Once unpeeled from its foam-lined hard case and protective cloth bags over the cups, Hendeka's shiny gloss-black braided cable looked and felt super plasticky. I saw why Astral Acoustics had intervened; though admittedly for quite the price. I also thought the foam-filled pleather headband as beneath the quality of its solid-metal ends, the grooved sliders and cups all of which told a more premium story. I was of two minds about the velour pads too. Whilst undeniably comfy, I find suede-type textures a veritable magnet for facial tuft and dead skin cells. I prefer smooth non-clingy surfaces. Personal preferences. As to fit, my tall fat noggin had just two slider grooves sit beneath its retainer and a full quad free above it. That meant plenty of untapped headroom. True egg heads, rejoice. Meanwhile small heads might run out of adjustments in their direction? Though the sharp forward geometry and matching cable exits all indicate the intended wear orientation, engraved white channel identifiers still live inside the head band's metallic ends for the otherwise confused.
Accessorizing confusion: three small silver bolt heads per inside slider block; two silver bolt heads per gimbal; four gold bolt heads per ear cup; gold slider end stops.
The ear pads are wedge-shaped so thinner in the front. As my photo shows, getting them off and back on again needs just a small twist. My failed industrial design education didn't find Hendeka's material mix wholly congruent. Whilst the metal gimbals are small enough to not really telegraph the offset, the far bigger slider/band metal junctions more clearly mismatch the hue and surfacing of the 3D-printed cups. This assemblage would look better if those metal parts too were 3D printed to unify the look. Ditto the four gold hex bolts on the ends. Equivalent ones on the gimbals are silver. So are the small inside bolts on the slider blocks. Meanwhile the golden shaft ends continue a minor 3-tone theme yet sticking to either silver or gold would be more seamless. In short, Hendeka's optics and haptics are a bit of a mixed bag; nothing deal-breaking at this ask but still worthy of mention as areas Hendeka v2 might revisit. Since this isn't a rigged Miss Universe competition, let's move onto sonics. My desktop's €3'500 40wpc FangSound Dionysus was obviously overkill for the occasion so upstairs I went to the Shanling EM7 Music Center.
My upstairs bonsai system of half-width components and miniature monitors augmented by compact force-cancelling sub via precision analog active crossover for mirror-imaged hi/lo-pass legs at 120Hz/4th-order.
Shanling's all-in-1 EM7 offers up to ~8wpc/32Ω headphone power and here hosts an offline 1TB local microSD library.
… to be continued…
