Shinola's Canfield Pro In-Ear Monitors offer an accurate mix with rich lows and clear, but not sculpted, highs.
They're also quite expensive, at $495, and it's hard to see where the "pro" part of the name comes into play—these are more like extremely luxurious earphones for style-conscious music lovers.
Still, the audio quality is indeed excellent and the design is top-notch, making the Canfield Pro In-Ear Monitors a real treat for anyone with deep-enough pockets.
Design
Available in black or silver models, the Canfield Pro In-Ear Monitors pull off a rare feat: They are eye-catching earphones.
There's not much real estate to work with on a typical in-ear pair, but Shinola designed a rounded square earpiece that looks quite striking—both the black and silver models have shiny side panels and brushed outer panels featuring the company's super-cool, understated lightning bolt logo.
Another design element Shinola gets right is that the cable is detachable.
It makes the $495 price tag slightly easier to stomach, as the earpieces aren't hardwired to a cable that might snap, fray, or malfunction at some point in the future (as is typical for all wired earphones).
When you only need to replace a cable, it saves you some money in the long run.
The cabling loops up, over, and behind the ear for a secure, comfortable fit, and Shinola includes six pairs of eartips in a variety of sizes and materials, including silicone and foam.
The earphones also ship with a zip-up protective case, with a black canvas, hard-shell exterior.
An inline remote control is located around mid-torso and has three buttons—a central multi-function that controls playback, call management, voice assistance, and track navigation; and two outer buttons for volume up and down.
The inline microphone is located along the right cable, close to chin level.
We love to see cables that separate the mic and remote, allowing for both better intelligibility from the mic and easier control of the remote.
The mic is solid.
Using the Voice Memos app on an iPhone 6s, we could understand every word we recorded clearly.
The recordings have a crisp quality, with a nice fullness so that things never sound thin or brittle.
Shinola claims the earphones are designed for professionals to use onstage, and while that may be the intent, most of the in-ear monitors I see pro musicians wear are custom-molded.
Perhaps some will be swayed by Shinola's design, but the Canfield Pro In-Ear Monitors seem far more likely to be worn by those who want stylish earphones that deliver quality audio than specifically for musicians looking for professional equipment.
Performance
Shinola developed and acoustically tuned the earphones with its partners at Campfire Audio.
Internally, each monitor employs two balanced armature drivers—a tweeter and a woofer—that deliver a frequency range of 10Hz-20kHz and an impedance of 37 Ohms.
On tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife's "Silent Shout," the Canfield Pro In-Ear Monitors deliver solid deep bass response without going overboard—this is an accurate sound signature that reproduces serious bass depth when it's in the mix, but doesn't exaggerate when it's not.
At top, ridiculously unwise volume levels, the lows do indeed distort, but no one should be listening at anything approaching top volume here, as it's really quite loud.
At about 75 percent, the volume is still powerfully loud, and the earphones deliver bass depth cleanly.
Bill Callahan's "Drover," a track with far less deep bass in the mix, gives us a better sense of the overall sound signature.
The drums on this track are delivered with some solid thump, but nothing approaching the sub-bass thunder we often hear from other manufacturers.
Here, the focus is on clarity and accuracy.
Callahan's baritone vocals are delivered with a rich low-mid presence that is balanced out with some crisp high-mids.
The guitar strums and higher register percussive hits have a solid brightness, but generally speaking, this sound signature feels more focused on the mids and low-mids.
While some listeners might want a little more bass push or a little more crisp treble presence, this is an accurate sound signature, with clarity prized over sculpting and boosting.
On Jay-Z and Kanye West's "No Church in the Wild," the kick drum loop gets just enough high-mid presence to allow its attack the sharpness it needs to cut through the layers of the mix, but typically we hear this loop receive more high-mid presence than it does here.
The sub-bass synth hits that punctuate the beat are delivered with reasonable power, but nothing approaching what many bass-forward, boosted earphones will conjure.
The vocals are delivered with excellent clarity—there's never any hint of added sibilance.
Orchestral tracks, like the opening scene from John Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary, allow the Canfield Pro In-Ear Monitors to shine.
The lower register instrumentation is rich and clear, providing the ideal anchor for the crisp presence of the higher register brass, strings, and vocals.
Things sound a bit brighter and crisper on tracks like this, mostly because the tracks themselves tend to be recorded and mixed in a manner that favors higher frequencies—or at least doesn't exaggerate lower frequencies.
For classical and jazz, the earphones deliver a truly balanced, beautiful response.
Conclusions
The Shinola Canfield Pro In-Ear Monitors offer accurate, clear audio—the type of performance that will indeed appeal to professionals, if not necessarily for professional purposes.
The design is also attractive, and the detachable cable adds value.
They earphones are expensive at $500, but if the look appeals to you, it's unlikely they'll disappoint.
For a similar price, we can also highly recommend the pro-style in-ear Ultimate Ears UE 5 Pro, the nearly flat response Westone W10, and for reference-style accuracy, the industry standard Etymotic ER4 XR.
If it's excellent audio at a lower price that you're after, consider the Bowers & Wilkins C5 Series 2.
