Introduction
IMR Acoustics is a brand that many would associate with the now-defunct “Trinity Audio”, a company that went on Kickstarter to promote and sell their products, subsequently failing to fulfill many of their orders and essentially scamming many people out of their money.
Bob, also known as “RockBob” in other circles, started his audio career with Rock Jaw Audio as the Head Designer. Trinity Audio was subsequently created, and upon its failure, spun off into what we know now as IMR Acoustics. IMR does not have the same controversies that Trinity had with regards to fulfilling orders, but you can see how Bob’s association with the company is a controversy in by itself.
IMR started its journey with the R1, a hybrid using a dynamic and a ceramic piezoelectric driver. This was followed by the R1 Zenith, an update to the R1 with near-lawsuit levels of similarity to Acoustune’s unique shell designs, but that’s a whole different topic.
With the history lesson out of the way, let’s focus on the R2 Aten. Taking cues from its predecessors, the R2 has the same driver configuration but now with even more tuning options, sporting both interchangeable nozzles and interchangeable dampers. With the discontinuation of the original R1 in favour of the R1 Zenith and the release of the new “RAH” tribrid flagship, the R2 now sits as the middle child of IMR’s ever-rotating lineup of IEMs.
Product page: https://imracoustics.com/products/imr-r2-aten
MSRP: £400 (~$500)
Driver configuration: 1DD + 1 Piezo hybrid
This unit was kindly loaned to me by one of my Patrons, Justin.
NON-AUDIO OPINIONS
My unboxing posts are pretty much the only times I’ll ever talk about build quality, accessories and the like. I’m not really the person to ask about these things as I don’t really care about them that much.
Accessories:
- Canvas case
- Tips
- 5 interchangeable nozzles (black, gold, red, purple, green)
- 6 interchangeable dampers that attach to the nozzle (black gold, red, purple, green, blue)
(Those I have labelled as “pink” are officially stated as purple.)
Cable: 2-wire twist braid. Relatively soft feel.
Connection: recessed 2-pin. Strongest type of connection in theory.
Build: metallic and sturdy, though there’s a seam around the shell that doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.
Fit: comfortable for my ears, no complaints.
Isolation: below average, would not use outdoors.
Manufacturer-provided details
Initial impressions
- The 6 filters do very little, if anything at all. Mainly used for fine-tuning the sound than any drastic changes to the R2’s signature.
- The nozzles change the signature most significantly, to varying degrees of success.
- Red and black nozzles are largely identical, with the greatest bass emphasis.
- The gold nozzle makes the mids horrible and nobody should ever touch it.
- The purple nozzle (I swear it’s pink) reduces the bass to manageable levels, though by virtue of reducing lower bass and keeping the lower mids largely intact.
- The green filter just rolls off the bass entirely. Who thought this was a good idea?
- The upcoming review will be mainly based on my favourite setting: purple nozzle with purple filters (again, I think it’s pink).
- Bass bleeds pretty hard on black, gold and red nozzles.
- Bass response isn’t very clean on purple nozzle despite the reduced emphasis.
- Midrange tonality is decent as long as you’re not on the gold nozzle.
Measurements
Comparison courtesy of the Graph Comparison Tool
For the dedicated page with all channel-matched graphs, visit here
Sorry for the recent content drought, life outside of audio has been getting busy. I should be pretty active in the next week or so but then I’ll take another short hiatus till mid-November, after which you can expect a lot more content when I go off for my semi-annual Singapore trip.
Thank you to all my dear readers and Patrons alike for your patience, and to the latter: thank you for your generous support as always.
And of course, my shoutouts to the big-money boys:
“McMadface”
Denis
Justin
“caravan”
Nicholas
Alexander
1 thought on “IMR R2 Aten: Unboxing”
This reminds me of the Jomo audio interchangeable filters on their hybrids. Do you have any opinions on the Jomo Audio lineup? I saw that you graphed them but they didn’t make it to the ranking list.