Ok, so my Butastur arrived yesterday. They are flawlessly finished and I’ve had a bit of time with them using the stock cable and recommend H570 tips.
On first listen, I was a bit disappointed, thinking that they were good but didn’t really bring anything to the table that I wasn’t getting with my Kiwi Ears OL. So I went back to the Kiwi Ears and oh my! The Kiwi Ears were really lacking compared to Butastur.
If there’s one word to describe the Butastur, it’s ‘airy’. But that doesn’t do them justice. I can use additional words like detail and separation, but again, that doesn’t do them justice. It’s because the the air and separation aren’t a thing in themselves, it’s what they allow the music to do. They allow the music to ‘breathe’. It’s a strange description but what I’m hearing is that the Butastur teases apart the individual instruments and vocals in the music and gives them room to breathe - for sounds to bloom and decay. This is why the timbre is so realistic and the details so easy to hear.
Some will hear the air and separation as greater soundstaging or wider image placement but for me, that’s not the ultimate benefit.
Detailed sets can often be harsh - here it isn’t
Separation can often be boring - here it isn’t
Kiwi Ears OL in comparison to Butastur sounded homogenised. All the elements of the music were there but blended into one. Like the difference between beef stew (Kiwi Ears) and steak and roast vegetables (Butastur ).
Another analogy is that by teasing apart the strands of the music, Butastur gives you greater insight to the individual elements of the music and a picture of the whole. Visually, it’s like a thin vs dense forest.
Butastur
Kiwi Ears OL
I think that this ability to deconstruct the recording has led to accusations that Butastur is ‘thin’ sounding and for sure, there is a lower weight or density of the recording as a whole but individual instruments or vocals carry their full weight. As a result, the whole is lighter but everything is individually present.
I experimented with the switches but the bass switch has no observable impact on bass weight while reducing the air and space between the instruments which is a poor tradeoff. The treble switch makes things unnaturally bright. So both my switches are in the off position, just as the maker intended.
Bravo American Spirit and Jinny. What a masterpiece.
