Introduction

XENNS is an up and coming audio brand that made a name for itself in the global audiophile community with its Mangird Tea IEMs—a set I reviewed and was quite impressed by. It’s still a good option today, which is more than could be said for the vast majority of all IEMs released at the same time. This was also around the same time the company behind the Mangird name decided to re-brand to XENNS and the first of the newer releases was the tribrid XENNS UP which was more divisive. It offered nice bass but ultimately was too dark and not detailed enough to really make itself a contender in a competitive tribrid IEM market. I was left wondering whether XENNS could have done something else for the money had it not gone with the Sonion EST tweeters, that can be notoriously hard to work with, and stuck to a hybrid design.

As it turns out, XENNS had the same idea. There was the XENNS Mangird Tea 2 which came after the UP but I thought it was mostly inoffensive and too safe a tuning to really stand out in any particular manner. I was worried that perhaps XENNS could not replicate the magic of the original Tea, even though I should clarify that both the UP and Tea 2 have its share of fans. So when I heard about the new XENNS Top hybrid set using a 1 DD/8 BA driver configuration and it also getting rave reviews out of China, I agreed to take it on for review. Thanks to Linsoul for providing a test sample to TechPowerUp as we examine it closely in our review today beginning with a look at the product specifications in the table below.

Specifications