Nostalgia Audio Eddie Prestige Review: The Affordable Guinevere
Our friends who are into portable audio hobby, especially if you’re from Asia, probably heard of Nostalgia Audio by now. Co-founded by two masterminds from Hong Kong, Nostalgia Audio has been making impressive progress and products yearly. At least here in About Audio, we’ve reviewed a great portion of their products: Benbulbin / Camelot / Tesseract / Durandal / Pendragon for the IEMs, and Kratos / Nerwen / Lancelot / Guinevere for the upgrade cables. And of course, the XWB (Xtra Wide Bore) silicone tips would be the most popular and familiar product made.
Today, we have the pleasure of announcing and reviewing NA’s latest product, the Eddie Prestige cable. Priced at $259 with a total of 300pcs limited globally, Eddie Prestige is a limited-edition earphone cable co-created with Eddie’s Hi-Fi World, featuring premium, rare metal wire materials. Let’s go through the technical details of Eddie Prestige and compare/contrast with different IEMs and cables.
Packaging / Accessories: Curated Quality Goodies
Eddie Prestige comes in a nicely designed packaging box with the product story written behind. Highlighting the cost-effective purpose of the collaboration, Eddie Prestige comes with a brown leather earphone tray for safely putting away the IEMs on the desk. A color-matching leather cable tie is included, and more importantly, you also get a full packet of the XWB Eartips in a special brown color edition. It’s a big thumbs up for Eddie Prestige, including extra accessories that are useful and practical.
Behind the ‘Eddie’ Collaborations
Before we move further into the review, perhaps it’ll be useful to share a little explanation about Eddie and his collaboration projects. Eddie, from Eddie’s HiFi Audio, has been in the audiophile space for close to two decades. Well-reputed for this diverse audio collection and reviews among Hong Kong and Taiwan, Eddie has already collaborated with several brands before this, such as Vortex Cables, Effect Audio, and Flash Acoustics. While the cables’ form factor and features differed for each product, they all shared the same rule: the pricing should be accessible without compromising quality. Nostalgia Audio states that their connection with Eddie began when he reviewed their Camelot earphones, which opened a deeper dialogue on tonal direction and conductor structure, leading to the creation of Eddie Prestige.
Cable Geometry: Rare metals, rare cases for such a price
Let’s talk about the cable materials and the wire geometry. Typically, sub $300 IEM cables are often made of pure copper or SPC due to strains in material prices. Even still, it’s still possible to find rare metal cables on AliExpress and such, though the quality of materials is often in question – and most importantly, the tuning. Regardless of viewing from either perspective, Eddie Prestige’s geometry is impressive just by the specs, as the wires are comprised of a whopping 5 different conductors: 7N GPC, 5N GPS, 5N Silver, 5N SPC, and 7N Copper.
I won’t go too deep into explaining the geometry (as things will get too wordy or complicated), though Eddie Prestige features unprecedented specsheets that I haven’t encountered within this price range. Formatted in Litz 4S structure, Eddie Prestige is inter-woven with two different groups of wires as shown in the rendered image. The cable parts are made of lightweight metals and finished in dark brown and light gold colors. Wires are shielded in amber gold color – great aesthetics that goes along with the metal parts.
Nostalgia Audio Eddie Prestige Specifications:
Wire Gauge: 24 AWG
Braiding Method: 4-Wire Braid
Core Structure: Special Litz Configuration
Conductor Materials: Gold-plated over 7N OCC Copper, Gold-plated 5N OCC Silver, 5N OCC Silver, Silver-plated 5N OFC Copper, Silver-plated 7N OCC Copper
Outer Jacket: Amber Gold SoftFlex PVC
MSRP: HKD 1,999.00 / USD 259.00
Overall Sound Characteristics of Eddie Prestige
Eddie Pestige is a balanced-sounding cable that doesn’t noticeably shift or alter the original sound signature. Instead, it focuses mainly on bringing tonal upgrades, enriching and deepening the timbre and texture. For the tone, Eddie Prestige gently adds warmth and fullness, yet without diluting the resolution or shimmer. What I found to be the most impressive improvement was how it matures the IEM’s micro details. Eddie Prestige unveils refined, silky texture details that weren’t too noticeable before, and it boosts these sonic elements with butter-smoothness.
Custom cables that unveil micro details are often reference sounding ones that is tilted to have less musicality and add sharpness, sometimes causing the sound to become dry or grainy – yet Eddie Prestige does this without sacrificing the musicality or smoothness. In fact, it also boosts musicality as mentioned, overall offering an overall upgrade in both musicality and analyticity. On the next page, we’ll be pairing Eddie Prestige with various earphones and share detailed sound impressions on how the cable impacts the sound.
Next Page: IEM Mega Match & Sound Pairing (with Nostalgia Audio Camelot / Starry Audio Bolide / Canpur CP622B / Palavox Dark Knight)