I wrote a somewhat controversial article read by 4 people called “a sojourn through middle class iems”. There I discussed a series of Noble and Westone iems being:
1. Noble 5/Dulce Bass;
2. Westone UmPro50;
3. Noble 6;
4. Westone W60;
5. Noble Savant.
It was a freewheeling article discussing shilling as a minor theme, but generally just a series of iems that I owned and enjoyed, and why that was so. I also vented pretty heavily on what I considered and still consider to be bad design. No example of this was more starkly attacked then when I reached the topic of the W60, which I’ve largely cut and pasted below.
Looking below I did a disservice by perhaps failing to describe what I really love about this iem. And I DO REALLY LOVE THIS IEM. I gave it a 4 star even while hating the plastic plates so much, this is nearly a 1000 word essay on terrible plate design and contemptuous business practice... clearly I still think that they must sound awfully good.
On that note I will commence...
Let’s begin this gloriously sounding W60… by getting stuck into their biggest failure.
Specifically those Stupid. Plastic. Plates.
I am a Westone fan but will a greater one, when their iems adopt metal shelled monitors & their stems are being made of thicker, sterner stuff. And when their "decorative plates” are banished to the dustbin of shameful iem ideas to ever sprout from this proud company.
As most appreciate, the iem segment has evolved like crazy like it’s been on fire. Innovations are spinning out all over the place. Noble is leading the cosmetic race, JH Audio surprising us with Lola innovative driver and BA combinations, Shure with electrostatic and Audeze using planar magnetic technology, Adel technology shaking up a couple of manufacturer’s Balanced Armature offerings and Campfire Audio and others throwing new brilliant organic single drivers into the mix… there’s lots happening and for an iem fan, every 3 months is Christmas… (Okay, if we could afford them or if Santa Claus is an audiophile… which he might be. He’s probably not hearing my cries on account of a pair of Empire Zeus XR ADEL jammed in his big pink ears.)
Unfortunately Westone is one of the very few companies (with Shure being the other) that are saying “Quick, let’s make more fragile plastic iem pieces and charge people $1000s of dollars!” (Hi, W80 & Shure KSE1500.)
Businesses needs to keep abreast of their competition. Anyone can choose a niche and go about owning it, as a strategy. It’s normally not a bad idea. Business 101. But I don’t see the “$1000 dollar plastic fragile iem” as a niche. Rather, it's an evolutionary obsolete sub-niche of the expensive iem general category.
This means Shure and Westone need to adapt or die. At the moment the focus is Westone. Shure at least as far back as 2011 realised that their iems needed to be stronger as demonstrated in their still beautiful se846.
It’s possible that the iem category has grown as a whole by so much that Westone and Shure’s iem divisions aren’t sufficiently troubled to adequately respond. They’re generally out of date items keep selling year on year, so they think “what’s the problem?”.
I think if iems were all they sold, then their attitude would be very different.
Neither brands has grabbed much of our Headfi communities’ interest in the past few years. This is frankly due to their unexciting efforts and lack of engagement with the Headfi community. Our community drives global trends in iems and cans… that’s a sociological fact. Read Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point fellas? Too bad.
So ignore us at your peril, but we are legion.
When you drop $100s and yes, $1000s on a single iem, and the face plate feels like a cheap gimmick… It causes one to ponder the quality of their expensive engineering in the first place… (If they can’t fix this, what other problems have been pasted over and ignored for years????)
Westone should've stopped making the W faceplates years ago… In other words, straight after the first crack appeared. (So, one (1) week after the 1st batch… five (5) years ago.)
But… having expressed a perhaps uncomfortable quantity of enough rage, the uncomfortable fact that I’m still a Westone fan. Because, I find that they're consistently tuned for angels. Sound still matters.
Treble - almost shockingly smoooooooth baby. These are the anti-fatigue headphones. The benefit (and there’s only one) of having light plastic shells is they sit in your ears like your skin, and then they’re tuned such that they never fatigue. In it’s own way, it’s perfect.
Mids - nice mids. Warm, smooth again. Think about all the good things about the Shure se535s, and the famed Shure mids signature generally… and then sculpt them a bit, so that there’s better detail, depth, finesse… Beautiful mids.
Bass - plenty of bass. It could be argued that the bass is a bit “boomy”, a teensy bit of echo that would suggest a lot of 80s rock would sound excessively 80s (if that makes sense) on these… But your ears adjust. You don’t feel short changed on the bass, but it lacks the control and force of the Westone UmPro50. I think the W60 holds itself very well against the Noble N5/Dulce… which says a lot about how well this bass is presented, given Noble markets that model as “sweet bass”… English for the Latin Dulce Bass.
Closing comments. The W60 gave an underwhelming first impression when it appeared, even to it’s Westone fans who were waiting patiently for something special. I think there are a couple reasons for this disappointment for this fantastic sounding iem. Fans were like me, were plain annoyed that Westone weren’t doing something about making their (then) new flagship with stronger specs.
Then the W60 wasn’t initially seen as a significant leap over the superb W40… Technically it’s not. Third, it’s price was high given that plastic form bugging everyone and haunting the brand to this day with it’s W80… No new technology other than slapping another BA into the admittedly impressive tight form.
However I’ve come to think the subtle beauty of these grow on you in a way after a couple of weeks that’s often the reverse of that initial newbie enthusiasm where your brain goes “wow, these are the best things I’ve ever heard… followed a day later by a bit of a “whatever” response. The hidden irritations reveal themselves. The treble turns out sibilant on a few tracks. Issues arise that you first ignored. None of that happens here. The build quality is irritating to begin with, and a week later when you’ve cracked your first plastic plate, it’s unbelievably irritating. But by then the sound is fantastic and you’re looking for alternatives. Thankfully a bright company called OSKSR has produced a beautiful metal plates that solves the problem. $35 bucks and the plates are a non-event… hell, they even look cool.
1. Noble 5/Dulce Bass;
2. Westone UmPro50;
3. Noble 6;
4. Westone W60;
5. Noble Savant.
It was a freewheeling article discussing shilling as a minor theme, but generally just a series of iems that I owned and enjoyed, and why that was so. I also vented pretty heavily on what I considered and still consider to be bad design. No example of this was more starkly attacked then when I reached the topic of the W60, which I’ve largely cut and pasted below.
Looking below I did a disservice by perhaps failing to describe what I really love about this iem. And I DO REALLY LOVE THIS IEM. I gave it a 4 star even while hating the plastic plates so much, this is nearly a 1000 word essay on terrible plate design and contemptuous business practice... clearly I still think that they must sound awfully good.
On that note I will commence...
Let’s begin this gloriously sounding W60… by getting stuck into their biggest failure.
Specifically those Stupid. Plastic. Plates.
I am a Westone fan but will a greater one, when their iems adopt metal shelled monitors & their stems are being made of thicker, sterner stuff. And when their "decorative plates” are banished to the dustbin of shameful iem ideas to ever sprout from this proud company.
As most appreciate, the iem segment has evolved like crazy like it’s been on fire. Innovations are spinning out all over the place. Noble is leading the cosmetic race, JH Audio surprising us with Lola innovative driver and BA combinations, Shure with electrostatic and Audeze using planar magnetic technology, Adel technology shaking up a couple of manufacturer’s Balanced Armature offerings and Campfire Audio and others throwing new brilliant organic single drivers into the mix… there’s lots happening and for an iem fan, every 3 months is Christmas… (Okay, if we could afford them or if Santa Claus is an audiophile… which he might be. He’s probably not hearing my cries on account of a pair of Empire Zeus XR ADEL jammed in his big pink ears.)
Unfortunately Westone is one of the very few companies (with Shure being the other) that are saying “Quick, let’s make more fragile plastic iem pieces and charge people $1000s of dollars!” (Hi, W80 & Shure KSE1500.)
Businesses needs to keep abreast of their competition. Anyone can choose a niche and go about owning it, as a strategy. It’s normally not a bad idea. Business 101. But I don’t see the “$1000 dollar plastic fragile iem” as a niche. Rather, it's an evolutionary obsolete sub-niche of the expensive iem general category.
This means Shure and Westone need to adapt or die. At the moment the focus is Westone. Shure at least as far back as 2011 realised that their iems needed to be stronger as demonstrated in their still beautiful se846.
It’s possible that the iem category has grown as a whole by so much that Westone and Shure’s iem divisions aren’t sufficiently troubled to adequately respond. They’re generally out of date items keep selling year on year, so they think “what’s the problem?”.
I think if iems were all they sold, then their attitude would be very different.
Neither brands has grabbed much of our Headfi communities’ interest in the past few years. This is frankly due to their unexciting efforts and lack of engagement with the Headfi community. Our community drives global trends in iems and cans… that’s a sociological fact. Read Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point fellas? Too bad.
So ignore us at your peril, but we are legion.
- The point of this rant is to say specifically to Westone that persisting with a crack-prone design on the W series is economic suicide.
- Adding a lean competitor who has illustrated the ability to parlay a cable business (ALO to Campfire Audio) into illustrating the ingenuity and frankly enthusiasm to produce a range of highly applauded, differently designed iems... and then adopting that same competitor's expensive cable to make your new flagship (the W80) a more palatable offering, is waving the flag of surrender.
- And then do all the above, and not even both to fix the most obvious and highly complained of flaw… FLIMSY PLASTIC... do I need to say it again?
- Plastic. Body.
- Thin reeds.
- Crack prone decorative plates… The likes of will entertain children during their Lego phases. Your average audiophile - not so much.
When you drop $100s and yes, $1000s on a single iem, and the face plate feels like a cheap gimmick… It causes one to ponder the quality of their expensive engineering in the first place… (If they can’t fix this, what other problems have been pasted over and ignored for years????)
Westone should've stopped making the W faceplates years ago… In other words, straight after the first crack appeared. (So, one (1) week after the 1st batch… five (5) years ago.)
But… having expressed a perhaps uncomfortable quantity of enough rage, the uncomfortable fact that I’m still a Westone fan. Because, I find that they're consistently tuned for angels. Sound still matters.
Treble - almost shockingly smoooooooth baby. These are the anti-fatigue headphones. The benefit (and there’s only one) of having light plastic shells is they sit in your ears like your skin, and then they’re tuned such that they never fatigue. In it’s own way, it’s perfect.
Mids - nice mids. Warm, smooth again. Think about all the good things about the Shure se535s, and the famed Shure mids signature generally… and then sculpt them a bit, so that there’s better detail, depth, finesse… Beautiful mids.
Bass - plenty of bass. It could be argued that the bass is a bit “boomy”, a teensy bit of echo that would suggest a lot of 80s rock would sound excessively 80s (if that makes sense) on these… But your ears adjust. You don’t feel short changed on the bass, but it lacks the control and force of the Westone UmPro50. I think the W60 holds itself very well against the Noble N5/Dulce… which says a lot about how well this bass is presented, given Noble markets that model as “sweet bass”… English for the Latin Dulce Bass.
Closing comments. The W60 gave an underwhelming first impression when it appeared, even to it’s Westone fans who were waiting patiently for something special. I think there are a couple reasons for this disappointment for this fantastic sounding iem. Fans were like me, were plain annoyed that Westone weren’t doing something about making their (then) new flagship with stronger specs.
Then the W60 wasn’t initially seen as a significant leap over the superb W40… Technically it’s not. Third, it’s price was high given that plastic form bugging everyone and haunting the brand to this day with it’s W80… No new technology other than slapping another BA into the admittedly impressive tight form.
However I’ve come to think the subtle beauty of these grow on you in a way after a couple of weeks that’s often the reverse of that initial newbie enthusiasm where your brain goes “wow, these are the best things I’ve ever heard… followed a day later by a bit of a “whatever” response. The hidden irritations reveal themselves. The treble turns out sibilant on a few tracks. Issues arise that you first ignored. None of that happens here. The build quality is irritating to begin with, and a week later when you’ve cracked your first plastic plate, it’s unbelievably irritating. But by then the sound is fantastic and you’re looking for alternatives. Thankfully a bright company called OSKSR has produced a beautiful metal plates that solves the problem. $35 bucks and the plates are a non-event… hell, they even look cool.