Review: RHA T10i in-earphones

We’ll jump around our sound test a bit, but starting with Tycho’s “Awake”, we found a warm tonality in the highs and bass with the treble driver, with a fairly decent balance to everything, and a good punch to some of the low drum hits in the bottom end. This is with the treble filter, and the reference filter just punches that out a little more aggressively, equalising the bass and making the treble and bass on even footing.

That said, we prefer the low end to sit below the other sounds, and the treble filter did that for us, something we could hear in other tracks, including Daft Punk’s “Solar Sailer” and Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place”, with the high and mids overwhelming your ears, and the bottom end just pushing through underneath.

Harder electronic seems more suited to the bass or reference tuning, and in tracks where more work has been paid to the bass, the highs will seem a little under impressive, though there’s still plenty of noiseless bass to go around, evident in Mooro’s “M66R6” and The Glitch Mob’s “Skullclub”, as well as Bastille’s “Bad Blood”, the latter of these sounding a tad empty and shallow.

From what we can tell, these aren’t “one size fits all” tunings. Rather, the earphones can be customised for the style of music, and we get the feeling music where bass is the priority will be better off with the bass tuning.

In fact, when we tested these tracks with the bass filter, we found more or less that, with more sound at the bottom end, essentially providing a more pronounced bass compared to the mids and highs the treble driver was offering.

The bass filter, where light dare not penetrate.
The bass filter, where light dare not penetrate.

Over to rock and back to the treble driver, and we’ve found The Deftones are a little soft but tight in the highs in “Digital Bath”, while Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” pulls back on the bass with the treble tuning and appears a little shallow, almost as if you were listening to the band from afar in your living room. That said, it’s still a good sound, and fitting of people who don’t want their ears bombarded with sound.

Older rock fans will appreciate the warm sound offered up in “Gimme Shelter” from The Rolling Stones, with clear distinction between the overlapping guitars, bass line, and percussion, with Mick’s voice shouting out over the top of it.

Again, not too bassy with the treble filter, though if you want to introduce more, there are two other filters waiting for you. And this feeling was recreated in The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” as well as The Beatles’ “A Day In The Life”, both with strong mids and highs, and just visible enough bass, with a warm back-end that was reminiscent of larger headphones.

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Next up is hip-hop and R&B, and while we expect this to be more the domain of the bass tuning, the treble filter has a fairly strong balance in Gorillaz’s “Feel Good Inc” with a warm soft bottom end bass with a hint of push back, and some bright vocals and guitars just beneath them. Galactic’s “Find My Home” offers much the same, even though the bass is clearly stronger here, though the sound is quite warm and easy to get used to. Again, if you like it bassier, grab the reference and bass tunings depending on how heavy you like it.

Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” brings on much of the same, and the drum hits that start the sound are a tad empty with the treble tuning, but the rest of the sound is warm and friendly, like when you heard it through speakers the first time, inviting you to dance.

Classic R&B — you know, soul — exhibits much of that same warmth, too, with a softness to the voices of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell in “Ain’t Mo Mountain High Enough”, the instrument tracks clear and distinct from the rest, with rounded bass sitting just beneath everything it. Stevie Wonder’s classic “I Wish” echoes the feelings we had with hip-hop, with the instruments taking priority, separated and clear, and the vocals begging you to turn the song up if only to get more out of the vocals.

Modern music is bright and sharp, though the treble filter does much the same with instruments a little more noticeable than vocals in the highs, the mids coming to life in Maroon 5’s “Sugar” and Katy Perry’s “Roar”, with enough bass in the bottom end rounding everything out.

The soundscape so far is quite close and welcoming, and with more sound quality than we’re used to from in-ear pieces, with enough bass that you’d swear you’re listening to a larger pair of cans.

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Jazz and classical end the sound test, and this is one area we expect to go quite nicely with the treble tuning, resulting in an audio quality that is warm and very easy on the ears, with the double bass in Dave Brubeck’s “Maria” just enough to be there, and not take over the ears as the sax, piano, or drums play, with more of that excellent balance in Louis Armstrong’s “Cheek to Cheek” with Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole’s “It’s Only A Paper Moon”, John Coltrane’s “Blue Train”, and the Miles Davis classic “All Blues”.

In fact, this is a pair of earphones that — together with the treble tunings — are spot on brilliantly suited for jazz, with a recreation that will put you in the same room as the musicians, with not too much of the bottom end, and just enough of the top, filling your eardrums with a sound that occurs almost as if it were real, or that you were really there.

Classical is a little bit shallower, though still fairly balanced, with Claude Bolling’s “Baroque in Rhythm” lacking depth but still appearing relatively balanced, Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” by the London Philharmonic spacious and louder in the bottom and mids than the highs, and Jacques Loussier Trio’s “Theme of Symphony No. 7” just right.

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The more you listen to the RHA T10i, the more you begin to think that the earphones are a little like “The Three Bears” of the headphone world, providing a sound that can be either too bassy, offering too much treble, or just right, and because you can change these tuning filters are your discretion, it means you can decide whether the porridge is too hot or too cold whenever you want, so to speak.

And that’s a good thing, because it means the quality of the sound is down to you and your ears.

Unfortunately, it’s also a bit of a bad thing because changing the filters means taking off the ear-tips, unscrewing the filter you were using, choosing the right filter relevant to what you want to use, screwing them on, and screwing the now replaced tuning filter onto the filter holder.

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Thankfully, there’s a colour coded system to help you work out what filter does what — treble is gold, reference is silver, and bass is black — but it can be a particularly fussy and fiddly affair, and it’s not the sort of thing you want to be doing in public, so make sure you know what you’re going to be listening to ahead of time.

This attention to customisation isn’t totally new to us, mind you, and we’re seeing different tunings being made to other headphones as time goes on. Most recently, we’ve seen a user modified sound in Parrot’s Zik 2.0, with software helping this out to make almost a custom driver suited for any style of music.

RHA’s take on this is interesting, and is hardware based for people who prefer wired earphones and something less noticeable. As a point, this reviewer can wear the RHA T10i earphones with a hat and have a customised sound. He cannot do the same with the Parrot Zik 2.0 headphones as they’re just too big and too bulky. We love them, but they’re not made to be as compact as the RHA earphones.

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Conclusion

You have to admire the gutsy move of RHA to try something like the T10i earphones, because it really does take a bold move to make something so fiddly, and bring it to market.

But that’s kind of the problem with these earphones: they’re a bit of a fussy concept, with the tuning filters reliant on you wanting to change the sound dramatically, and hoping the filters do the job properly.

In a high definition audio world, we can see people who would love that prospect, too, as custom tuning tends to be something made for people who know their music.

For instance, if you know you’re going to play some Miles Davis, Ray Brown, or Oscar Peterson — jazz for those of you who don’t know the artists — you can use the reference or treble filters, with a quality suited to those musicians and style of recording. And if you happen to want to listen to electronic from Skrillex, Daft Punk, or Hybrid, you’re probably going to switch to the bass filters.

And why not? If you can make your music sound better, more power to you.

High grade metal. How many earphones have that?
High grade metal. How many earphones have that?

But this won’t be for everyone because it can be fiddly, and if you prefer to have a sound quality that is pretty solid across all genres, you may want to look elsewhere, because these require you to take a few minutes out and change something when the music just isn’t right.

We love what’s going on here, and RHA has made some good efforts with the T10i, but they’re not going to be for everyone.

That said, people who only listen to one style will probably love what’s on offer, if only because they’ll never have to change to one of the other filters ever again.

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Overall
Features
Value for money
Performance
Ease of Use
Design
Reader Rating0 Votes
Interesting way to change the sound of the earphone depending on the style of music and personality of sound profile that you prefer; Relatively warm sound across the board; Very well made; Plenty of tips provided in the box; Mic-equipped remote included, even if it is made mostly for iPhones and iPads;
Heavy earphones; The fit is very unusual, and not overly comfortable until you’re used to it; We love the idea of replaceable tuning filters, but it’s a little too fussy to work in real life; Treble filter has a surprising amount of bass, as does the reference filter, which is downright bassy;
3.9