Ultimate Ears triple.fi 10 pro versus Sleek SA6 - my comparison - Page 2

I have questioned that same thing, but I'm one of those people who will notice a flaw over a strength. I may listen to 12 songs in a row that sound fanstastic, but when track 13 in a playlist comes up and the treble is piercing to the point of distraction, that's what stands out in my mind above those twelve flawless songs I just heard. On top of that, I place a premium on getting to avoid micromanagement. I want the gear to match my listening habits - mostly lots of smartlist generated music mixes or random albums - rather than needing to change my listening habits to match the gear.

Besides, for this latest twist in my audio journey, I never set out to get the absolute best IEM money can buy, I just wanted to do noticeably better than my super.fi 5 pros, and both of these succeed at that; the SA6 just fits my needs a bit better.

Ignoring that fit, isolation, and cost were all in favor of the SA6, that might seem reasonable, but I have over 32,000 music tracks. If you assume my ballpark of 5% of tracks that would need equalisation, that's over 1600 tracks that's I'd have to identify, experiment with, and then embed EQ presets for. Then consider that I use iPods as my source. and I'm not changing that, so custom equalisation is problematic at best. Then consider that I still use earbuds, full size headphones, and play music through my car and full size stereo, and what you've got is a logistical nightmare.

Like I said, I put a premium on avoiding micromanagement, and if only getting most of my music played at A caliber versus A+ caliber saves me that micromanagement, that's an easy choice. While I can audition the gear side by side and find the differences, those differences are subtle, and without having the TF10s to keep plugging in and going back over the same passage and going back, I will never miss the difference.

You're either confusing my issue, or I'm not being clear. What you mention is a completely different matter. These are tracks that sound noticeably different than their source, at least as reproduced on everything else I ever heard them on. I've got plenty of stuff that's hardly pristine recordings, but that has nothing to do with whether a set of drivers reproduces them accurately. An old John Lee Hooker recording with background hiss isn't going to sound like it was recorded last week at Sony, but it should still be reproduced closely to the source by good drivers. When Jerry Garcia's sweet finger picking occasionally verges on sending the same sort of shiver up your spine as nails on a chalk board, there's a problem with the reproduction: it's over emphasizing those high ranges and creating an undesireable artifact that isn't part of the original source.

It's not like any of this should be surprising, just look at the frequency response graph for the TF10 on UE's website, it's a series of three sharp peaks and valleys with roughly a 7 dB range. That is going to be audible in the right circumstance; if you hit the right combination of frequencies, you're going to get a perfect storm of simultaneous over and under emphasis in the high range and hear what I did, whether that bothers you as much as it did me is a whole other matter.

The low range complaints, on the other hand, I'm sure are 100% working as intended, I just didn't care for it.

That's kind of the point, I assumed they wouldn't exhibit such a peak and valley audibly, and frankly, I don't really care why they performed the way they did. This is all a bunch of arguing over angels on the head of a pin type stuff. The point is that I can reliably find certain instruments that they come off sounding artificial with in their reproduction, the underlying cause is irrelevant. I'm not the first person to post that their high end can sound artificial, I won't be the last. It doesn't matter if it's the peak and valley response, a source flaw that only they are so wondrous as to be able to reproduce, or flying monkeys, that's what they sound like to my ears.

Besides, it's not as though they're not great earphones. In the absense of UE's bad customer service, I'd have never looked elsewhere and would have been happy with them with or without these "flaws" because I wouldn't have cared enough to buy something else when they sounded so great most of the time. Since I was prompted to look elsewhere for reasons completely independent of sound quality, I found a better fit for my standards is all.

Not that you don't have my back, but I don't even know that I give the probing that much credit. The underlying technical explanation is irrelevant to my repeated observation that there is music that the TF10 do not sound so good with to my ears, but the same music with the SA6 sounds fine, because it's really that simple.

As soon as I knew that there was a good chance I might be returning the TF10 for reasons other than their sound quality, I wanted to make sure that I had an acceptable replacement in place. I made a long list of test tracks that either sounded particularly spectacular or particularly off on the TF10. Then I played these tracks with the SA6. I fiddled with the ports and tubes until the spectacular tracks sounded similarly good. I found the off tracks sounded fine unless I intentionally replicated the same sort of overdone treble with the treble++ tubes. Then I went back and forth on those same test tracks using both earphones until I was certain that, yes, the TF10 sounded the way they did and the SA6 sounded the way they did. Then I did a whole bunch of listening to other music with the SA6 and before long I knew what I was going to do, send the TF10 back.

I was surprised the choice was so clear and painless because, in spite of my critique of some aspects of their sound reproduction, I had been extremely impressed with the TF10, so impressed I was expecting the SA6 to be at best acceptable. I certainly never expected them to be so close that I taped up the TF10s to go back without so much as a farewell listen once I had made my choice.

In as far as comparing the sound quality, that's a done and done in my book. Whether I have correctly sussed what aspect of the drivers or crossover or the resonance with the driver pod or what brand of headphones the sound engineer was wearing the day he mastered that track is responsible for this difference doesn't matter.