These luxury in-ears could be the IEMs of your dreams

Noble Audio's flagship wired IEMs, the Chronicle, were initially released only as a very limited edition to celebrate the firm's 10th anniversary. But now there's a new version that's in full production and available to everyone – although given their price tag, don't expect to see too many pairs in the wild.

Let's get that price tag out of the way first. The Noble Audio Kronos are £4,100 / $4,500 / €4,750 (about AU$8,490), which is equivalent to 16 pairs of our current best earbuds pick from Technics. But when you see the specs it's clear that the Noble Audio IEMs are in a completely different league, and designed for a very different kind of customer. Noble says they're "designed to satisfy audiophiles, collectors and enthusiasts alike".

Noble Audio Kronos IEMs: key features

The Noble Audio Kronos are hand-assembled and have the same driver configuration and tuning as the firm's highly rated Chronicle. They also have the same Titanium Damascus material for their faceplate and the rest of the unit is Grade 2 Titanium.

As you can see from the photos they're very jewel-like in their design, but what you can't see is the huge number of drivers inside each IEM.

The drivers here are a 9-driver hybrid arrangement consisting of:

• 1 × 7 mm dynamic driver (bass)
• 1 × 10 mm dynamic driver (sub-bass)
• 1 × dual‑membrane bone conductor driver (tactile depth and resonance)
• 2 × Knowles balanced armatures (mid frequencies)
• 2 × Knowles balanced armatures (high frequencies)
• 2 × Sonion electrostatic drivers (ultra-high frequencies)

The drivers are integrated via a 6-way crossover that Noble says delivers a "seamless, immersive soundstage", and with an impedance below 35 ohms they can be driven by a huge range of hardware including smartphones as well as more elite hi-fi equipment.