The new wired earbuds from 1More appear to be a technical tour de force. The Penta Driver P50 use five drivers per earbud and feature detachable MMCX connections. That’s what you might expect to find in a set of high-end in-ear monitors (IEMs), not a set of $170 wired earbuds, and yet that’s what the Penta Driver will cost when they go on sale in mid-September.
Multi-driver wired earbuds (and increasingly wireless earbuds) aren’t that unusual. The existing Triple Driver and Quad Driver earbuds from 1More are a testament to that. However, inside the Penta Driver is multi-driver combination I don’t think we’ve ever seen before: a diamond-like carbon (DLC) dynamic driver has been layered with four planar diaphragm drivers.
Normally, multi-driver earbuds mate several balanced armature (BA) drivers with each other, or in combination with a single dynamic driver, but planar diaphragm drivers are a different beast. The company says it will deliver precise and balanced audio output across the entire frequency range.
The Penta Driver are made from aluminum alloy and are hi-res audio certified, which means they can reproduce frequencies as wide as 20Hz-40kHz. The included analog cable is made from silver-plated oxygen-free copper and terminates at the earbuds using MMCX connectors — a very handy feature that lets you use the Penta Drivers with any other third-party MMCX cable or wireless adapter. That’s a big change from the Triple Driver and Quad Drivers, which have permanently wired cables.
The cable also has an inline remote with a mic for calls, making it a good substitute for the wired buds that might have shipped with your smartphone — assuming your smartphone came equipped with a traditional 3.5mm headphone jack.
But even if your phone is USB-C (soon, even the iPhone will use this connector), 1More has you covered — it includes a USB-C to 3.5mm headphone adapter in the box, along with a protective pouch and eight different sizes and styles of silicone and foam ear tips.
The company hasn’t said what kind of digital-to-analog converter (DAC) is housed in the USB adapter, but it probably isn’t particularly high-end.
Once again, 1More has come up with an impressive value proposition — audiophile-grade wired earbuds for under $200. Of course, that’s on paper. But 1More has seldom let us down when it comes to real-world performance, so we’re very optimistic. We’ll let you know as soon as we give them a spin.
Editors’ Recommendations
