Наушники — Spirit Torino VALKYRIA TITANIUM

The Valkyria Titanium is an open-back, over-ear dynamic headphone from Spirit Torino of Turin, Italy, whose designs come from Andrea Ricci, a former sound engineer at the Turin opera house. It is produced as a limited edition of 99 units, designed and built in Italy, at EUR 12,000, with a US price of USD 10,995 and a Canadian price of CAD 19,999. Units are built to order and shipped from Turin, and each one comes in a solid walnut case inside a protective wooden box, and buyers can pick a black or brown headband.

Key specs that matter

Impedance is 64 ohm and sensitivity is 90 dB, with a maximum power handling of 4,000 mW. Frequency response is quoted as 18 Hz to 35 kHz, calibrated on isophonic curves. The headphone weighs 540 g, and the rated operating temperature is 0 to 50 degrees C. The cable is 2.2 m or 3 m long and ends in either a single 4-pin XLR plug or dual 3-pin XLR plugs, with rhodium-plated Furutech terminations.

Engineering and use context

Each earcup holds two Spirit drivers in what the company calls Twin Pulse Isobaric technology, so the headphone carries four drivers in total. With the isobaric arrangement, the two units of each cup move together and share a common coupling chamber, so the pair keeps tighter control over diaphragm motion than one driver alone. Spirit Torino adds its Revolver Drive system for diaphragm control, and the motor uses 40 neodymium magnets, ten per driver, arranged to concentrate the magnetic flux. The frame is Grade 5 titanium, chosen for its stiffness and more rigid than the frames of earlier Valkyria versions, and the gimbal is aluminium. The earpads combine leather and Alcantara with the Ventilation Pad System 4.0, and the padded leather headband adjusts on sliding pins. The cable has a fully symmetrical double-wired structure with 16 pure silver conductors braided around a coaxial OFC copper core in each channel, and all 36 conductors are soldered directly to the drivers with silver solder. The build uses 145 components in 24 different materials sourced from 13 Italian suppliers, and each headphone takes 6 hours to assemble followed by 100 hours of running-in.

Pairing

The moderate impedance and sensitivity call for a desktop headphone amplifier with solid voltage and current reserves, and the balanced XLR termination favours amplifiers with a 4-pin XLR or dual 3-pin XLR output.

Alternatives

The Spirit Torino Twin Pulse 1706 is an open circumaural headphone with the patented dual-driver isobaric system and a fixed silver cable.