The Bird flies again!

PROS: updated exterior design with new Titanium alloy shells, new Silver/Gold-Silver/Copper premium cable, new tuning with a more revealing, cleaner, punchier sound and faster bass.

CONS: higher price.

The product was provided to me on a short loan for the review purpose in exchange for my honest opinion.

Available for sale from authorized retailers like Musicteck.

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Intro.

A few months ago, when I shared my Oriolus Monachaa review, I started it with: It’s a Bird, it’s a Plane, it’s a… new Oriolus Bird? While Monachaa was a different bird, today I will be talking about the return of the Bird, Traillii IEMs with Titanium wings. After years, close to 4 now since its introduction, this IEM still remains relevant in many audiophile discussions. Even just a bare mentioning of a new Oriolus release often triggers a question if updated Traillii is around the corner. Perhaps, Oriolus Japan, who were behind the original Traillii JP development, hasn’t decided yet if they have a worthy successor, but someone else decided to take matters into their own hands.

From what I understand, Traillii Ti is a project of Jaben China, one of the Oriolus distributors in China who made the announcement about the limited Titanium Bird release toward the end of 2022. With a smaller scale local release of only 199 units, which ended up driving the price up, it didn’t get as much attention at first. But now, made its shiny debut at CanJam NYC ’24, giving the Bird a second wind when I spotted a long listening line at Musicteck tables during the show. I had to come back multiple times until I finally got a brief listening spot to collect my impressions. But after the show when I started working on the report, I got flooded with more questions about it.

After pinging Musicteck to borrow Traillii Ti for a few days, I was able to spend more time with these, to analyze and to compare its performance against the original without going by memory, to try a few cables, and to take measurements. While I was only planning to talk about it briefly in my CanJam show report, due to an overwhelming number of questions, I decided to write a separate short review, just focusing mainly on the sound analysis and the comparison. So, here we go!

Design and Accessories.

Since I only received a pair of Ti Birds with a stock cable, there is nothing to talk about the unboxing experience, though I have been told that it won’t be any different than many other higher end Oriolus IEMs. Thus, you still will be treated to a minimalistic brown cardboard box with Van Nuys leather case inside, twin-tube IEMs storage sleeve, and a common set of eartips.

In terms of the design, the driver config remains the same, 12 drivers partitioned into 2xBA lows, 6xBAs mids, and 4xEST highs. You still have 3-way frequency-division crossover and 4 sound tubes going to the nozzle, hidden under the mesh guard of the new shell design. The internal wiring has changed, the shells are now made of Titanium alloy, and there is a new cable. Going from acrylic material shells to Ti raised the weight from 4g to 10g. I also noticed a change in spec with new Impedance being 16ohm (old was 21ohm) and new Sensitivity is 110dB (old was 112dB)

New Ti shells are a little bit bigger, not taller but rather longer, which fills up more the concha cavum area of the ear. Going from 4g to 10g was not that noticeable to my ears, and I didn’t find any changes in comfort between wearing JP vs Ti shells. I also noticed the nozzle diameter change, JP (7mm) vs a little bit bigger Ti (7.5mm). While I usually wear large size eartips with other IEMs, with Traillii I do step down to a medium size due to a larger nozzle diameter.

As already mentioned, cable has been upgraded as well. Instead of the original PWA 1960 4wire (8 conductors) copper cable, Traillii Ti comes with 8-core Pure Silver, Gold-Silver alloy, Copper cable. You will still find a standard 2pin 0.78mm connectors and color-coded connector housing, and 4.4mm balanced brand-name Pentaconn L-shaped plug. I assume, this is PWA made cable as well.

Page 2 – Sound analysis, Cable pair up, and Conclusion.