I love music, and I love pretty things, so when I got the press release for Noble Audio's new flagship (ie, expensive) in ear monitors (IEMs), I perked right up.
The Noble Audio Lu Ban, set to release at the upcoming CanJam Singapore, is named after the legendary Chinese structural engineer and inventor, but looks a great deal prettier, I'd wager. There's plenty of marketing waffle about what these things sound like, but sticking to just the facts, they feature cocobolo wood, one 10mm dynamic driver, two planar drivers, and they cost $1,399 / £1,299.
Spec check
The Lu Ban features a three-driver hybrid setup consisting of a single dynamic driver and dual-planar drivers. The heart of the thing is the 10mm dynamic driver utilising a wooden composite diaphragm – the thing that vibrates to move air that makes the sound.
Noble Audio claims that this wood-based material provides specific resonance behaviours that apparently allow for a deeper, more textured bass response, which I'm excited about. I just wrote a review of the Mangird Tea Pro IEMs and the bass was one of the most satisfying that I've heard in an IEM. It would be cool to hear what Noble Audio's take on textured bass will be.
This choice is also intended to deliver a midrange with "harmonic richness," aiming for a more realistic decay on vocals and acoustic instruments compared to standard synthetic diaphragms. Now, that's dangerously close to marketing fluff, but I've heard some of Noble's earphones before, notably the FoKus Amadeus wireless earphones, and the midrange was notably better than most of the competition. So I believe that they can deliver on this fancy description.
Then come the planar drivers, which are designed to handle the higher frequencies. There's even more fancy words about how these are made and what they will do, but bottom line is: Noble claims there will be a faster transient response and improved micro-detail with them. While I haven't tested the unit yet, Noble Audio describes the resulting sound as a balance between "musical warmth and technical precision," which again puts me in mind of a recently reviewed IEM, the Ziigaat Horizon.
The look of love
One thing is undeniable – if the photos are to be believed – and that is the Lu Ban looks gorgeous! Each pair features hand-crafted shells with faceplates made from a beautifully deep dark cocobolo wood. That means that no two units are identical in appearance, and to be honest, that should be standard for a pair of IEMs that cost $1,400.
Noble Audio says that the build process involves meticulous hand-finishing to meet their flagship standards, and it certainly looks like it.
The IEM is packaged with the Magnus cable, an 8-core mono-crystalline silver and copper hybrid cable... now, as someone who cannot discern any meaningful difference when swapping cables, this is all fairly meaningless to me. But if that makes sense to you, more power to you!
