Performance
If sound is truly all you care about, the Atrio earphones are one of the best deals in town. Low-frequency sounds were rich and astoundingly deep. The Atrio earphones were not as bright as the Shure SE series or Etymotic ER, but users who find some earphones to be a little too crisp on the high end might really enjoy the deeper, warmer sound of the Future Sonics Atrio series. Rock, electronic, and hip-hop music really resulted in a night-and-day difference with the Atrio's vastly deeper earphone driver. Jazz also stood up well, with the Atrio restoring the low, wooden thud character to upright bass and shaving some of the brittleness from horns. Classical and live recordings did feel muted and less open-sounding on the Atrio earphones when compared against the Shure SE310 and SE420.
Future Sonics' Atrio series of earphones have really set new expectations for us when we consider how low frequencies are represented in earphone performance. If they didn't look so tragically awful, I imagine companies like Shure and Ultimate Ears would be nervous.
