The bass response of the Tralucent Audio 1Plus2 is by far its greatest technical strength. I’ve never heard anything that delivers the amount of visceral power that it brings and yet retains the same control and resolution as well. I’ve heard some dynamic drivers with excellent bass resolution, like the Sony MDR-EX1000 and the Sennheiser IE800, but there is absolutely nothing I’ve heard that compares to the sub-bass performance of the 1Plus2.
Nothing. It is just incredibly powerful, yet so incredibly controlled at the same time — it
will leave you grinning from ear to ear like a certain famous British Shorthair. It makes the $900 Ultrasone IQ (
gosh, I hate that earphone…) sound like a $20 earbud.
No joke.
Scout’s honor.
The bass is so good, it’s almost distracting. I keep noticing how good the quality of the bass is. It doesn’t help that the response is a decent level boosted over flat at the eardrum. In all honesty, I don’t know what they did to make the bass response so good, but I do think they successfully introduced a natural sub-bass group delay without bumping up the bass response too much, i.e. it overcomes the missing 6 dB. Now, obviously, I have no measurements to back these statements up, but I’m pretty sure that if we applied an Energy-Time Curve (ETC) analysis to the 1Plus2, we’d see that it’s different from that of a typical IEM (which normally range from 5-15 ms under 50 Hz, as opposed to 5-35 ms in an anechoic chamber). The sheer quantity of it is just a tad too much, though. I sort of wished it only had the group delay without the bump in response. If I had to EQ, I’d take the bass shelf down 2 dB for the optimal bass response for my tastes. Not for easy listening, at least. I guess Tralucent wanted to give listeners the “punch†they’re looking for.