Can this Apollo take you to the moon?
PROS: Premium build quality, warm sound signature, good choice of materials, smart comfortable headband design, extremely comfortable ear pads, high quality stock cable and case.
CONS: Price, unconventional midrange tuning with boosted lower-midrange and dipped upper-midrange takes it away from accurate tonality and timbre of instruments, thick presentation takes away from clarity and instrument definition.
The product was sent to me free of charge for the review in exchange for my honest opinion.
About Sendy Audio.
Sendy Audio is the more premium sub-brand of 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.
Manufacturer Website – Sendy Audio Apollo Also available for sale on – MusicTeck
Technical Specifications.
- Driver Type: Planar Magnetic
- Driver Size: 68mm
- Frequency Response: 20-40Khz
- Sensitivity: 95db +/- 3dB
- Impedance: 16Ω
- Weight: 395g
Included in the box.
- Apollo headphone
- 4.4mm Balanced cable
- 4.4mm to 3.5mm adapter cable
- Headphone carry case
- Cable sack
Technology, Build Quality and Design.
QUAD-FORMER Technology: The planar magnetic driver is made of double magnets, double sides of coils on diaphragm and double coils on each sides of diaphragm. Double sides of coils means there is coil on each side of diaphragm. Double coils means there are two coils on each side of diaphragm, so there are totally 4 coils on the diaphragm, which makes the diaphragm vibrate the same for the same frequency. Double sides magnet provides the same magnetic power in the field. This allows Apollo have good electroacoustic energy efficiency conversion, extremely low distortion and very good consistency.
Housing – The wood headphone housing is made with high quality rosewood. The process includes precise CNC carving, sanding, polishing, painting and natural drying. The wood housing surface is then lacquered and buffed to high gloss. The grill is made with steel mesh that has a sunlight design, which is where the headphone gets its name Apollo from. The black and nickel coloured steel mesh have distinct layers. As per Sendy, this design isn’t just for aesthetic purposes but also has an effect on tuning because of the specific arrangement of each hole.
Head band – Apollo has the same headband design as Sivga Phoenix. The matte black headband is CNC machined from stainless steel. The headpad is made of goat skin. It is soft and very comfortable. The headband design is ergonomic, light and allows for fatigue free long sessions.
Earpads – The earpads are made of high protein materials and memory form, which is very soft and comfortable. They cover the whole ears and do not exert much pressure on the cheek. Also, the earpads are detachable, which can be replaced easily and conveniently.
Cable – Apollo 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 circular chin slider with Sendy’s logo and the y-split, connectors and jack casings are all made of high quality black anodised metal, which feel 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.
Sendy 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 – Apollo comes with the same case as Sendy Aiva, which has the Sendy logo on top and bottom. It is small and very travel friendly, and can easily fit into a laptop bag. It is made out of leather and is very well built. It has 4 feet at the bottom to stand the case upright if you ever want to (like in the picture below), though I don’t know when one would want it to do that.
Fit and Comfort.
Apollo is probably the most comfortable headphone out of Sendy/Sivga’s range. It is fairly light and the earpads cover the whole ears and fit very comfortably. The head pad does not exert a lot of pressure on the head and you can adjust the headpad adjusters for optimal fit. The ear cups have memory foam, are extremely squishy, don’t exert a lot of clamp force and swivel a bit to fit the shape of the jawline quite nicely. All of this makes for a comfortable headphone for long listening sessions. The only gripe I have with fit is that the top of my ears touch the driver assembly, which can become a hot spot in longer sessions.
Twister6 Reviews 