On the subject of sound quality changes…
Until you hear an Oladra, you do not realise that the K Series has a sense of strain and constriction. The Oladra diminishes that by a very large margin. The music flows more freely and thereby the music communicates significantly more. If you are a music lover, this is incredibly important, and it directly addresses an area that has been a major weakness of digital audio. Let’s call that change more ‘ease’.
The other notable difference is that the Oladra reveals significantly more detail, particularly in the high treble and the deep bass, so it simply communicates more of everything in a way that makes it more engaging than a K50. The detail in the deep bass is particularly impactful on musical enjoyment. Let’s call that more ‘detail’.
The big difference in sound quality from upgrading the K50 is that is gets the kind of ‘ease’ that the original Oladra gets. This transforms the K50. It becomes a whole new experience.
But, the upgraded K50 does NOT get the level of ‘detail’ that the original Oladra gets. It does get noticeably more ‘detail’ than before, and the detail is presented in a more natural way. By that I mean that the greater detail is not because anything is hyped, it is just there.
The improvements for the K40, K41, K30, K22 and K21 are similar to the improvements for the K50. But it really does make the K22 and K21 a realistic option for very good high-end audio systems. All the things you want are buttoned off a little compared to the K50, but there is no glaring fault. As long as you can put up with the things impacted by low power, these two are now a huge bargain.
The improvements for the Oladra are in both ‘ease’ and ‘detail’, with the increase in ‘ease’ being the more significant. The K Series improves much more than the Oladra does, but ‘diminishing returns’ is what you tend to get when pushing the envelope.