Nostalgia Audio Durandal Review: Wield, and Bring Music to Life!
Nostalgia Audio (NA in short), a powerfully rising brand from Hong Kong, has been making significant movements and achievements across a variety of products, ranging from IEMs to upgrade cables and XWB eartips. Along with the well-praised custom cables (such as Lancelot, Kratos, etc.), even to this date their flagship IEM Camelot is still a timeless, active performer that easily competes against the latest TOTL IEMs, and not to forget about their limited co-flagship model, the Tesseract.
Nostalgia Audio also has a full series of monitoring, reference line-up IEM products in case you weren’t aware, the NA 3/5/7/12 series is an ideal choice for artists, studio engineers, or audiophiles that prefer reference tunings. Meanwhile, after some time since they released a new IEM model, NA has brought us another interesting premium IEM, called the Durandal.
The Pitch: New Flagship IEM
Featuring 1DD+4BA+2BC drivers, Durandal is NA’s first take on implementing a bone conductor driver, as well as being a collaboration model with Vortex Cables, another popular Hong Kong brand that manufactures cables and rising fastly across the communities. There are a lot of things to talk about Durandal in many aspects, so let’s begin with the review! Durandal retails for about $2400, a price sitting right below NA’s flagship IEM Camelot and Tesseract.
Interactive, Artful Packaging
One of the things I’ve appreciated from Nostalgia Audio products especially since the Tesseract (Review link) is the creative, interactive, and lore-based packaging they’ve designed for each product. Durandal’s concept art for the outer packaging features a beautifully drawn scene from the Carolingian epic “La Chanson de Roland”, with everything in monochrome color except the sword that the knight Roland is wielding – the Durandal glowing in lapis blue color. To open the package, there’s a small sword stuck on the right side of the box. Once you pull, the Durandal IEM makes its appearance as well as the included accessories.
What is Included?
Durandal’s dedication to keeping the product concept lore-accurate extends to the smallest accessories. Other than the earpieces, Durandal comes with ‘Durandal-exclusive’ Vortex Hroudland custom cable, an aluminum Durandal storage case, a commemorative ancient coin and necklace, an earpiece mesh bag, a leather Nostalgia/Vortex desk mat, a full set of Nostalgia XWB eartips (S/M/L), a full set of of ‘Durandal-exclusive’ Royal Blue Symbio W hybrid eartips (S/M/L).
My Quick Thought on Premium Packaging/Accessories
While some might call it a waste of cost that upbrings the retail price, and while I agree about that for some over-packaged goods, adding like Durandal barely impacts the price. Alongside, I believe premium products should come along with a premium experience, and that experience should begin ever since receiving and opening the product. Making a premium first impression is what I consider as true high-class and is the respect and dedication of consumers who have paid the pricey cost for a product.
Gorgeous, Gothic-art Earpieces
Durandal’s earpieces are designed and built like a piece of art. With the silvery metal rims engraved with V-patterns encase a three-dimensional faceplate. The lowest part of the faceplate is mirror-finished, which is then topped with a delicate Gothic structure, and lastly, the Durandal sword is placed in the center. The earpiece body and Gothic structure have a mysterious color that sits somewhere between blue and purple (or between lapis blue and indigo). The faceplate is seamlessly finished with resin coating, giving the faceplate a premium watch-like feeling to the eyes. One gorgeous design that amazed me for NA’s creativity once again.
The body is made of resin while the nozzles are made of titanium with divided sound bores for higher clarity, separation, and livelier imaging. The earpieces are very light and ergonomic, allowing great fit and comfort with ease. The earpieces are considerably compact compared to other TOTL IEMs. The nozzle length is slightly on the shorter side, yet the inner side of the resin body is shaped to go narrow as it reaches the nozzle part, so I was able to gain a snug fit with deep enough insertion. Gaining a proper fit is important, especially for Durandal, so in case you find the insertion isn’t deep enough, make sure to do your tip-rolling.
The Inside the Durandal: The Drivers
Let’s now talk about the technical side of Durandal. Durandal is a 7-driver tribrid IEM utilizing 1DD+4BA+2BCD drivers. Having the custom-designed 9.2mm dynamic driver handle the bass, Nostalgia commented that their new proprietary dynamic driver designed for Durandal is designed to deliver “an extraordinary, profound, and impactful bass response that resonates deeply“. This proprietary dynamic driver is then covered with a stainless steel front chamber.
For the four balanced armature drivers, two of them are responsible for producing rich, natural mid-highs while the other two are in charge of bringing clear and detailed high frequencies. NA comments they’ve gone through meticulous R&D for choosing the driver combination that would bring precise, harmonic reproduction of vocals and instruments.
Lastly, Sonion’s dual-membrane BC (Bone Conduction) driver takes care of rendering Durandal’s particularly iconic mid-range (which we’ll be discussing in details in the next page). Sonion BC drivers are specialized for directly transmitting sound through vibration, bypassing external interferences or distortions that could occur while traveling toward the ears.
Spin the sound: Spiral Flow Device
Nostalgia Audio’s signature technology for their flagship model – the SFD (Spiral Flow Device) technology is once again applied to the Durandal also, just as it was for Camelot and Tesseract. As most earphone drivers do, the sound has to be transmitted through tubes until reaching the nozzles. Through this process, certain sound ranges (usually high-frequencies) are prone to losing details and accuracy. Nostalgia’s SFD system seeks to relieve such flaws by engraving spiral grooves within the high-frequency sound tube. This allows stronger momentum for the high frequencies to achieve better details and accuracy.
The Final Touch: Vortex Hruodland Cable
For the first time, Nostalgia has held hands with Vortex Cables – a highly reputed Hong Kong custom cable brand to design a proprietary custom stock cable dedicated to Durandal, called the Hruodland. Considering the lore that Nostalgia has intended for Durandal, the naming of this special cable may have been derived from Roland’s earliest Latinised form of his Franish name – Hruodland.
While fabric cables have been common to be found from the market (even within Vortex’s own products), the Vortex Hruodland catches the eyes with its unusual sleeve design, featuring a four-color scheme of shielding fabrics which are black, blue, crimson, and pink. As for the cable material, Hruodland is comprised with single-crystal silver wires.
Ultra Twins Pair Structure / Air-Injected to the cable?!
Alongside that, Vortex has applied three more special features and technologies for Hruodland – the first being Vortex’s ‘Ultra Twins Pair’ structure. Hruodland is designed with the latest Litz Type 9 (!) design where the AWG (thickness) of the the wire conductors and the total AWG of the shielding layers are matched. This further enhances the EMI shielding performance compared to traditional shielding methods, as well as better optimizing the conductivity quality of the signal transmission.
The second highlight of Hruodland is the Japanese NUC “Air-Injection” Technology. To explain this, I suppose we need to go through a very quick science session. Simply said, Vortex air-injected polythene to the insulation layer’s outer surface. This results in 25% of the insulating material being consisted of air, hence the insulation layer has a noticeably lower dielectric constant than PTFE – which leads to further reducing accumulation of microcharges in the insulation material. With all said, this would lead to higher accuracy while transmitting high-frequency signals.
Vortex’s First-Ever: Composite Insulation Damping
Lastly, the third highlight of Hruodland would be the “Composite Insulation Damping”. Along with Vortex air-injecting the main insulator for the core wires and twisting the positive/negative poles, Hruodland is Vortex’s first-ever product to add an additional damping layer to counteract external vibrations – but most importantly, making the already-quiet-background to the next level, making it even cleaner and quieter (spoiler alert: the effects were apparent upon actual listening!)
Nostalgia and Vortex commented that while internal damping has been widely used across the Speaker Hi-Fi field, so far it has been rarely seen among headphone/earphone cables due to the limited wire diameter (as the IEM cables must remain slim enough). Vortex also added that manufacturing Hruodland was exceptionally difficult as the wire conductors themselves already take a large portion of the cross-sectional area, and securing a space to add another damping layer was a goal that made things even harder to execute.
Well, that was a mouthful to explain and talk about Hruodland! The rest of the details & specifications can be found below. Let’s now move on to the stuffs that directly matters – the sound. Hop on to the next page for detailed sound impressions of Durandal.
Technical Specifications of Hruodland:
- 2-Braid / 21.3 AWG 4N OCC Silver & Silver Plated Wires
- Litz Type 9 Structure
- 5N LC-OFC Copper Shielding
- S-Z Stands with Shielding (with “Ultra Twins Pair” design)
- Customized Flexible Nylon Skin
- Japanese “Air-Injection” Technology
- Gold-plated, high-quality 4.4mm Balanced Plug
Next Page: In-Depth Sound Impressions of the Durandal