JVC HA-FW10000 Review
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JVC HA-FW10000 Review: Why Craftsmanship Beats Complexity

ByRonald

Curious about what makes a pair of earphones truly special? Discover why the JVC HA-FW10000 stands out by focusing on craft over complexity.

When it comes to super high-quality earphones, most brands try to win by adding more and more tiny speakers inside. Some use hybrid arrays, others pack in five or seven balanced armatures, and a few even manage to integrate a specialized planar magnetic driver into the tiny space.

But JVC took a totally different approach with their top-of-the-line model, the HA-FW10000. Instead of just adding more parts, their engineers combined high-tech design with classic Japanese craftsmanship. They treated it like a work of art. Because of this unique philosophy, they created one of the most special and interesting pairs of earphones ever.

JVC’s Place in the Market

Think wood is just for furniture? JVC’s high-end headphones use it to create stunning sound, and their flagship model is still a benchmark years after its release.

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Until not too long ago, you didn’t see JVC headphones much around Asia, and I hardly ever thought about them. But it turns out, in places like Japan and Europe, JVC is a really big deal. They’re right up there competing with giants like Sony and Apple.

This wasn’t just because they make cheap headphones. They got there by having some serious tech skills. Their secret weapon? Wood. Yeah, you read that right. JVC’s best and most expensive headphones are built around special wood technology. They’ve tried other things (and even won some awards), but their most ambitious projects are all part of this “Wood Series.”

At the pinnacle of this series sits the JVC HA-FW10000. It came out in 2018 to celebrate 10 years of making wooden earphones, and it’s still the model that defines what JVC is all about.

Love for Nature: The Wood Cone

When you hear “wooden diaphragm,” you might think of those classic JVC stereo systems. They were great! But making a big wooden speaker for a home stereo is one thing. Shrinking that technology down to fit inside a tiny earpiece is a whole different challenge.

So, how did JVC do it?

They started with a normal plastic speaker cone and made it stronger by coating it with carbon fiber. Then, they glued on an incredibly thin slice of natural wood—so thin it’s like tissue paper. At this minuscule scale, the wood layer fundamentally alters the diaphragm’s behavior, making the sound more natural.

The Best of Both Worlds

  • Carbon Cones: Headphones with just carbon cones often sound super accurate and sharp, but can be a bit too clinical or cold.
  • Paper Cones: Headphones with paper cones sound warm and rich, but can miss some detail and have bass that’s a bit fuzzy.

JVC’s wood-and-carbon combo is the best of both. The carbon provides a stiff, solid base for clear and dynamic sound, while the wood layer adds a warm, natural, and rich quality. Because the wood is dense, it avoids the fuzziness of paper.

A Natural Resonance Killer
Wood isn’t a uniform material; it’s a mix of fibers with different densities. This natural variation helps it absorb unwanted vibrations across a wide range of frequencies. This prevents the sharp, peaky resonance that you often get with speakers made from a single material, like plastic or metal.

No Detail Overlooked
The engineering doesn’t stop there. The speaker is housed in a solid titanium chamber for purity, and the earpiece itself has a titanium inner frame with a beautiful Japanese maple wood outer shell, coated in traditional, durable Urushi lacquer.

Even the sound tuning uses natural materials. The inside of the earpiece is filled with silk fibers (to control the treble) and traditional Japanese paper (to fine-tune the bass). This lets engineers adjust the sound with incredible precision.

Finally, to control how air moves inside, the wall opposite the speaker is covered in tiny bumps. These dots break up sound waves that would otherwise bounce around and distort the music. They have an almost resonance-free character, unlike typical plastic, carbon, or metal cones.

Craftsmanship in Materials

The technology doesn’t stop with the driver.

  • Housing: A titanium inner frame paired with an outer shell made from Japanese maple, coated multiple times with Urushi lacquer for hardness and durability.
  • Acoustic damping: The cavities are filled with silk fibers (for treble control) and Awa Washi paper (for bass tuning). This traditional material mix allows precise frequency response shaping.
  • Airflow control: The inner wall opposite the diaphragm features micro-dots that diffuse stray reflections.

Every choice reflects the meticulous attention typical of High-End design: natural materials, acoustic control, and obsessive resonance management.

Design Inspired by Instruments

JVC tuned the sound of these earphones with a “less is more” High-End philosophy. They used a classic speaker design that mixes natural wood with high-tech carbon fiber. They also used craft materials like silk to fine-tune the sound, and they worked hard to eliminate any unwanted vibrations or echoes. This shows an incredible focus on getting every tiny detail right.

Since the JVC HA-FW10000 was created to commemorate the anniversary of JVC’s Wood series, its design is a tribute to a classic woodwind instrument: the clarinet. The hint is quite clever; it suggests that these earphones are like musical instruments themselves. They have a unique character, but their job is to play the music accurately and beautifully.

You can see this in the design, which looks like a clarinet’s key or valve. But what seems like just a cool style choice is actually functional. All that metal makes the earpieces heavier, which helps them resist vibrations that can distort the sound, much like high-end speakers use heavy cabinets.

Plus, the part where you plug in the cable has a special shock-absorbing insert inside. This cleverly isolates the connector from the main body, so any tiny vibrations from the moving cable are absorbed before they can reach your ear and affect the sound.

Listening Impressions – From Confusion to Addiction

The first listen is surprising. The sound feels odd, bass seems light, treble understated, mids slightly bright. It’s almost like hearing a 1960s recording through a vintage radio.

But within minutes, perception shifts. The bass reveals itself: tight, deep when needed, but never bloated. Treble extends with air and sparkle but avoids harshness. The midrange shines alive, detailed, and timbrally rich, presenting instruments with lifelike realism.

After five to ten tracks, the character becomes addictive. What initially felt strange transforms into something captivating and irreplaceable. The JVC HA-FW10000 makes any genre sound engaging, from classic rock to jazz, progressive, electronic, and even Japanese Taiko drums. Everything feels natural, immersive, and emotionally gripping.

This isn’t an earphone that flatters only certain recordings; it finds the magic in all of them.

Measurements

Three unusual things immediately stand out in the frequency response graph. The first is the absolute linearity of the response all the way up to 2 kHz. I’ve never seen such a flat graph of this length before. Typically, the frequency response begins to bend somewhere around 200–300 Hz, and for all headphones, it begins to noticeably drift at or before 1 kHz. This is pure physics—in these areas, the influence of the headphone housing, the ratio of the internal volume to the load chamber created by the listener’s ear, and so on all come into play.

Here, we see only a pitiful attempt by the frequency response to break down somewhere around 500–1,000 Hz, which the engineers successfully suppressed. Looking at this, one might assume that the boost at 3 kHz was implemented completely deliberately and intentionally.

Typically, they try to lower this frequency response zone to avoid a bright coloration in the midrange (exactly the effect I heard at the beginning), but if the developers were able to stretch a perfectly flat graph to 2 kHz, the task of dampening this hump was hardly insurmountable for them. 

The second unusual feature is the generous dose of high frequencies around 15 kHz. Dynamic drivers typically have little left there, or they exhibit several sharp peaks and dips, but here there’s a single, fairly broad peak. Furthermore, this peak shatters the notion that wood produces only a soft, pleasant midrange and no highs—here they are, a normal high frequency, on par with the midrange and low frequencies, that very “air” that was noticeable during listening.

I double-checked the third and most surprising phenomenon several times on the test bench, as it looked more like a technical error than a real measurement result. The graph below shows the raw measurement results for different types of headphones. The software smoothing function was not applied to these graphs, resulting in sawtooth distortion in the high-frequency range and partially in the low-frequency range.

I won’t name any specific headphone models—let’s just say they’re all mid-to-high-end and were chosen randomly from the general population. All in-ear and many full-size models present exactly this picture.

Smoothing the frequency response graph with a step of 1/24 octave is used to trace the average frequency response line, which is what we perceive – after all, the human ear ignores all these “saws”, generalizing and averaging the result.

Now take a closer look at the frequency response graphs for the JVC HA-FW10000 headphones at the very beginning of this section. I didn’t apply any smoothing to them. If you look closely at the right edge, you can see a slight jitter around 18-20 kHz, and there are some barely noticeable waves in the bass range. Everything else looks practically flawless. How is this possible? Either magic or the wood-carbon-plastic sandwich really isn’t prone to resonance. Not at all.

As for the harmonic distortion graph, the JVC HA-FW10000s try to convince us that they aren’t the product of magical forces or the creation of an alien civilization. With a very good distortion range of 0.25–0.1%, achievable with real headphones, in the 60–2000 Hz range, the graph dances cheerfully in the bass region, rising locally to 3–4%.

And the notorious frequency response hump at 3 kHz is accompanied by a cloned hump on the distortion graph—didn’t they manage it after all? So, at least based on the distortion, we can conclude that these headphones were made by humans—and they’re not 100% perfect. Only 98–99%.

Conclusion

The JVC HA-FW10000 is a seriously special pair of earphones; it’s a statement. Just look at the parts: the speakers are made from wood and carbon fiber, the housings are made from maple wood with a traditional Japanese lacquer finish, and even the cables are tuned with silk. Every single piece is made with incredible precision and a deep respect for old-school craft.

When you first listen, the sound might surprise you; it’s different. But give your ears a few minutes to adjust, and it becomes totally addictive. It plays every type of music perfectly, offering amazing clarity, super natural tones, and a kind of musical magic that’s hard to describe.

Even though it’s been out for years, the JVC HA-FW10000 is still the gold standard. It shows what’s possible when you mix cutting-edge tech, master-level craftsmanship, and real artistry into one amazing product.

Pros and Cons

Pros

  • Sound Quality
  • Design and Quality
  • Outstanding Resonance Control
  • Versatile Musicality
  • Detailed, Non-Fatiguing Sound

Cons

  • Unusual Initial Sound
  • Controlled Bass, Not for Bass-Heads
  • Price:
  • A bit heavier.

Key Features – JVC HA-FW10000

  • Wood Dome Driver – PET base with carbon coating and ultra-thin (50 µm) natural wood layer for resonance control and lifelike timbre.
  • Titanium & Maple Housing – Inner titanium frame for rigidity, outer Japanese maple shell coated with Urushi lacquer for durability and beauty.
  • Natural Acoustic Tuning – Chambers partially filled with silk fibers (treble tuning) and Awa Washi paper (bass tuning).
  • Airflow Control – Micro-dotted inner wall disperses stray reflections for cleaner sound.
  • Premium Cable Design – 4-core OFC with silk-thread damping, continuous conductors (no mid-path joints), and double insulation to minimize noise and vibration.
  • Isolated MMCX Connector – Shock-absorbing mount reduces vibration transfer from cable to housing.
  • Clarinet-Inspired Aesthetic – A nod to traditional woodwind instruments, emphasizing that these IEMs are also musical instruments in their own right.
  • Ultra-Wide Frequency Response – Extends from 6 Hz to 52 kHz, ready for Hi-Res audio.

JVC HA-FW10000 – Specifications

  • Driver Type: Dynamic
  • Driver Size: 11 mm Wood Dome diaphragm (PET base + carbon coating + 50 µm natural wood layer)
  • Housing Material: Titanium inner frame + Japanese maple outer shell with Urushi lacquer
  • Acoustic Tuning Materials: Silk fibers (treble control), Awa Washi paper (bass tuning)
  • Frequency Response: 6 Hz – 52,000 Hz
  • Impedance: 16 Ω
  • Sensitivity: 103 dB / 1 mW
  • Maximum Input Power: 200 mW (IEC)
  • Connector: Detachable MMCX
  • Cable:
    • 1.2 m 4-core oxygen-free copper (OFC)
    • Multi-strand structure with silk thread damping
    • Double insulation for mechanical and microphonic noise reduction
  • Plug: 3.5 mm stereo mini (gold-plated)
  • Weight: Approx. 14 g (without cable)
  • Accessories:
    • 5 sizes of Spiral Dot+ eartips (S/SM/M/ML/L)
    • Carrying case
    • Cable clip

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