@aminus Upto 300 price range what would be your recommendation for the iem with the best vocals and soundstage? I like vocals full, clear, non recessed and exciting. Kanas pro and oxygen are close enough for me but not quite there yet. I was thinking about the fdx1 but am not sure now after your fd01 impressions.
Astell & Kern AK T8iE MK II:
I’ve frequently hailed the Beyerdynamic Xelento as one of the best single DD IEMs on the market. Well, the T8iE is basically the same thing with slightly less treble. Let’s delve into this baby.
The T8iE is Astell & Kern’s collaboration with Beyerdynamic, producing an incredibly bass heavy L shaped IEM. The original MK I is supposedly even bassier than this, which is pretty absurd to think about. The MK II reduces the overall bass response and distortion figures, and it’s what Beyer’s more V-shaped Xelento is based off of.
Bass response on these is one of the thickest and heaviest on the market, while still being technically competent. The T8iE opts for a very midbassy but well extended bass response, and it works somewhat situationally. On a lot of tracks I find it somewhat excessive, especially jazz or classical ones. On the likes of PiL’s Albatross though, the T8iE handles Jah Wobble’s massive bass like a fish in water. Five Suns II by Guapo has delicious amounts of rumble and the right amount of slam to go with it, with the muscular bass guitar riffs being exacted with unforgiving force. The rumble on these is just so damn good, and the decay is beautiful. Definition and timbre are also clear thanks to the large boost the general response has. The T8iE definitely makes its name as one of the best DD woofers on the market, and it’s a single DD at it too. Not bad at all.
Midrange on the T8iE is... well, recessed. There’s no getting around it but the T8iE cuts out any lower mids bloat by just cutting out the mids entirely. On Close to the Edge, Steve Howe’s guitar parts almost feel like they struggle to breathe for air amidst the boosted bass guitar. Vocals still fare somewhat fine but basically every midrange instrument struggles to compete whenever Chris Squire is in the picture. On Slint’s Breadcrumb Trail, McMahan’s spoken word feels like it’s mumbling and trying its damndest to float above the dominating bass and drums in the mix. There’s just no getting around it, as good as I think the T8iE/Xelento are, the midrange on them suffers pretty badly.
The treble on the T8iE is where it differs from the Xelento, and not favorably. The T8iE opts for a darker sound, which, combined with the strong bass, means that the T8iE almost feels L shaped where the Xelento feels like a strong V. It’s also not the best at extension, mostly having a lower treble oriented response. Stick impact is fairly noticeable though decay feels lacking. Mingus’ Solo Dancer, for example, simply doesn’t have enough crash and ring when the track calls upon it. I feel like this is where the Xelento excels over the T8iE, the Xelento has enough treble to balance out the strongly boosted bass, while the T8iE just doesn’t.
Technicalities on the T8iE are all around solid. Dense tracks like Boulez’s rendition of Le Sacre du Printemps are articulated nicely with no real congestion or separation issues. Soundstage is somewhat small due to the small housing, but despite this the layering and presentation are both competent. The T8iE definitely belongs in the upper echelons of single DD technical ability, although it ultimately loses out to the likes of the EX1000.
I feel like the T8iE is somewhat made redundant by the existence of the Xelento. The Xelento’s boosted treble balances out the strong bass with an overall pleasant V shaped response that retains the same wonderful bass. Overall however, both are fairly technical and nicely tuned.
All listening was done out of the WM1A’s 3.5mm jack.
I feel like the Xelento is the superior recommendation here. For the average used price of $500 it’s pretty hard to beat. As for the T8iE, it’s tough to recommend since the Xelento is far more common (read: easier to buy used) and has just enough treble to balance out the bass boost as well.
@aminus Upto 300 price range what would be your recommendation for the iem with the best vocals and soundstage? I like vocals full, clear, non recessed and exciting. Kanas pro and oxygen are close enough for me but not quite there yet. I was thinking about the fdx1 but am not sure now after your fd01 impressions.
The first thing that came to mind with mids was the ER2, but you mentioned soundstage directly after that. EX800ST is an option that fulfills the latter more than the former, but isolation on those is nonexistent and they're not the world's best mids. Can't think of too much more beyond that so pick your poison.
Aminus Rants: Power
Behold, the objectivist’s bane, the critic’s arch-nemesis. Doesn’t sound good? Needs more power. Measures poorly? Needs more power. Such statements and claims have been the ire of many a measurbator and detractor.
Attempts at eloquence aside, the recent discovery with the demanding current requirements of the EE Wraith spurred my interest in this topic. After all, if the EE Wraith has such noticeable, almost definitely measurable, changes with adequate “power”, would that apply to other IEMs?
Well… From my personal experiences, power scaling mainly applies to extremely inefficient drivers. You’d be looking at around the levels of full sized estat level of inefficiency, and even then that mostly refers to the TOTLs from the likes of Stax (looking at you, 009 and 007). A lack of power, from personal observations and discussions with an estat enthusiast friend, can lead to dynamic compression, a lack of transient control and in some cases frequency response anomalies and higher amounts of distortion. Keep in mind these headphones have impedances in the hundreds of thousands of ohms, as well as capacitance from electrostatic amplifiers being burnt off into the usually very long cable, so this stuff hardly applies to tiny little IEM drivers.
Except it does, in this case. How is this stuff relevant to the likes of the Wraith? It’s simple: the Wraith’s tweeters are Sonion’s electrets, which, as much as I give them flak for the misnaming, are cousins of the noble estat. In particular, the Sonion estats use transformers to up the voltage in order to have remotely enough power to compete in SPL with the other drivers in the setup. Combine that with EE’s slightly questionable little EIVIC technology, which I’m frankly not sure how it works and how it plays with voltage and current, and the fact that they’ve decided to stack four of the damn things in one IEM, and you have a recipe for disaster. The current output of the average portable player is simply not enough to attain any sort of voltage swing from the Sonion electrets. A full sized amp is, but at that point we’re no longer looking at a very portable audio setup. I’m willing to believe a similar thing was going on with the initial Canjam unit of Vision Ears’ Elysium, where the Sonion electret simply didn’t have enough current through the average player and as such created a blobby, wet sound signature due to a lack of proper treble control. That is, until plugged into a suitable high current source, in this case a HeadAmp GS-X Mini, in which the driver was fed enough power to shine.
So I’ve gone and said it; power is a thing. But here’s the catch: it really only is a dealbreaker for the likes of estats. The average dynamic driver or planar (I won’t even talk about BAs) is not nearly as inefficient as an electret or electrostatic, not even close. You can’t begin to compare the two, the difference in voltage requirements and impedance is simply so massive that they’re practically worlds apart. On top of that, these drivers in IEMs are extremely small, far smaller than the average headphone driver. The Z1R’s full range DD which necessitates its large bulky shell size is a mere 12mm, far tinier than even the smaller end of full sized headphones. The efficiency of these drivers is very high, and you’d honestly being to burn the voice coil of them with enough current. I personally have not heard any real improvements between plugging my various IEMs into various sources, some of which are considered high powered and others considered lower in power, beyond the actual sound signature and detail retrieval of the player. Stuff that lack of current is characterized by really doesn’t change that much between the likes of the WM1A and the Kann Cube or DMP-Z1. This leaves me unable to really say that current is a genuine factor when someone says that X headphone or X IEM simply has a poor frequency response or transient response. Even in the theoretical scenario that it does apply, it doesn’t quite enter dealbreaker territory, because the general room for scaling is simply not that large. One isn’t going to find major FR changes with more current with basically all of the DDs on the market and the large majority of planars.
Now, I have heard differences in decay in some DAPs and desktop sources that use unusual forms of transmitting current, mainly Questyle and their QPM and desktop players. Whatever their “Current Mode Amplification” is, it does seem to genuinely do something do dynamic drivers and reportedly planars as well, though I’d more readily attribute that to how the current is being sent to the IEM rather than how much. However, I’m not sure if it’s an improvement. Too fast of a decay can sound unnatural in the subregions, and is of course one of the typical criticisms of the BA woofer. This brings in another question: is faster decay necessarily good? I’m not sure I can answer that at the moment.
To sum it up, I’m taking a disgusting centrist fencesitter stance on the whole power debate. I do think that with the Sonion electrets, and estats in general, it is a factor that can bottleneck a transducer’s performance. But I’m really not that much a believer of dynamic drivers and planars improving with more power, not from my experience. Did I just waste your time making you read a fully subjective, anecdotal, unsubstantiated claim? Perhaps. But I think it’s important to clear up my stance on the whole power argument, since I’d rather not leave the can of worms I opened at the end of the EE Wraith review unsealed, lest it comes back again to bite me.
Aminus Rants: Power
Behold, the objectivist’s bane, the critic’s arch-nemesis. Doesn’t sound good? Needs more power. Measures poorly? Needs more power. Such statements and claims have been the ire of many a measurbator and detractor.
Attempts at eloquence aside, the recent discovery with the demanding current requirements of the EE Wraith spurred my interest in this topic. After all, if the EE Wraith has such noticeable, almost definitely measurable, changes with adequate “power”, would that apply to other IEMs?
Well… From my personal experiences, power scaling mainly applies to extremely inefficient drivers. You’d be looking at around the levels of full sized estat level of inefficiency, and even then that mostly refers to the TOTLs from the likes of Stax (looking at you, 009 and 007). A lack of power, from personal observations and discussions with an estat enthusiast friend, can lead to dynamic compression, a lack of transient control and in some cases frequency response anomalies and higher amounts of distortion. Keep in mind these headphones have impedances in the hundreds of thousands of ohms, as well as capacitance from electrostatic amplifiers being burnt off into the usually very long cable, so this stuff hardly applies to tiny little IEM drivers.
Except it does, in this case. How is this stuff relevant to the likes of the Wraith? It’s simple: the Wraith’s tweeters are Sonion’s electrets, which, as much as I give them flak for the misnaming, are cousins of the noble estat. In particular, the Sonion estats use transformers to up the voltage in order to have remotely enough power to compete in SPL with the other drivers in the setup. Combine that with EE’s slightly questionable little EIVIC technology, which I’m frankly not sure how it works and how it plays with voltage and current, and the fact that they’ve decided to stack four of the damn things in one IEM, and you have a recipe for disaster. The current output of the average portable player is simply not enough to attain any sort of voltage swing from the Sonion electrets. A full sized amp is, but at that point we’re no longer looking at a very portable audio setup. I’m willing to believe a similar thing was going on with the initial Canjam unit of Vision Ears’ Elysium, where the Sonion electret simply didn’t have enough current through the average player and as such created a blobby, wet sound signature due to a lack of proper treble control. That is, until plugged into a suitable high current source, in this case a HeadAmp GS-X Mini, in which the driver was fed enough power to shine.
So I’ve gone and said it; power is a thing. But here’s the catch: it really only is a dealbreaker for the likes of estats. The average dynamic driver or planar (I won’t even talk about BAs) is not nearly as inefficient as an electret or electrostatic, not even close. You can’t begin to compare the two, the difference in voltage requirements and impedance is simply so massive that they’re practically worlds apart. On top of that, these drivers in IEMs are extremely small, far smaller than the average headphone driver. The Z1R’s full range DD which necessitates its large bulky shell size is a mere 12mm, far tinier than even the smaller end of full sized headphones. The efficiency of these drivers is very high, and you’d honestly being to burn the voice coil of them with enough current. I personally have not heard any real improvements between plugging my various IEMs into various sources, some of which are considered high powered and others considered lower in power, beyond the actual sound signature and detail retrieval of the player. Stuff that lack of current is characterized by really doesn’t change that much between the likes of the WM1A and the Kann Cube or DMP-Z1. This leaves me unable to really say that current is a genuine factor when someone says that X headphone or X IEM simply has a poor frequency response or transient response. Even in the theoretical scenario that it does apply, it doesn’t quite enter dealbreaker territory, because the general room for scaling is simply not that large. One isn’t going to find major FR changes with more current with basically all of the DDs on the market and the large majority of planars.
Now, I have heard differences in decay in some DAPs and desktop sources that use unusual forms of transmitting current, mainly Questyle and their QPM and desktop players. Whatever their “Current Mode Amplification” is, it does seem to genuinely do something do dynamic drivers and reportedly planars as well, though I’d more readily attribute that to how the current is being sent to the IEM rather than how much. However, I’m not sure if it’s an improvement. Too fast of a decay can sound unnatural in the subregions, and is of course one of the typical criticisms of the BA woofer. This brings in another question: is faster decay necessarily good? I’m not sure I can answer that at the moment.
To sum it up, I’m taking a disgusting centrist fencesitter stance on the whole power debate. I do think that with the Sonion electrets, and estats in general, it is a factor that can bottleneck a transducer’s performance. But I’m really not that much a believer of dynamic drivers and planars improving with more power, not from my experience. Did I just waste your time making you read a fully subjective, anecdotal, unsubstantiated claim? Perhaps. But I think it’s important to clear up my stance on the whole power argument, since I’d rather not leave the can of worms I opened at the end of the EE Wraith review unsealed, lest it comes back again to bite me.
EE Wraith (and Valk) has an extremely low OI which changes the frequency response based on output impedance. I'm guessing that's what people are mistakening for more "power" when changing around sources.
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EE Wraith (and Valk) has an extremely low OI which changes the frequency response based on output impedance. I'm guessing that's what people are mistakening for more "power".
Low impedance itself doesn’t necessarily result in change in FR when paired with high OI sources, but it causes lack of proper driver damping, which in-turn results in poor transients and flabby bass and such. Highly likely Wraith has a non-linear impedance curve, and probably that’s what you were referring to.
Low impedance itself doesn’t necessarily result in change in FR when paired with high OI sources, but causes lack of proper driver damping, which in-turn results in poor transients and flabby bass and such. Highly likely Wraith has a non-linear impedance curve, and probably that’s what you were referring to.
Cutting-edge artisanal in-ear monitors for discerning listeners. Proudly designed and manufactured in Singapore.
Stay updated on Subtonic Audio at their sponsor profile on Head-Fi.
EE Wraith (and Valk) has an extremely low OI which changes the frequency response based on output impedance. I'm guessing that's what people are mistakening for more "power" when changing around sources.
I don’t necessarily think it’s an OI thing, mostly because my experience with the Wraith mimics the behaviors of the aforementioned higher end electrostatics out of less powerful amps. Of course this is something that can be verified with enough testing though, as well as actual measurements of the Wraith’s impedance curve.
Unfortunately it appears like the original K10 isn't available for demo here. The Encore is, but that doesn't really sound the same of course. I will be running down to the main carrier of Noble here in SG later today so I can confirm in person, either way.
I’ve been enjoying this thread now for awhile. Just out of curiosity could you post some Noble Encore impressions? I would like to read your thoughts. Cheers!
I’ve been enjoying this thread now for awhile. Just out of curiosity could you post some Noble Encore impressions? I would like to read your thoughts. Cheers!
@aminus Upto 300 price range what would be your recommendation for the iem with the best vocals and soundstage? I like vocals full, clear, non recessed and exciting. Kanas pro and oxygen are close enough for me but not quite there yet. I was thinking about the fdx1 but am not sure now after your fd01 impressions.
Just found this post by chance and think it needs some clarification. While everybody is, of course, entitled to mod their FD01 in whatever way they want, an FD01 modded with torn up baby wipes will very likely not yield the same results as the damping proposed in my original modding instructions. To illustrate this point, I can show you the results of different damping methods on the FD01, they're actually all over the place:
So, what I'm trying to say is, be careful about jumping to conclusions based on @aminus' review of an FD01 that very likely does NOT sound like the FDX1. A properly modded FD01 has no sibilance and doesn't have dark treble. And neither does the FDX1, because JVC meticulosity tuned it to match a properly modded FD01.
Just found this post by chance and think it needs some clarification. While everybody is, of course, entitled to mod their FD01 in whatever way they want, an FD01 modded with torn up baby wipes will very likely not yield the same results as the damping proposed in my original modding instructions. To illustrate this point, I can show you the results of different damping methods on the FD01, they're actually all over the place:
So, what I'm trying to say is, be careful about jumping to conclusions based on @aminus' review of an FD01 that very likely does NOT sound like the FDX1. A properly modded FD01 has no sibilance and doesn't have dark treble. And neither does the FDX1, because JVC meticulosity tuned it to match a properly modded FD01.
Yep, I'm not gonna comment on what the FDX1 may sound like until I get my hands on one personally. The FD01 review only covers that specific FD01 with that specific dampening material and material placement. Hence the disclaimer at the beginning of the review.
I just posted an Encore review. Though my ideas really go along with the previous 7 reviews......all except the bass tone impressions of one other reviewer. I’m pretty sure your finding will parallel mine.........though maybe not?
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