A little about me...
I'm 52 and live in the UK. I've been into audio since my teens. I built my first stereo amp when I was 16, and I know one end of a soldering iron from the other, and mostly I remember to pick it up at the end the lead comes out of... My last project was upgrading the capacitors and resistors in my Quad 33 pre-amp. I started playing the cello when I was about 8 or 9, gave it up when I was about 15, but missed the feel and sound of playing an instrument, and so bought and taught myself to play the mandolin when I was 18 and supposedly studying for my exams. Music has been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. Playing an instrument helps remind me what real, live instruments can sound like, and what the experience of music is about.
 
My musical tastes are eclectic, from classical (Bach on period instruments, Tallis and Victoria renaissance choral, Vaughan Williams and Holst full orchestral) through all kinds of folk and rock (Dylan, Robert Plant, Nick Cave, Richard Hawley, Jackie Leven) and out the other end to dance and techno and world-beats (Daft Punk, Orbital, Afro Celt Sound System). For me, good audio equipment is all about it getting out of the way and letting me listen to the music.
 
I first became aware of the Hoomia H8 earphones from browsing this very site, and there didn't seem to be a great deal of information about them available – other than the great review by BloodyPenguin here on Head-Fi, which certainly piqued my interest. I already have some of the Chinese Xiaomi Hybrid-driver earphones, which I enjoy greatly, and I felt the Hoomias (from Taiwan) with a similar hybrid driver configuration, would be an interesting and enjoyable comparison. I received the review pair direct from Hoomia in exchange for writing an open and honest review.
 
My headphone listening varies: at home I have a couple of full-size rigs – Arcam and Cambridge Audio CD players driving a Schiit Magni, a Pro-ject Headbox S, a Mr Nixie Russian valve (tube) hybrid amp, and a Project Starlight valve hybrid amp. My full-size headphones are Sennheiser HD598 and Audio Technica ATH-M50x. However, I'll also listen to a Sony MZ-RH1 Hi-MD recorder and an xDuoo X3 DAP at home and at work using a range of IEMs including Musical Fidelity EB33, Sennheiser CX880, Xiaomi Hybrid, and Xiaomi Piston 3. Most of my IEM listening is either at work (office) or late at night when the house is quiet.
 
First Impressions
 
The Hoomia H8 earphones come in a substantial wooden box with a cut foam insert and a dense rubber  cable winder/storage bobbin. It's certainly quite up-scale packaging and you get the impression that Hoomia are pitching the H8s at a more high-end market than a lot of their other earphone production. The build of the phones also speaks of solidity and quality with the 3.5mm plug and the Y-splitter covered in a rich, brown-anodized sleeving, which tones very nicely with the dark brown, flat and sturdy cable (which is also very tangle-resistant). The earphones themselves are in either bare (or clear anodized – can't tell which) aluminium and are very nicely finished with a clean, engineered, "turned" appearance with laser-etched writing.  Each earpiece houses a dynamic driver (for bass and lower-mids) and a balanced armature driver (for upper-mids and treble).  The only slight let-down is the microphone assembly, which is made of black plastic; it works perfectly, but it looks a little "ordinary" compared with the rest of the product which is rather more "premium" as a whole. The H8s come with medium silicone rubber eartips fitted and with small and large spare eartips in the box, and a pair of foam eartips. I did all my listening with the medium silicone tips – they were comfortable and provided good sealing and isolation.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
The cables emerge straight out of the aluminium sphere of each earpiece without any strain relief, and whilst this feels pretty solid, I do wonder a little as to whether it might slightly shorten the life-expectancy of the cables at this point – especially as you have to use the cable a little as a "lever" to help with inserting and removing each earpiece from your earlobe. I'd feel a little happier if there were some kind of moulded strain relief around the cables at this point. Time will tell.
 

 

 

 

 

 
Listening
 
I generally give earphones about 48 hours or so burn-in. I'm not 100% convinced of the value of burning-in headphones – I think I've noticed some change/improvement in some cases, but I wouldn't bet my house on it. That said, I wouldn't call myself a sceptic either...
 
In this case, however, I plugged the H8s straight into my Windows Phone Nokia Lumia 1020 – because I wanted to test the function of the MusIC button (Windows Phone tends to be the poor relation when it comes to these things, which seem to be mainly designed primarily around Android functionality, and maybe Apple iOS). As it turns out, it works fine on my Lumia 1020; a single press pauses or re-starts the playback, a quick double-press skips one track forward, and a quick triple-press skips back to the start of the track (and a double-triple-press skips you back to the previous track). I hadn't intended to listen for long from my phone, but I found myself really caught up in the music – I was listening to the album Sen by Sevara Nazarkhan as a variable bit-rate WMA file and I was impressed by the clarity and spaciousness of the music, and the firm, almost tactile quality of the bass. I ended up listening for about an hour without intending to. A good start – coming from my phone and a fairly compressed file at that. I then plugged the phones into a portable CD played and gave them 48 hours of relatively loud music with a good spread of dynamic and frequency range (Midival Punditz – as it turned out; the CD was handy). I always feel a bit impatient when I'm burning-in 'phones – I want to have a bit of a listen, but by inner purist urges restraint until a couple of days have passed.
 
I have since spent about a week and a half listening to these phones with a wide range of music and I'm really starting to get a feel for them now. My main listening source has been my xDuoo X3 DAP, which continues to impress with it's musicality and openness. It always seems a bit artificial to break the sound down into bass-mid-treble, because that's not how I hear (or listen), but for the sake of making some sense of my impressions, I'll do so anyway...
 
Bass – The first thing which struck me with the H8s was their bass presence, and extended listening has borne this out. The bass is plentiful, but very well controlled and articulate. There is clear definition in the bass and it reaches down very low. My standout track for bass extension is Glistening Fields from Iarla O'Lionaird's Foxlight album – the bass goes so low it becomes a tangible presence if you're listening on speakers with a quality, hi-fi sub-woofer. The H8s reproduce that effect remarkably well – given that they can only work on the ears and not on the chest cavity as well!  It's also fair to say that the bass doesn't dominate or obscure the rest of the music – in dense orchestral passages it's still possible to hear into the heart of things and hear what's going on. I think that this is partly due to the quality of the mid-range...
 
Mids – Just out of curiosity, I like to listen to a 20Hz – 20kHz sweep through new headphones, just to see how they respond. Nope, it's NOT scientific, but in the past it has picked out some notable resonances in some phones which really ought to know better... With the Hoomias I thought I picked up a slight emphasis in the mid-range – nothing major – just a mild hump in the response. Whatever, listening to real music did reveal a corresponding clarity of detail and focus, particularly with vocals and some orchestral music. It's easy to hear through the complex textures of some of Wagner's or Sibelius's orchestral writing – and very rewarding it was. Likewise with Monteverdi's Vespers (Andrew Parrott's 1984 EMI recording) – the vocal lines are consistently clear, detailed and well-separated, with the other instruments existing in the same acoustic. The H8s appear to have been designed to get the best out of this kind of music. Where I felt they did slightly less well, was with some electronic-based music (Daft-Punk, for example), where the super-defined mid-range could feel a little fatiguing after a while, and I found myself turning the volume down, because it all felt a little "too loud". The Xiaomi Hybrids, with their slightly softened mid-range response, are a little more relaxing for listening to that kind of music for any length of time. Neither is right or wrong – it's about taste, and having choices.
 
Treble – One of the things I'm finding with hybrid-driver designs like the Hoomia H8s and the Xiaomi Hybrids is the sweetness and clarity of the treble response delivered by the balanced-armature unit housed in each earphone. Granted, I'm a 50+ year-old guy and my hearing isn't going to be going all the way out to 20kHz anymore, but my hearing is still pretty good and relatively un-abused – I religiously wear high-attenuation earplugs when I'm out on my motorcycle. The treble from the H8s really is a delight – clean, sweet, open, and with no undue emphasis or stridency. In some ways I find it hard to describe the "treble" on its own, simply because it seems so well integrated with the rest of the music. There's not a hint of that exaggerated "hi-fi-ness" that you can get (and which I try to scrupulously avoid, because I find it so irritating). Vocals feel very natural with no undue sibilance, and cymbals are very clean with no excessive splash.
 

 

 

 

 
Overall sound – Putting all this together, the H8s give a very detailed, seamless presentation. Very musical and open with no real vices or coloration to speak of. The sound-stage they present is open and spacious and very detailed, though interestingly, a little less widely spread than my Audio-Technica ATH-M50x – a little more intimate and "in the head". The sound-stage is very believable, with a real sense of placing with a genuine acoustic around performers.
 
They are very detailed. However, with some kinds of music, they can feel a little "unforgiving", perhaps just a little "too much", but I'm being really picky in pointing this out – it's the kind of thing that I might notice one day, and not on the next, even listening to the same piece of music. It's the "flip-side" of being so clear and detailed all across the audio spectrum; just sometimes one wants to take a seat a little further back in the auditorium. These earphones will not disappoint if you're after hearing all the information – they really are lovely and a delight in that regard. I'll be listening to a familiar piece of music and a smile will come to my face as I hear some new detail, or a familiar intricacy presented with a new clarity.
 
Value – Given that I received these earphones effectively "for free" (except that I've actually spent quite a few hours taking photos and writing this review), I do have to ask myself whether I think they are worth the asking price. On Amazon.com at the moment, they're available for $96 (or about £67.50) – which is a fair bit of money. On reflection, I do feel that at that price they do represent good value. If I'd bought them for that price with my own cash I'd feel pretty happy, and I'd be looking forward to listening to my music through them for a long while to come.

A little about me...
I'm 52 and live in the UK. I've been into audio since my teens. I built my first stereo amp when I was 16, and I know one end of a soldering iron from the other, and mostly I remember to pick it up at the end the lead comes out of... My last project was upgrading the capacitors and resistors in my Quad 33 pre-amp. I usde to play the cello but gave it up when I was about 15. I missed the feel and sound of playing an instrument, and so taught myself to play the mandolin when I was 18 and supposedly studying for my exams. Music has been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. Playing an instrument helps remind me what real, live instruments can sound like, and what the experience of music is about.
 
My musical tastes are eclectic, from classical (Bach on period instruments, Tallis and Victoria renaissance choral, Vaughan Williams and Holst full orchestral) through all kinds of folk and rock (Dylan, Robert Plant, Nick Cave, Richard Hawley, Jackie Leven) and out the other end to dance and techno and wold-beats (Daft Punk, Orbital, Afro Celt Sound System). For me, good audio equipment is all about it getting out of the way and letting me listen to the music.
 
My purchase of the xDuoo X3 wasn't really one of those planned things... No really, it wasn't...
I'd been having a conversation with a workmate about his aging iPod Classic - he'd been asking me whether he'd be able to port all his AAC iTunes files and playlists to another (non-Apple) device, and I'd said "Sure, but I'll check around for you..." and so I started investigating DAPs on the net, for him, of course... Fatal!
 
Before long, I'd discovered that there was a whole world of DAPs out there – many with intriguing-sounding Chinese names, and some for very reasonable prices. As a long-term Sony Hi-MD user (and therefore dependent on the continued operation of the legacy SonicStage software on my PC – still works under Win-10) I'd been considering alternative portable listening sources, but never been prompted to actually look before. I soon discovered that the xDuoo X3 was generating quite a bit of interest, offering sound quality well above what you might expect for the price. There were some good deals out there from some of the Chinese sellers - I bought mine from TomTop – and it arrived within a week.
 
Packaging is nice and simple – a printed cardboard sleve outer box with an illustration of the player and a description on the reverse. Inside this is a strong, black board box with xDuoo printed in silver on the front. The player was inside this, held by die-cut foam, along with instructions in English and Chinese, a decent micro-USB cable, and a couple of screen protectors. The battery was partially charged – as all decent Li-ion batteries should be.
 
I already had a range of MP3 and WMA files (at various bit-rates) on my PC, but given the twin micro-SD slots on the X3 with a total capacity of (nominally) 256GB, I'd already decided to rip a lot of music to FLAC using Exact Audio Copy. Once I'd loaded up a 4GB card with all my lossy format files, and put a load of FLAC files onto a 64GB card, I was ready to roll...
 
Well almost... The screen protectors on the X3 have come in for a bit of criticism, and I think I know why. I put one on, and it really didn't want to stick too well, but I noticed that the "outer" face felt a bit tacky – lightbulb moment – the numbered tabs on the protective peel-off sheets had been applied wrongly. I carefully removed the screen protector and rinsed it under the tap, and then replaced it the "wrong" way round – and it has stayed stuck pretty well. OK, perhaps one of those little quirks of a slightly un-developed product. More on that later.
 
Apoligies for any dust in the photos - the black finish shows up every little bit...

 
Headphone and line-out sockets are very solid, and lettering is crisp and clean.

 
 
I did also have a couple of instances of the X3 locking up – turned out it was due to a particular micro-SD card it didn't like. It has not locked up since – in about a month of pretty intensive use.
 
I plugged in my headphones (Musical Fidelity EB33 – were what I had on me at the time), and, wow – the headphone socket was very stiff, but solid feeling. It's still quite stiff, but feels just as solid as on day one. I switched on the player (long press on the power button), qucikly navigated to a folder (album) selected a track, and pressed the large round PLAY button...
 
...a BIG smile crept across my face... this was good, this was very good... The sound quality was easily as good as my Sony MZ-RH1 which, until then, had been my "gold standard" of listening quality – a device which I've had for some years and I know and really enjoy its sound quality. I could instantly tell that the xDuoo was right up there. Pretty good for something which had only cost me a shade over 50 quid...
 
I've since spent well over 50 hours listening to all kinds of music on the xDuoo, and it continues to impress. The sound quality is just really solid, and really believable. To talk about bass, mid-range and treble is a bit artificial – they should all work together to give a convincing whole, and on the X3 they do. However, since that is how one generally breaks down audio performance into manageable sections, I'll do that. The bass is secure, solid and articulate – it has control, there is texture and definition, and good "slam" in those passages which have it – it also reaches down very deep, into the sub-sub-bass where you can feel it tickling your eardrums more than actually hear it – but it doesn't dominate or overwhelm – except where it does in the original recording.
 
The mid-range is clean and clear – vocals and percussion sound really easy and natural. Perhaps when a recording gets a bit busy (with lots of different vocal lines, for example) there can be a slight veiling of detail, but I'm being really picky. I have a recording of intense and hectic mandolin playing – Into the Cauldron, by Chris Thile and Mike Marshall – and the X3 renders it beautifully. The mandolin lines are so easy to separate and place in the sound-stage, every note is clear, the woody timbre of the instruments is so convincing. Granted, it's a great recording, but mandolins are all about mid-range and treble, and the X3 makes them come to life.
 
Which brings me nicely onto the treble... much as the mid-range here for me. Sweet and very clear most of the time, and combining well with the mids to give the music breath and space. And that's the thing about the X3, there's just so much space and detail in the music – real, believable resolution of detail. In one recording of Jackie Leven playing guitar on "Forbidden Songs of the Dying West" there's a point where I could swear I hear Jackie's shirt buttons just brushing against the back of his guitar, and his chair giving a little creak – hair-tingling details! Just occasionally I think details get a little lost (as with the mids), but it's really not a big thing, and it never gets offensive or causes strain.  It's more like I find my attention starts to drift ever so slightly, whereas normally this player just draws me in, and draws me in...
 
One other thing about the sound - as far as I'm concerned, the background noise is effectively absent; black silence.  On older, analogue recordings, you can sometimes hear the background hiss of the recording tape.   It's like going out on a clear night, miles from street lights and looking up at the stars - you see so much more because the background sky is so dark.
 
This is a player I can listen to for hours – and I often do.
 
I haven't said much about the build of the player, but it's a quality item – the case is CNC machined from solid aluminium – and it feels really good and solid in the hands. The legends and writing on the case are all cleanly laser-etched: very clear and durable. The buttons are all crisp and positive – and their seemingly odd layout makes really good sense: each button can be readily identified in the dark, or in a pocket. Operation is easy. The player will confidently drive all of my headphones – from IEMs to full-sized over-ear phones like my Sennheiser HD598 and have power to spare. The battery comfortably gives me over a couple of days' worth of average listening, at work and at home.
 
Build is simple - and solid.

 

 
This is how the track name scrolls across when you use a long shutter speed on your camera..!

 
However, the player is not perfect and may not suit everyone. The user interface is basic – that suits me fine, but it may not please those used to colour displays, album art, and the ability to sort by genre or what the artist ate for lunch on the day of the recording.  The display is spartan - clear, simple, but no album art or anything like that.  Brightness is easily adjustable in the menu.  I can easily navigate to a folder (which is how I store my album tracks: 1 folder = 1 album), pick a track and press PLAY and I'm good to go, but it doesn't support M3U playlists or the like. It does support CUE files – though I've not gone into that. And neither, at the moment, does it support gapless playback – there's a pause of perhaps half a second between tracks. More troublesome though, is the cutting off of the first fraction of a second of some tracks (those without any lead-in), and this is a bit annoying. It needs to be fixed with a firmware revision.  With the current firmware (version 1.1) there is also no equaliser function.  I'll say that again: there is no equaliser function.  Of any kind.  It doesn't trouble me: I thought it might, but it doesn't.  It just means that you need to exercise a bit more care in your choice of headphones.
 
The other issue, which is now well-documented is that the player has a pitch error of about 0.75% or 0.8% when playing files sampled at 44.1kHz – i.e. ALL CD-derived files. The files play ever so slightly slow. Files at higher sample-rates aren't affected. This may or may not be fixable with a firmware revision; it's not clear yet. Is this the end of the world? That depends on how pitch sensitive you are. I haven't done direct A:B comparisons, but in normal listening, I don't detect it. Some others say they do hear it, some only hear it sometimes – I respect their views. I don't hear it and therefore don't find it troublesome. One remedy, is to convert 44.1kHz files to 48kHz sample rate and then they'll play true, though re-sampling may or may not introduce audible artifacts. How this wasn't picked up in product testing and development, we'll probaly never know. It's a quirk – annoying or not depending on your sensitivity. Although I don't pick it up, I still wish it wasn't there, and I hope it can be fixed in a firmware revision.
 
Despite this issue, I still find the X3 a really enjoyable player to own and listen to. The fact that it only cost me a shade over (UK) £50 is remarkable – though prices have gone up a bit more recently. For me, it has served as a perfect introduction to modern DAPs and lossless audio. Despite the flaws metnioned above, it serves my needs and my listening requirements very well, and I hope to be listening to it for a long while.

A little about me...
I'm 52 and live in the UK. I've been into audio since my teens. I built my first stereo amp when I was 16, and I know one end of a soldering iron from the other, and mostly I remember to pick it up at the end the lead comes out of... My last project was upgrading the capacitors and resistors in my Quad 33 pre-amp. I started playing the cello when I was about 8 or 9, gave it up when I was about 15, but missed the feel and sound of playing an instrument, and so bought and taught myself to play the mandolin when I was 18 and supposedly studying for my exams. Music has been a big part of my life for as long as I can remember. Playing an instrument helps remind me what real, live instruments can sound like, and what the experience of music is about.
 
My musical tastes are eclectic, from classical (Bach on period instruments, Tallis and Victoria renaissance choral, Vaughan Williams and Holst full orchestral) through all kinds of folk and rock (Dylan, Robert Plant, Nick Cave, Richard Hawley, Jackie Leven) and out the other end to dance and techno and wold-beats (Daft Punk, Orbital, Afro Celt Sound System). For me, good audio equipment is all about it getting out of the way and letting me listen to the music.
 
I first became aware of the Xiaomi Hybrid earphones from browsing around Gearbest's website looking for LED bicycle lights. They looked interesting: nice clean design appearance, and on paper a good set of specifications with a driver configuration I'd not listened to before, and then there was the bargain price – about (UK) £12 at the time.  These earphones have hybrid drivers - a conventional, dynamic "voice coil" driver to handle lower frequencies, and a much smaller balanced armature driver to deal with upper mids and treble frequencies.  Whether there is any electronic crossover circuitry to divide the frequencies between each unit, or it's achieved simply by the mechanical limitations of each driver I don't know, but hybrid drivers are normally pretty much unheard of at this price point.  Definitely worth a punt.
 
My headphone listening varies: at home I have a couple of full-size rigs – Arcam and Cambridge Audio CD players driving a Schiit Magni, a Pro-ject Headbox S, a Mr Nixie Russian valve (tube) hybrid amp, and a Project Starlight valve hybrid amp. My full-size headphones are Sennheiser HD598 and Audio Technica ATH-M50x. However, I'll also listen to a Sony MZ-RH1 Hi-MD recorder and an xDuoo X3 DAP at home and at work using a range of IEMs including Musical Fidelity EB33, Sennheiser CX870. Most of my IEM listening is either at work (office) or late at night when the house is quiet.
 
After about 10 days, the Xiaomi Hybrid IEMs arrived. The packaging is a nice, plain and simple card carton with a tear-off seal and the phones held securely by a hard foam insert. There's a plastic bag with different sizes of silicone ear-tips, and a printed sheet of instructions (in Chinese). I tend to keep my IEMs in inexpensive hard EVA zip-up cases, so the minimal packaging suits me just fine.
 

 
 

 
 
I straight away tried the Hybrids with my xDuoo X3, and I felt the sound was pretty good, though not remarkable – clear, open, pretty clean, and a decent sound-stage. I'm not entirely sure whether I'm a believer in burn-in or not – but I do tend to do it, and sometimes I thnk it makes a difference, so I plugged the Hybrids into a portable CD player, popped in a Daft Punk CD, turned the volume up to loud (but not blisteringly so) put it on repeat and let it get on with it for 24 hours or so. It gave me a chance to look at how well the phones are made in the meantime...
 
I've got to say it, I'm impressed with the build quality of these IEMs – the finish on mine was flawless. Impeccable lathe-cut finishing on the metal parts, perfect fit with the moulded plastic components and good quality cable, and nicely executed details like the HD Audio laser-etched into each earpiece. There are some nice little details, like the tiny "breather port" in the plastic tube moulding of each unit (just by the moulded "L" in the photo below) – I surmise that these function to help eliminate any pressure on the diaphragm of the driver (or your eardrum) when you insert the earphone into your ear canal – helping both to function as nature intended. For the shape of my ears, comfort is superb – day long listening is no problem. For what it's worth, the remote is fully compatible with my Nokia Lumia Windows (8.1) phone, and gives play/pause on the centre button and volume up/down on the upper and lower buttons. These don't feel like cheap IEMs - they feel like the real deal.
 

 

 
 
After a day of burn-in I listened again – and really listened... Mmm... What I got straight away was an incredibly relaxed presentation. Don't get me wrong – I don't mean sloppy or haphazard – I mean that it was open and unforced, and very un-fatiguing to listen to – even for extended periods. I would find myself listening for far longer (and later into the night) than I had planned to, because I was hearing subtle details in the music that I had missed before with my other IEMs. The relaxed presentation put me in mind of my full-sized (over ear) headphones, only with that greater sense of intimacy to the sound that IEMs can sometimes give.
 
Breaking this down and listening for a lot longer (over a number of weeks), I find that the Hybrids really can communicate a huge amount of information in a superbly coherent way. The soundstage (from a good source) is really convincing – you can hear the layout of an orchestra. Once when I was listening to Kate Bush's Hounds of Love album I suddenly turned round because it really felt like someone was right beside me talking into my ear – uncanny!

For me, the bass is well controlled and detailed. It's full and satisfying, but not overbearing. I have a specific test track (Glistening Fields from Iarla O'Lionaird's album Foxlight) which practically goes into sub-sub bass – these phones will reproduce that faithfully.
 
The treble is incredibly clean and well detailed – I was listening to Moby's album 18 only today and there's a track which has the sound of a damped cymbal being struck quite near the centre with a hard-tipped drumstick – and the Xiaomi Hybrids really picked that up – it sounded so real.  I don't know if that's the balanced armature drivers doing their job, but it sounded great to me.
 
A number of people have commented that there is a mid-range hole with these phones, or that the sound signature is V-shaped. I don't really find that. For me, the mid-range is nicely present, clear and well detailed – speech and vocals are natural, and the mid integrates seamlessly with the treble. I think it's what also contributes to a good sound-stage – the degree of coherence in the whole sound spectrum.
 
Just the other day, I was wondering why some people find the mid-range on the hybrids rather recessed, and then I remembered that some people listen at rather higher volumes than I perfer to, so I tried turning up the volume with these earphones – and I noticed that at higher volumes, the bass does tend to dominate, and lose a bit of control – causing the mid-range to recede. Perhaps this was the cause? I don't know – it was way above a level that I'd want to listen to even for a short period, so a non-issue for me. However, if you like to listen at higher volume, these may not be for you.
 
I could go on for longer, but I'm not sure I'd convey much more useful information. The bottom line is that I'm seriously impressed with the Xiaomi Hybrids. For me, thay just get out of the way and allow me to really enjoy my music, and hear nuances and details that I'd not picked up before. No, they are surely not the best IEMs available, but at the price I paid I find them pretty compelling. I've ordered a second pair as a spare.