Introduction

Anyone who has been interested in headphones in the last decade has at least heard of HIFIMAN, if not even tried on or purchased one of its products. With dynamic driver, planar magnetic, and electrostatic headphones in the widest price range ever of ~$69 to $18,000, there's something to tickle anyone's interest buds. Indeed, HIFIMAN is even the audio brand with the most reviews here on TechPowerUp and there are even more when you add in the Head-Direct reviews back from before the brand name changed. While the company is known primarily for its headphones, it does sell both wired and wireless IEMs too. Indeed, my very first HIFIMAN product review was that of the intriguing TWS800 wireless earphones which were noteworthy for using a high impedance voice coil and an integrated amplifier—ideas that others are picking up these days. HIFIMAN has stuck with using single dynamic drivers for its IEMs throughout, including with its previous flagship RE2000 Pro Gold that costs $2000. Today we examine the latest, and possibly greatest, set of HIFIMAN IEMs that aim to take over the same $2000 market.


The HIFIMAN Svanar is the first set of IEMs from the audio brand that gets an actual name as opposed to simply a combination of letters and numbers, with Svanar being Swedish for "Swans." The shells take inspiration from a swan for its design as we will see soon, and there's also some motivation provided by the Swan Lake ballet too. The gist here is there are multiple reasons for the name beyond simple arbitrary choice, with one such goal being to take advantage of nature's design to come up with one that results in extremely comfortable IEMs. This is also why the shells use two different materials as we will discuss more in detail. The Svanar uses a single dynamic driver using HIFIMAN's topology diaphragm technology involving nanotechnology and we already know this is an expensive set of IEMs. So let's thank HIFIMAN for providing a review sample to TechPowerUp as we see how well the Svanar does in our testing which begins with a look at the product specifications in the table below.

Specifications