Review: JH Audio Lola – Unorthodox Hybrid!

Disclaimer: Jerry Harvey Audio supplied the review sample of Lola free of charge. It is a custom built IEM and will stay in my inventory for all relevant future reviews as a reference model. JH Audio is not a side advertiser. Many thanks for the opportunity and generosity.

About JH Audio

As we have learned from the interview with Jerry Harvey just a little while ago, JH Audio was founded 2008. But Jerry has been the founder and owner of Ultimate Ears and has designed some of their most reputable products, including the Triple.Fi. If you haven’t read the interview yet, you can do it here. JH Audio is a CIEM company seated in Orlando and mostly works with professional musicians, such as Slash, Will Smith and many more very famous groups and artists. That alone speaks books for Jerry and his team. They of course also offer their lineup for the regular folk around. Models like Layla or Roxanne have been praised by a big number of audiophiles around the globe. JH Audio is one of the brands that also pushes a lot of own technologies and patents them, like FreqPhase or D.O.M.E., to further enhance their performance and give the best possible sound-reproduction to their customers.

Here’s a video of Jerry explaining his FreqPhase technology and what it brings for the consumer:

About Lola

Jerry’s main focus in the past has been multi-BA constructions with driver counts up to twelve armatures per side. With Lola he took a different approach though, JH went the hybrid road, a little different than his competition though. Usually a dynamic driver is used for bass frequencies because of their more natural way of delivering it. When designing Lola Jerry found that the drivers he used had their sweet-spot in the mids, so he placed two 4.9 mm dynamic drivers facing each other in a D.O.M.E. enclosure. Together with six additional balanced armature drivers, two for bass and four for high frequencies, giving Lola a total driver constellation of eight drivers.

Ever since I saw the announcement of Lola I was intrigued by the design as I myself also consider the mids to be the best part of a dynamic driver and since I like the bass of BAs more. Just like most of JH’s products, Lola comes with a variable bass attenuation, which enables you to set the bass response below 200 Hertz between 0 +/- 15 decibel.

Almost all Jerry Harvey IEMs come with a four-pin detachable cable. The connectors on each side can be screwed on or off, which for me personally feels more secure than any other way. Each side can only be connected in a specific way, so you will not end up with wrong connected phases. This connection made it impossible for me to try out different cables though, because all my aftermarket cables are of 2-pin style, simply because all my other C/IEMs (except for the Campfire’s) have this connector. The supplied eight-wire Moon Audio cable is of high quality already, so there’s no pain in not cable-rolling for this review.

Lola features a three-bore design with metal bores, on the inside there are tubes in different lengths to ensure a phase corrected playback of all frequencies. On the technical specifications side of Lola we can see that it has an impedance of 16 ohms and its sensitivity is rated at 105 dB per Milliwatt.

It continues on page 2!