A very special thanks to Tahsin Sevgel who graciously sent me his very first M6, more for feedback than a serious review. Other than audio kinship and long-distance friendship, we have no formal association with Tahsin Sevgel Audio Devices, and the opinions expressed in this review are entirely and independently my own.
Introduction
If you’ve read my review of Tahsin Sevgel Audio Device’s M3 Plenum, you’ll already know that Tahsin and I have some history. You’ll also know that describing his operation as a “boutique manufacturer” makes it sound considerably larger and more conventional than it really is.
Tahsin Sevgel Audio Devices is essentially Tahsin: engineer, designer, builder, tuner, problem-solver and, more often than not, customer-service department. His IEMs are conceived and painstakingly assembled by one man in Turkey, generally using techniques and components that range from the inspired to the mildly eccentric.
That eccentricity has always been part of the appeal. Long before six-, twelve- and eighteen-driver specifications became marketing shorthand for performance, Tahsin was asking how much music he could extract from one or two balanced armatures.
The original Warbler Prelude, his own M2 and later the M3 Plenum built their reputations around a very particular obsession: the midrange, and especially the human voice. With carefully selected drivers, rare or vintage wiring, unusually large capacitors and resistors, and acoustic structures you simply don’t see in mass-produced IEMs, he achieved results that seemed wildly disproportionate to the modest specifications.
They were never conventional products, though. Even when the sound was beautiful, there was usually something quirky, specialised or unapologetically vintage about it. The prices – often multiple thousands of dollars for one- and two-driver customs – made little sense if you judged them by driver count alone.
Their value lay in the materials, labour and, above all, the quality Tahsin managed to coax from seemingly ordinary off-the-shelf components.
After the M3, models such as the M4s and M5 moved in a somewhat more practical direction. Tahsin has a small but meaningful domestic market among performing and recording artists, musicians and sound engineers, and those products were built primarily for their needs: ample headroom, dependable clarity and more accessible pricing. They were serious working tools, but they were not necessarily another full-scale assault on the increasingly extravagant high-end audiophile market.
And so, when Tahsin contacted me a few months ago to say he had put something new together and wanted me to hear it, I wasn’t expecting a revolution. An interesting experiment? Certainly. Something handmade, unusual and unmistakably his? Almost guaranteed.
What I eventually got was the best-sounding custom IEM I have personally used.
Continue to lightning in a bottle…
