mushy flavor, then the Omega’s flavor is very accurately judged. As for the soundstage, it’s at an 85-point level on all xyz axes. The horizontal width isn’t particularly expansive, but the vertical height and depth are fully expressed. It falls a bit short for live recordings or large orchestral works, but it can present a very three-dimensional spatial playback capability across various sources.
The overseas gold version actually somewhat fits the stereotypical “narrow-sense 2D ACG” in people’s minds, while the domestic version fits into the category of “broad-sense ACG.” The so-called broad-sense ACG actually fully represents the all-rounder route, whereas what audiophiles mean by ACG by default in many cases refers to 2D ACG or anisong. In this regard, the gold version is more on point: its extension at both ends is more full, the angularity of its imaging is a bit stronger, and its treble speed is faster. Its vocal richness is not as good as the domestic version, but its vocal line emphasizes the direction of Japanese-style “female poison” more, and when listening to some energetic ACG songs, it also shows a moderate sense of “noisiness.” The only counterintuitive thing is that although its bass at first listen seems less than the domestic version and not as fleshy, its actual bass depth and texture detail are better than the domestic version, so it is also suitable for listening to some small-ensemble classical music, and it has more of a “delineating” quality for details, rather than the domestic version’s “needle hidden in cotton.”
As a product, the Omega shows no essential difference in sound quality between the domestic and overseas versions, but that doesn’t mean there is absolutely no difference. It’s mainly at the two frequency extremes: the domestic version’s bass extension is not as good as the overseas version’s, but its fundamental frequency range is more relaxed, while the overseas version’s treble overtones are not as natural and delicate as the domestic version’s. I haven’t actually fully understood the brand’s thinking behind this trade-off, so I’ll just describe it here. In terms of tuning completeness, I personally feel the domestic version’s sound has more of an edge. It’s a pop-oriented all-rounder, and its bass handling places more emphasis on adaptability to general pop music—whether you want atmosphere or speed and rhythm, it seems to touch on all of them, and performs decently at that. Its vocals also present a warmer, more moist texture, delivering a relatively natural and delicate sound on the foundation of high-quality pure BA drivers. The overseas version is a bit “Science-Fi,” and also somewhat more straightforward in its presentation of technical performance. Through these trade-offs, Twistura has, from its own perspective, presented a differentiated display of listening philosophies at home and abroad. How can there be a way to satisfy both in this world? Since there isn’t, then just make two answers.
Source: Li Lingjiaqi
