Introduction

Nectar Sound Research, LLC is a 1-man entity that I knew almost nothing about until very recently, and am glad to have changed that for the better. Better known simply as Nectar Sound or even Nectar, this is almost a business case study in the making as to what happens when an electrical engineer goes down the audio rabbit hole and realizes there is potential to do more than what is out there. What if I told you that said person had not even listened to any other headphones of the same category until he made his own beginning in 2019? Something like this would be unheard of when it came to more typical dynamic driver headphones or even planar magnetic sets, and yet the wacky world of e-stats is full of such stories. Take the Headamp Blue Hawaii Special Edition featured in our first electrostatic headphones review, for example, which itself was a love project from a single person that resulted in a company with multiple employees and a dedicated workspace now. Would Nectar Sound be following this same pathway of success?


To do this, I approached the person behind the outfit and expressed my interest in reviewing the product that made him famous in the smaller e-stat world—the Nectar HiveX. You can see how the HiveX in its current form came about thanks to these refreshingly honest videos on a personal YouTube channel, whereby the prototypes themselves were of interest to customers after a single listening session. You will also see him build, and share plans for amplifiers, and this thought process of helping the community translates over also to the Nectar Sound website, wherein you will see helpful notes about amplifiers that are currently still the entry barrier for e-stat headphones. This full transparency was obvious in his detailed emails to me, wherein I learned a lot about how the HiveX came about in its current iteration following the Nectar Pollinator and Hive. I will also note here that a dedicated review sample is not a trivial cost to cover for a fledgling 1-person outfit and so I must thank Nectar Sound for helping make this happen. This is a product that many readers have been requesting coverage for—more so than I can remember for anything else since I started reviewing audio gear—so let's not waste further time and get going on the next page!