Kiwi Ears Orchestra Lite CIEM 8BA

It sounds OK though the price is OK to me.

I have had a few disasters buying CIEMs. I have bought some CIEMs that just sound awful, like the UERR which has 0 bass and 0 treble. The texture is bland and has never heard of dynamics. The Hidition Viento B was much better, but the only let down worse than the bass was the customer service.

I bought the Kiwi Ears CIEM as an experiment. In the world of CIEMs, it is absurdly cheap at $399. The build time is also insanely fast at about 20 days. This is where my positives of this IEM end.

I wanted to see if Kiwi Ears had good production quality on their CIEMs and if they sounded remotely passable. As someone who enjoys the custom fit, I was hoping I could recommend this as a starter custom for those who want to try it without dropping $2000 USD. I don’t want to compare this to my other customs. I wanted to gauge whether or not this CIEM is worth being the gateway to custom in ear monitors for new users. Moreover, my hopes were very conservative. I wanted good build, decent tuning and decent technical imaging chops.

Out of the box, I would say the build quality felt quite nice. The shells felt smooth and well polished. They seemed sturdy and didn’t have any sharp edges. The cable that it comes with is a passable cable. It is easy to use and pliable, but has a MAJOR issue with the IEM (I’ll get to this later). The hard pouch isn’t bad either. For $399, this is a bare bones package, but not something I’m upset about.

My first issues started with the fit. The first thing I do with CIEMs is inspect for any obvious damage and then put them in with no cable. My goal is to figure out how they fit and how to insert them properly. Even if you use the same impressions, different makers will use the impressions differently. Some nozzles are shorter or longer and the interaction with the concha and outer ear is different for all of them. My Biento was insanely deep while my UERR was shallower than most universals.

Each maker has a different implementation and Kiwi Ears was interesting. The depth of the nozzle wasn’t as deep as Hidition but shallower than 64audio. The shells are massive and seem to try and fill the entire outer ear. I noticed immediately that my left ear had not even a semblance of seal, but my right ear was perfect. I racked my brain for ideas and reached out to a friend who recommended a medical lacquer and a UV light and actually was able to fix the seal myself.

I put the cable in and immediately the seal disappeared. I was thinking of how this could happen and I realized that the angle the 2 pin connector was installed at caused the cable to push against my temple and push the IEM out of my ear. My goal was not to damage any cables I cared about so I bent the stock cable until I could get a seal.

For those keeping score, we now have 2 very big negatives on build quality out of the gate. The IEMs don’t seal and the 2 pin angle ruined any seal I was able to get without damaging my cable.

So for those who think it can’t get worse from here, time to remember that I haven’t critiqued the noise it makes. There is decent sub bass extension, but the impact is very pillowy. It has almost 0 presence from 180hz to about 400 hz and then begins to rise and then has some very strange channel imbalance around 1800hz-3000hz. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t having a stroke so I used a tone generator and confirmed that there are major imbalance issues.

The strangest part of the sound is that I think it has a phase or polarity issue. I am not an electrical engineer, but I have heard this stuff before. If you take an IEM and install the 2 pin connectors backwards, the IEM will be out of phase and sound super wonky. I did this a lot on the Moondrop Variations switching the 3.5mm and 4.4 mm terminations.

The way I think this affects the sound is it sounds like the bass is coming from underneath me and the stage has negative width. It sort of feels like I am in a railroad house at the end of a large hall and the band is at the other end shouting. The instruments are all crushed together and it’s really hard to pick out any one instrument from another.

It’s really difficult to critique a broken monitor, but this just sounds like garbage. If this is the intended sound, and if my monitors are not actually broken, then these are the worst monitors I have ever heard. If they are broken, I will take back all my comments about the sound and leave it up to very poor build quality.

I asked Kiwi Ears if I could return it for repair, but they said I would need to pay for shipping + I would need to send new impressions to repair the lack of seal. I’m struggling with sunk cost fallacy. I can send them back, get them repaired and have them sent all the way back to me for them to most likely still be bad and broken or I can throw them in the bin and just leave the saga behind.

I haven’t decided yet, but for the time being this is just 1/5 star IEM with really a 0/5 stars being the real rating. I wouldn’t recommend these to anyone and I hope no one else suffers the fate I suffered. While I doubt I’m the first person to get a broken unit, the build quality issues alone make this a very tough product for me to recommend even if they sound perfect.