Review Punch Audio Portazo IEM

Punch Audio Portazo: A Bass Powerhouse?

OK, here we go. We select the most bass-heavy tracks from our collection to experience how low these Portazos can go. Of course, I could have mentioned Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble” here, or a heavy EDM track like “The Dragonhawks” by Liquid Stranger & Space Jesus. We played these for a while, but I get much more information about the performance of, in this case, an in-ear monitor when I play music that I am more familiar with.

For example, bassist Ben Williams, the opening track “Black Villain Music” from the album “Coming Of Age”. It starts with a Fender Rhodes, then the double bass comes in, followed by the rest of the band. This track contains a lot of what I call “undertones”: different layers of bass reproduction. The Rhodes piano, for example, should have a deep low end that forms the foundation for the rest of the vibraphone-like sound. The double bass is very difficult to amplify and record properly. Often it sounds too woolly in the low end and too thin in the high end. In short, in this song we can appreciate the bass qualities much more subtly.

We would not really call the Punch Audio Portazo a bass powerhouse. The lower registers are reproduced just as we hear them on neutral headphones and in-ears. Not overpowering, in the right proportions. The high frequencies are fast and accurate, as we expect from planars. We don’t hear any excessive high frequencies here either.

Let’s stay with jazz for a moment, with Roy Hargrove. We play “Strasbourg St Denis” with another prominent double bass, a grand piano and Hargrove’s trumpet. Here we notice again how decisive the eartips are and the position in which they are placed in the ear. We notice that turning them in too deeply leads to a closed-in feeling and bass reproduction that is far too heavy. Turning them back a little helps enormously. It is a bit like a test in speaker placement, but in the ear canal.

Of course, “Giorgio by Moroder” by Daft Punk is a must. It is a great track for testing the durability of the sound at high complexity. And at the end of the track, the Moog synthesiser goes down to the very lowest; 0.1 Hz, far beyond the human audible limit of 20 Hz. The Portazos keep it up for quite a long time.

Midrange

For the midrange, we turn to Jennifer Warnes’ “The Well”. This album was recorded by Bernie Grundman and mastered by George Massenburg, two giants in the studio world. Warnes’ voice is recorded very close up, so we hear everything: breathing, the rhythmic beats of the band, a balanced piano recording.

The midrange is slightly less prominent than the low and high frequencies in the Punch Audio Portazo, but we do not find this (quite) bothersome. Strings and woodwinds benefit from this in particular, which we also notice when playing classical music. Zelenka’s Trio Sonatas, played by a sextet including oboist Heinz Holliger. The texture of the oboe comes through beautifully and the bassoon (which can go very low) does not dominate. The ensemble sounds wonderfully homogeneous and swinging.