Big thanks as usual to all the CanJam staff and exhibitors (thank you
@joe for my shiny new badge!), and a very special shout-out to the super-nice Bloom Audio folks who tolerated me for so long at their booth
Here are my good and not-so-good impressions of SoCal's 2023 CanJam. I'll start with the not-so-good.
Way too many exhibitors and way too little time. That's always been true of CanJam, but this year was even sillier. If you listened to a couple of seminars and visited three or four booths, that was the day gone. I made it to less than 5% of the exhibitor booths this year. (Though in fairness, Bloom carries so many vendor products that you could check quite a lot of boxes in just one place.) CanJam just feels like it's too big. I'm sure the answer to this is an even bigger CanJam next year, because, you know, $$$$. But I do consider this a problem. I come away acutely aware of how much I missed.
The market is becoming absolutely saturated with products having increasingly smaller differences separating them. (Spoiler alert for the end - vendors are closing in on those targets they know the majority of us like.) OTOH, the gradient isn't necessarily always positive. There was a period post-pandemic where supply-chain-constraint excuses saw many manufacturers simply incrementing model numbers and increasing prices with product specs
often going south. I'm more optimistic having seen some of the more recent offerings, including those exhibited at the SoCal CanJam, but it still feels like many OEMs are disingenuous with their newer offerings, and weeding out truly-improved products isn't trivial.
One major concern I have with the audio industry in general is that the hype that precedes these events builds expectation which, on its own, is enough to skew perception of a product. Nobody is immune to having their brain tricked, even when you know it's coming. YouTube is littered with both audio and visual examples of this. Interpolating, extrapolating and 'filling in the gaps' is part of a normally-functioning brain. We're all susceptible to it, and we ought to at least acknowledge it.
Let me get some of my disappointments out of the way first. Empire Ears. I love you guys. You have made some great headphones in the past. I just think you're headed down the wrong path with the Raven. A 'quadbrid' IEM, with dual W9+ sub-woofers, five proprietary balanced armature drivers, quad electrostatic tweeters and a W10 bone-conduction ultra driver with a premium Empire X PWaudio R7 OCC dual-gauge cable with a 4.4 mm rhodium termination, a proprietary multi-point synX Crossover Network, dual-conduction architecture, EIVEC MKII (Empire Intelligent Variable Electrostatic Control Technology), HRC (Harmonic Resonance Core) and ARC Resonance Mitigation Technology. Are you sure that's enough? Doesn't it also need dual W10+ ultra drivers and triple AHA hydroxy liposomes? TL; DR - it's huge and its tuning is not to my preference. (Even if you love the tuning, it's still going to be unnecessarily huge.) Consider how much buzz and excitement there was for the Odin at this CanJam. I predict that level of buzz for the Raven at SoCal CanJam 2024 after EE unveil their newer IEMs.
The Subtonic STORM is an example of the audio hype train at its most nefarious. The STORM's sound was, to me, rather average. It's a bit lean in the sub-bass, and I'll admit that part is personal preference, but it also seems to have a somewhat uneven treble, and that isn't a plus for anybody. Like the Raven, it's also firmly a part of the audio arms race to pack as many different divers (preferably with as many different driver types) as possible into a single shell. The result is stupid-sized IEMs that - even if they somehow fit in your ear canal - stick out the side of your head like a pair of golf balls. My other gripe (aside from the ridiculous sticker price) is the fact that Subtonic were not prepared to let me measure the STORM. This is the first and only time - at any audio event - that I've been denied that request. It would be understandable if the STORM were a prototype, but Subtonic are already selling this product and are perfectly willing to take your money. What do they have to hide? I'm not claiming measurements can tell you exactly how a headphone will sound to you, but they can quickly find flaws in a product that might be a problem. If you believe that you can determine everything about the sound in just one listening session, go back and carefully re-read paragraph #4. TL;DR: Subtonic and their products all receive an emphatic thumbs down from me.
FiR Audio is an IEM manufacturer that is cascading new products onto the market at a furious pace - certainly faster than the fade-rate of existing-product hype. They've made some great IEMs in the past (and I've voted positively with my wallet on more than one occasion), but they've also had some really weird misses, so a new IEM from FiR has a genuine fun element of surprise to it. They had a new single-driver 'e12' IEM at CanJam, which I found pretty fascinating. It came in a standard FiR shell, but it looked like it might have been 3D-printed. I'm not sure if it's even for sale so, in fairness to Bogdan, no measurement links here, but what I can say is it sounded like a typical dynamic driver with a very slightly emphasized lower treble. (Pretty good actually, but not as good as the NHB12 discussed later.) But there's one really big puzzle - it had large (and I mean really enormous) levels of 2nd-order harmonic distortion. I can't imagine what's going on here, because you never get distortion this high from a single dynamic driver. Apparently it uses an 'electro-dynamic' driver, which ostensibly means the same thing, and yet this driver does indeed seem to be somehow different - but not in a good way. I don't care how harmless (or pleasant-sounding?) even-order harmonics are, at this level something seems to be wrong.
64 Audio's Volür was another IEM that seemed to be getting a lot of chatter and hype. They've come close, but I've never quite found a 64 Audio product that really works for me. Volür certainly seems to be an improvement over the Tia Fourte's tuning, but their upper treble is a bit much and fit is still an issue meaning I'd have to pass on this one.
I'm a big fan of Noble's products. I loved the Sultan and thought last year's Kublai Khan was stunning. Their new Viking Ragnar had me scratching my head though. This is supposedly their new flagship product, but it feels like we've just gone back in time several years. The Ragnar sounds like their original Khan (not the Kublai Khan), which I found too bright. You can see the similarity
here.
Astell & Kern have partnered with Vision Ears to make the new 'Aura'. (I think 'partner' here simply means Vision Ears made the product and then cranked up the price so that both companies could take a cut of sales). A&K's past partnerships have usually been over-priced disasters (e.g., T9ie, Odyssey), but the Aura looks only to be over-priced - it's actually a decent-sounding headphone. I personally much prefer the sound (and price) of the PHöNIX (more on this below), but tuning is obviously a personal thing. One general caveat though - check the output impedance of your DAP or amp. Aura has a low and uneven impedance curve, which means that even very small output impedance values (around 1 Ohm or so) can be enough to noticeably change its frequency response. (You can see the effect by adjusting the Z-out value in the tool window
here.)
Questyle is a company whose products I've enjoyed in the past. They have a new dongle (the M15) which might appeal to those of you who, thanks to Apple's courage, broke free of those nasty 3.5 mm sockets in your phones. No comment here, because I don't believe in dongles. (To clarify - I believe they exist, but I also believe they're the work of Satan and ought to be banned.) Questyle also have a new 'lossless' IEM, which is 'made for iPhones'. Made for iPhones with a lightning socket, that is. That aged well, didn't it?
However, the NHB12 also comes with a 3.5 mm-terminated cable, so technically it can also be lossless with Android - yay! It's actually a great-sounding IEM. I believe it's selling for around $300USD, which makes it all the more impressive. After hearing it, I commented to the Questyle rep that it sounded very similar to the original Beyerdynamic Xelento. I can't remember his exact words and don't want to get them into a lawsuit with Beyerdynamic, but his response was basically: yes, that's what we were aiming for. Its shell is larger than those of the Xelento, but its
frequency response is awfully close. Its lightning cable might quickly become obsolete, but since you can just throw that away and use its supplied 3.5 mm cable with a decent DAC in a DAP or an LG/ASUS phone, I'd give this one a big thumbs up
Great job Questyle!
Thieaudio have another iteration of their Monarch (the Mkiii), which I guess I enjoyed enough to tolerate its large size. It's another great-sounding IEM - a big improvement over other Harman-like headphones like the AKG N400 (which had some nasty treble spikes). The Monarch Mkiii sounds good enough that I could happily use it without EQ. Another thumbs up from me
This was my first time hearing Vision Ears' PHöNIX. It appears to be a cheaper (though still not cheap) version of the ERLKöNIG with its tuning switch in position #2. Number 2 is easily my favorite ERLKöNIG tuning, so I wouldn't miss the switch at all. I actually find the PHöNIX's tuning more to my liking than that of the Harman target and despite the modestly-large shell size, Vision Ears' IEMs always seem to fit in my ears nicely. For me, they're super comfy. Another big thumbs up from me
Sadly, this year I didn't find any must-buy products that I left the show with. I've probably been in the game too long to be dramatically surprised by any new headphone or DAP, because most now just represent increasingly small changes (and not always for the better). There was really only one product I would have bought at this year's show. This was a product I heard right at the end which gave me a wow factor I'd not experienced in ages. But this was, sadly, a product that's not even for sale
It was a private demo of a headphone unit that oratory1990 showed me. This was a single-driver mems-microspeaker-based IEM that was tuned by oratory1990 via DSP, which it could do by virtue of its USB-C interface. This must have been the smallest IEM I've ever tried - it was ridiculously tiny, so anybody who can fit any kind of eartip in their ears would be able to get a comfortable fit with these. Part of the wow factor probably came from the whole concept of getting a bass this big from a device this tiny. It was apparently tuned to the Usound1v1 target, which (even though it might be fractionally mid-bass heavy for me) is definitely a tuning I prefer over Harman. (If you already own any of the headphones on the HTS database, you can try EQing your existing headphones to that Usound target
here.) Sadly, the product itself is now discontinued, but you can see its specs
here. I think these would have sold like hot cakes if they'd been exhibited at CanJam. I would have bought one in a heartbeat. It was such clever engineering and such an amazing sound from such a tiny device, and they were just so impressively different from all the other gazillion-driver IEMs that have now become the mainstay of this event. Despite this particular IEM being discontinued, I feel like this type of device is, or should be, the future. Tuning via DSP (for example, with parametric EQ) is much more precise than clunky hardware tuning via resonance chambers, crossovers, dampers, etc. On that subject...
Why is it that we have so few (almost zero) DAPs, USB- or true-wireless-Bluetooth-driven headphones with a proper built-in parametric EQ? I think the answer is you. And me. All of us. We're the reason we can't have nice things. Because we don't demand products that would actually make a significant difference. We're the reason we're going to be visiting an even larger CanJam in 2024, that will be exhibiting even more, even larger IEMs, with even more drivers per side. Sigh.
A final parting thought that brings all this full circle. The gray curve below is oratory's Usound1v1 target; the cyan curve is the arithmetic average of the frequency responses of all those newer headphones discussed above. I don't think this is entirely coincidence:
