Introduction

Kinera's parent company, YuTai Electronic Acoustics, was established in 2011. This makes the entire outfit no more than a decade old, yet it has already left a strong impression on me with just a single cable covered before. The company has plenty of experience in working with and even developing balanced armature drivers for hearing aids, which it has put to good use in hybrid IEMs. We are not looking at one of those today, and this in fact happens to be something out of the left field for Kinera. It had come out with a couple of TWS earphones in the past, including the YH802, albeit to middling fanfare.


However, Kinera clearly had more plans for the increasingly popular TWS market. To celebrate its 10th anniversary and show off its artisan prowess, Kinera released a limited edition of the YH802 TWS with only 2000 units sold worldwide. It uses a single custom-developed 10-mm dynamic driver and promises extensive touch controls to make up for the absence of a mobile app. There is even hybrid ANC here, with ANC and transparency modes that have associated voice prompts go with them. The biggest attraction is no doubt the fully hand-painted finish, making this limited edition a clear departure from the previous white, beige, or black sets it supplanted. Thanks to HiFiGo for providing TechPowerUp a review sample so that we may see how it fares for ourselves.

Specifications

Packaging and Accessories

Kinera's packaging impressed me greatly even with the simple cable from before, so much so that it felt somewhat extravagant there. With IEMs and earphones in general, packaging is the easiest way to get customers excited and leave a solid first impression. As such, I was not surprised to see more of the same here in a manner I understand to be Kinera's go-to for all IEMs. We get a hexagonal-shaped cardboard box with a hang-tag up top, and all sides are decorated in a cohesive manner. This limited edition version, for example, has the company logo and product name up front with the colors of the TWS earphones as the background and case depicted as a cyberpunkian moon over a city skyline that may also just be an audio visualizer in action. The original three colors are seen on the back, which means this side was simply copied over from before, and we now know this limited edition is purely an aesthetic makeover with the internals remaining the same.


The lid opens up akin to a gift box, where you might expect delectables for your mouth. Instead, we are met by the same for your ears. Kinera has plenty of marketing taglines on either side of the box and lid, and we see a multi-language manual, reminder to join various Kinera online communities with links to the same, and another reminder to register the product after making sure you are satisfied with it. The manual is quite handy since there is no app support, so it walks you through initial setup and pairing, as well as how to make use of all the pre-programmed touch controls. The next layer is thick foam with machined cutouts and finger holes to hold and extract the TWS IEMs and charging/storage case inside a wax paper wrap. As seen above, the other accessories are found in a compartment below that of the TWS earphones themselves.


For all the fanfare with the actual packaging, Kinera ends up going sparse on the accessories themselves by providing only the typical short USB Type-A to Type-C cable to charge the case and two additional sets of silicone ear tips. Knowing the TWS earphones come with the third set pre-installed, I chose to remove them for a group photo to confirm you get sizes S, M, and L.