The Thieaudio Legacy 4..

Well it’s been stirring a lot of reviews and chatter that’s for sure. It seems I see reviews with people drooling over them as if they just discovered the next best thing in IEM tech.  So are they?

I received them (purchased myself) and upon unboxing I was greeted with an bunch of useless packaging. It was kind of like one of those Russian dolls where there is one inside the other, on and on. 

Once I worked my way through that I found a nice cable, nice looking (albeit simple) IEM’s. A set of “ok” tips attached to a boat anchor and a nice case.

Build quality was on par with all the other Thieaudio IEM’s I’ve seen/tested. The first thing I looked at was the switches on the back side of the IEM. I left then down (the position they came in) for the first round of testing. I say first round because with switches if I am to evaluate properly I need to test in every position, which sucks. I will state that I only tested the switch position evenly, meaning, I set each side the same which gives you four possible positions. If you wanted you could test with one side set in one position and the other side set in a different position. I mean you could really lose your mind with it if you want. Me. I don’t like switches. Just make it sound the best it can and ship it, that’s it.

Let’s get to the sound. I thought these were very analytical straight away. They had good bass, mid’s were not forward but present and smooth. Treble was good, not grainy or sibilant. Detail retrieval was top notch. Timbre was ok but nothing spectacular. Stage was small and imaging was ok.

There is a song on the album Yoyo Ma “Not Our First Goat Rodeo” called “The Trappings”. Whether you would like this song or not, it is excellent for stage and imaging testing. In the song there are 4 vocals placed in different positions and on something like the Thieaudio Monarch, HD 800S or even the FiiO FD5 you can clearly here their different positions and distance from each other and you. On the Legacy 4 it sounded very flat. I could hear some imaging going on but very subtle. Stage just wasn’t there. I felt like everything was next to my head. This was with the default switch setting.

With inside switches up and the outside down (my favorite setting) the detail was good and the mids were better. Bass also improved. Stage and imaging were the same.

With both sides both switches “up” bass became heavy yet they were still analytical but the imaging completely disappeared? I guess the imaging is a function of higher frequencies and with those “muted” it killed the stage/image.

I tested these alongside the Kinera Freya. The Freya was a completely different beast but at near the same price point. I liked the Freya better. It seemed that the Legacy 4 had excellent sound reproduction but I just could not get “involved” with the music. I felt like I was studying it instead of enjoying it. I can’t say anything bad about them but they just were not my cup of tea.

In fact I would say these were similar in sound “quality” to the Legacy 3, but maybe the bass was better on the 4. Detail and treble slightly improved also. But I liked the tonality of the 3’s better. I enjoyed listening to music on the legacy 3’s. Like I wrote earlier the 4 was just a bit to clinical and the music just didn’t make me “happy” on these, but I could not point out any faults with the sound reproduction if that makes sense?

Are these worth the $195.00 price tag? If your studio mixing or just like really clinical lifeless music reproduction with no stage then yes they are. If you have the Legacy 3 and are happy, keep them and wait for the next one or save some more money and by the Thieaudio Monarch.

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