SIVGA P-II

A boutique design and build headphone under $500.

PROS: Highly attractive design, premium boutique build quality, warm musical sound signature, separation and resolution, soundstage, excellent choice of materials for construction, smart comfortable headband design, comfortable ear pads, high quality stock cable and case.

CONS: Nitpicking – Its weight can be felt slightly after wearing it for a few hours, slight honk in lower-midrange because of a tiny bump around 800Hz, can use a bit more forwardness in upper-midrange (for people who want a more reference upper-midrange) and a tiny high Q cut at 12kHz in upper-treble.

The product was provided to me free of charge for the review in exchange for my honest opinion.

About SIVGA.

Sivga is based out of Dongguan (China) and was founded by two childhood friends, Jian Zhou and Rongchun Pan who shared a common love for music and quality headphones. Jian had been working in the field of headphones for nearly 20 years before he founded SIVGA Audio, where he was a senior technical engineer of a leading OEM headphone factory in China and led the R&D, headphone design, craftsmanship as well as manufacturing departments. During his career in the last company, Jian worked with many international headphone brands and played an important role in helping those brands grow. Rongchun on the other hand was an avid audiophile who was obsessed over the pursuit of sound quality and developed a knack of tuning headphones. SIVGA are an OEM as well as have their own line of headphones under the brand names -SIVGA and Sendy Audio. They follow boutique as well as modern manufacturing techniques, where their wooden ear cups are built and finished by hand and all the metal parts used in the headphones are CNC machined to perfection.

Links – SIVGA P-II (Official Website) | SIVGA Official AliExpress Store

Technical Specifications.

Driver – 97mm x 76mm Planar magnetic
Frequency response – 20kHz – 40kHz
Impedance – 32Ω
Sensitivity – 98dB +/- 3dB
Cable – 1.6m Balanced cable with 2.5mm headphone connectors and 4.4mm jack
Weight – 420g

Included in the box.

P-II headphone
4.4mm Balanced cable
4.4mm to 3.5mm adapter cable
Headphone carry case
Cable sack

Technology, Build Quality and Design.

As per SIVGA, it took them 3 years of hard R&D, tuning and innovation to finish and perfect the planar magnetic driver, overall industrial design, material selection, acoustic damping and final manufacturing. They state that all parts right down to the screw were independently designed.

P-II oozes of boutique build, design as well as premium quality right from the ear cups to headband and grill design. P-II is a very well thought out product with an obsessive focus to every minute detail in design. It has massive eye candy quotient and I’m mightily impressed!

Planar Magnetic Driver.

P-II has a 97mm x 76mm planar magnetic driver with in-house developed OTV technology and double neodymium magnet structure with 108 well arranged acoustic holes. The PCB ultra-nanometer composite diaphragm and aluminium belt plating allows the whole structure to be thinner and lighter.

Picture Courtesy – SIVGA

Black Walnut Wooden Cups.

The wooden cups are made from Black Walnut wood. They are cut by CNC but are sanded, finished and stained to perfection by hand, which is labour intensive and requires very good skilled craftsmen. The cup grill has a black metal ring with a very nice and attractive honeycomb design and a small SIVGA logo on the right. Since the whole process is complex and takes time because a lot of it is built by hand, P-II is generally produced in small quantities as a boutique product.

Picture Courtesy – SIVGA

Ear pads.

P-II has hybrid ear pads made of high protein leather and velvet fabric on the side. It was designed after consulting data of various face shapes which helped them design a custom shape by varying the foam thickness of the ear pads at different points that touch the cheek, jaw and mastoid. This helps it fit more snugly and comfortably than normal ear pads. The inner part of the ear pad is oval in shape and is designed to engulf the outer ear completely. All of this results in a very easy and comfortable fit. More on this in the ‘Fit and Comfort’ section below.

Picture Courtesy – SIVGA

Headband.

P-II’s matte black headband is CNC machined from stainless steel. The head pad too is made out of high protein leather and is cushioned with small brick shaped design which is extremely comfortable for hours on the end. It has an elastic band on the inside and adjusts automatically when you wear the headphones as per your head shape and height without the requirement for manual adjustment.

Picture Courtesy – SIVGA

Yoke.

The yoke is CNC machined out of an Aluminium alloy for high durability. It allows rotation of ear cups to 90° and a swivel of 30°.

Picture Courtesy – SIVGA

Cable.

P-II comes stock with a very nice 4-core 6N Single Crystal Copper OCC balanced cable with 2.5mm headphone connectors and a 4.4mm jack termination. It has a very nice and ergonomic Y-split with an oval chin slider that slides down to complete a cylindrical design of the Y-split. The connectors and jacks are high quality and seem rugged and built to last. The cable is soft and supple; wraps up very easily and unwraps without much effort or entangling. It’s not the softest cable in the market but I’m very happy to see a well built premium cable with a headphone in this price range.

SIVGA also offer the same 4-core 6N Single Crystal Copper OCC with different jack terminations such as a 4-pin XLR as well as different adapters to purchase separately aftermarket. They are all hand built in their own factory and are all built to order as per your requirement. SIVGA were kind enough to send me another cable with a 4-pin XLR termination, a 4.4mm female to 4-pin XLR male adapter as well as 4.4mm female to 1/4″ jack adapter to try P-II’s pairing with my desktop setup.

Leather Case.

P-II is not the most compact headphone nor is its case. The case is made out of leather and is very well built. P-II sits in the case with the ear cups flat. All in all, the case keeps the luxurious premium design of the P-II intact and is slim enough to fit in my small laptop bag easily and comfortably.

Fit and Comfort.

Even though one would consider P-II medium-heavy at 420g, it fits quite comfortably. The padded head pad does not exert a lot of pressure on the head as it adjusts automatically based on your head size. There isn’t a lot of clamp force at the ear cups, they swivel to 30° and are able to fit according to the shape of one’s jawline quite nicely. What’s even better are the ear pads that are wonderfully shaped and feel like they’ve been customised for one’s head and ears specifically. Of course since P-II isn’t as light as the HD6XX, you’re also aware of it being on your head. I didn’t experience neck or jaw pain but I did start feeling the weight after a couple of hours, especially if I didn’t take any breaks in between.

Page 2 – Sound analysis, Comparisons and Conclusion.