Tunai Piano Hi-Res Headphones Review

A Closer Look and Performance

The headphones themselves come with a gorgeous brilliant white cable and fittings. It’s a very stylish looking cable. However, it certainly not forms over function. The lightweight cable is built to be super strong and meet those oh-so-important audiophile standards.

It comes with 3N 99.999% Oxygen Free Copper cabling (OFC), with a Y-Type cable design. It also features a 3.5mm 4-pole gold-plated jack. That means you can pair it with your mobile devices, game controllers, and pretty much anything else really.

Built-in Mic

On the cable, you’ll find a small controller, which features a single button. Of course, if you’re on mobile, that button can be used to answer/end calls, pause and play music, or wake your mobile assistant. There’s a small microphone too, nothing too complex here, but we’ve used it for a few phone calls and it’s as good as any other brands microphone really. Nothing much interesting to say on that subject if I’m honest, it gets the job done.

Now, let’s move on to these rather fantastic looking earbuds. As you can see, they’re as good looking as any of the fashion headphone brands out on the market today. With a choice of rose gold, polar blue and sterling silver to choose from, you’ll find one that matches your taste easily enough. The white cable matches up with the white coloured metal housing of the drivers, as well as those earbuds too, keeping things looking uniform throughout.

Colourful

Despite the three colour choices, the only coloured section is about 1/3rd of the driver housing. I like it though, it’s understated while still making a statement, adding a hint of colour and style. While I haven’t seen the other two colours in the real world, but I must admit I’m quite fond of the Polar Blue… which is green, let’s be honest now. I wouldn’t have picked this colour typically, but now that I have it, I’m very happy with it.

The design is quite typical of modern high-end headphones. The drivers are quite large for in-ear, but use angled channels for the drivers that point down into your ear. This not only gives a more direct sound, as is obviously preferable to ones mounted 90-degree to the ear; typical on many in-ear driver mountings. However, it also provides a rather secure anchor that balances the weight of the earbuds and keeps them firmly in your ears too. I went for a good run and jumped around the office, and these little buds were happy to stay in my ears the whole time; no complaints there then.

Hi-Res Audio Needs Hi-Res Range

So why are the drivers as big as they are? Well, they feature a dual driver design, with one massive 13mm dynamic driver kicking up the bass end of the sound, while a smaller ceramic driver deals with the more delicate frequencies. Hi-Res audio needs to be able to produce around 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz.

However, the Piano rock the world from 10 Hz right up to 40,000 Hz, which is way below and above the range of human hearing. Sure, you can “hear” that, but it still moves the air regardless at those ranges, adding “feel” to the sound. Furthermore, it also means the ranges that music is produced at fit nicely in the range with nothing left out.

Powerful Drivers

The drivers are rated for 32 Ohm, with a sensitivity of 105dB/mw. Many brands are much lower than this and are quite easy to power from even the cheaper end of music players, mobile devices etc. However, the Piano will accept a good pounding from a more powerful headphone amplifier if you have one. We cranked them through a headphone amp that can run up to 300 Ohm and pushed them way past their typical volume to much praise. Too loud to put in my ears, but the sounded distortion-free regardless.

However, for the main testing, our humble Samsung S9+ was more than enough to run through some albums, Flac files and other such media. However, even the max volume on that was pretty freaking loud with these, and the 75% level was a punchy and plenty powerful level for us.

Tremendous Bass

The sheer power of these headphones is something to behold. While I can’t hear down to 10 Hz, and let’s be honest, who can! The drivers have a terrific low-end response that can really rattle your eardrums with amazing precision. The opening of Lend Me The Eyes of Millennia by Ihsahn isn’t music for the faint of heart, or for lousy headphones. The audio assault from the synth to the terrifying double bass, to the roaring vocals, will put any speakers through their paces in a real hurry when the main rhythm kicks in around the 1:15 mark. However, the range way incredibly dynamic even on the 13mm driver of the Piano.

Listening to Big Wreck – Albatross, the acoustic guitar may as well have been right in my own hands, with Ian Thronlys crunchy guitar tone and vocals soaring from the other side of the room. Being able to hear the plectrum click over the strings sounded as beautiful as it could.

I even went through a little of Eminem’s Kamikaze album, with its relentless opening tracks featuring some seriously low-end bass frequencies that’ll shake the frame out of most subwoofers and a brutal assault on the mid-ranges from Eminem. Again, things sounded as punchy as I would expect from larger over-ear headphones.

However, it was Steve Vai’s – In My Dreams With You that really showed the power of the Piano headphones. The end of the track with Devin Townsend overlaying his vocals was almost surreal. The main vocals were obnoxiously right in front of my face, with the layered tracks fading in from the sides and all around to a mighty crescendo. All the time maintaining the intensely tight mix of the albums drums, dizzying guitar tones, and admittedly iffy sounding cymbals, but that’s not Tunai’s fault by any measure.

Oh, BTW!

I have linked YouTube version of the tracks mentioned. FLAC files were used where possible for my testing, and Amazon Music for the rest. More tracks were certainly tested too, but these are the ones that really stood out. YouTube quality may not give you the same results due to their audio compression.

Just One More Go…

It’s with a heavy heart that I packed these headphones away for the day; admittedly an hour later than after I intended to finish testing them. Will they be back out for another listen? Oh, no doubt about it. In fact, maybe writing this review can wait for just a few more albums, a glass of scotch, and a cosy chair…