Aminus hates everything (Or, Aminus rants and reviews stuff)
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candlejack
Headphoneus Supremus
Hey @aminus, apologies if you already covered this, but how much time do you spend with an IEM before you reach your conclusions?
Most listening sessions are around an hour. An IEM I like can get more. An IEM that is intolerably bad can get less. Depends.
Aminus Rants: 2020, or, Off This Decade
The last 10 years have ended. Or maybe not. In either case I think it’s worth it to talk about my general thoughts on the last 10 years of IEMs, to the best of my ability, and what the future may hold.
This decade has been, above all else, the biggest decade for the IEM industry. The explosion of the boutique kilobuck IEM market, increased interest in taking portable audio to higher standards and new advances in technology have meant that IEMs have never seen bigger industry growth in history, for better or worse. Prices for IEMs in this decade match or surpass the prices of TOTL headphones, who themselves have also seen huge industry growth. It’s a trend that I can’t quite say I’m fond of. Many IEMs don’t have the sound, never mind the build or engineering chops to demand the prices they do. A lot of the time it’s driver spam for the sake of driver spam, or just ridiculous overpricing because, well, why not? People will pay anyways.
And then on the opposite side of the spectrum, you have the extreme budget types. The segment of the market that believes that takes the price/performance mantra too far and ends up being no better than the blind ballers they tried to oppose in the first place. You end up with a group of people blindly chasing after the latest hype (not dissimilar to how the former category blindly buys the latest overpriced flagship) and proclaiming each this month’s new IEM to be even more of a giant killer than the last. It’s an unending loop of cultists in denial that don’t realize that in their efforts to become a “conscious consumer” they’ve turned around and become the exact kind of sucker they tried to avoid becoming in the first place.
And really, both of these groups are motivated by the exact same human impulse: Fear of Missing Out. The reality is that the majority of the audio world is motivated by FOMO. But within the context of the IEM industry, a lot of IEM’s modern hype trains are motivated by people FOMOing over what they’re told is good without really having an indepth understanding of why it’s good, or if it’s even good to begin with. Part of this phenomena is willful ignorance, and part of it is a lack of exposure as well. And to a certain extent it’s just low standards. Some people just genuinely think that everything is good, irregardless of what you throw at them.
But enough of that. I think it’s worth it to talk about the future direction of the industry, namely its products. What I see happening is a stronger push towards more exotic driver types and more advanced material science. This is already happening with the Sonion electrets as well as numerous attempts at advanced DD diaphragm materials with varying results. But gone are the days of putting BAs in a shell and calling it a day; not because they’re acoustically lacking, but because they’re not marketable enough. Expect to see more badly implemented electrets, more incoherent hybrids and tribrids, more dynamic drivers that sound closer to BAs than any respectable DD should, more bizarre planar IEMs that sound like a burning trashfire with or without DSP, and on and on and on and on. The industry’s propensity now is towards marketing with more and more out there technology, and while this is a good thing, a lot of the times it’s, well, unwarranted. There nothing special about planar IEMs, not until someone manages to make one that sounds something approaching decent. There’s nothing special about electret tweeters anymore, no one knows how to implement them right except 1 random Malaysian guy who’s barely known in Asia, nevermind outside of it. There’s nothing special about ADLC or beryllium or aluminum or magnesium dome DDs, because half the time they’re just tuned badly enough that their transients and detail retrieval and timbre just don’t matter. Technology that tries to innovate is nice and all, but how much of it actually succeeds?
But that aside, whatever scraps of innovation there are in the slow but steady engine that is the IEM industry seems to have an effect for the better. The hybrids of today are lightyears ahead of the ones of yesteryear. At least one (1!) successfully implemented tribrid exists, and hopefully others learn from it and take suit. Companies seem to be, to a certain extent, paying attention to the intangibles that affect sound, and are trying to create technologies that actually fix them, rather than the same old tubed BA spam with some voodoo crossover/phase technology that doesn’t really help all that much.
Here’s an example: one of the most recent trends in IEMs over the last half-decade is the idea of using acoustic chambering over standard tubing, which seems to help with making IEMs have a more diffuse and open presentation. The Z1R, Fourte and Solaris obviously come to mind, but so do lesser known IEMs like FAudio’s single DDs. I think this is a trend that people are going to copy based off of Sony and Campfire’s successes, and I do want to see more of it.
I also see less of a strong push in CIEMs and more of one in UIEMs. Part of this might be because a lot of the vanguard technologies in the market are hard to implement in CIEMs, not to mention implementing it consistently. 64 have consistently stayed away from CIEMs for their tubeless hybrids. That, and the fact that a lot of the most advanced IEMs these days use a DD in some capacity, and consistently implementing a DD in CIEM form seems exceedingly hard.
What I really do want to see, however, is a push towards single DDs again. Not every company can invest the R&D into the dynamic driver diaphragm design required to make a truly competent single DD IEM, but of the handful that can, I really want to see someone try and make a single DD IEM that succeeds the EX1000. Everything else since that seems to have missed the mark, some moreso than others, but at the end of the day it feels like everyone else is struggling to catch up to Sony’s decade old flagship.
Another thing I want to see is improvements in coherency in hybrid technology. I’ve talked about this before in my driver types rants but it’s worth stating again. Many hybrids on the market don’t integrate their different driver types with enough finesse, and obviously so. The handful that do are the likes of the Campfire Solaris, which does it for all the wrong reasons, and the Elysian Annihilator, which is a step in the right direction but is far too unique of a tuning and sonic direction to really use in this context. The goal that needs to be achieved with a hybrid IEM, ultimately, is to make the full driver range sound like a single coherent DD. Making it sound like a BA is for the worse, as BAs have undesirable timbre and decay characteristics. I still maintain that a single DD sound is the endgoal of hybrid design, and no one has really pulled it off convincingly yet.
So what are my thoughts on the future? Well, I think the only way is up. Yes, the industry is flawed, yes, there’s more garbage and mediocre trite than there are genuinely good products, but at the end of the day, the good products only get better. And I think this is worthy of looking forward to. Portable audio has some ways to go, but it’s certainly making progress, enough that the IEMs of 2019 leave the IEMs of 2014 in the dust. I can only hope the same applies for the IEMs of 2024.
But really, don’t let this rant mislead you. I’m eager to see what happens in 2020. The direction companies have been heading in is slow and full of failed experiments and filler, but is ultimately on the whole positive. One can only hope that things continue to progress, and not stagnate.
Score: And you thought the last 10 years werebad good/10
The last 10 years have ended. Or maybe not. In either case I think it’s worth it to talk about my general thoughts on the last 10 years of IEMs, to the best of my ability, and what the future may hold.
This decade has been, above all else, the biggest decade for the IEM industry. The explosion of the boutique kilobuck IEM market, increased interest in taking portable audio to higher standards and new advances in technology have meant that IEMs have never seen bigger industry growth in history, for better or worse. Prices for IEMs in this decade match or surpass the prices of TOTL headphones, who themselves have also seen huge industry growth. It’s a trend that I can’t quite say I’m fond of. Many IEMs don’t have the sound, never mind the build or engineering chops to demand the prices they do. A lot of the time it’s driver spam for the sake of driver spam, or just ridiculous overpricing because, well, why not? People will pay anyways.
And then on the opposite side of the spectrum, you have the extreme budget types. The segment of the market that believes that takes the price/performance mantra too far and ends up being no better than the blind ballers they tried to oppose in the first place. You end up with a group of people blindly chasing after the latest hype (not dissimilar to how the former category blindly buys the latest overpriced flagship) and proclaiming each this month’s new IEM to be even more of a giant killer than the last. It’s an unending loop of cultists in denial that don’t realize that in their efforts to become a “conscious consumer” they’ve turned around and become the exact kind of sucker they tried to avoid becoming in the first place.
And really, both of these groups are motivated by the exact same human impulse: Fear of Missing Out. The reality is that the majority of the audio world is motivated by FOMO. But within the context of the IEM industry, a lot of IEM’s modern hype trains are motivated by people FOMOing over what they’re told is good without really having an indepth understanding of why it’s good, or if it’s even good to begin with. Part of this phenomena is willful ignorance, and part of it is a lack of exposure as well. And to a certain extent it’s just low standards. Some people just genuinely think that everything is good, irregardless of what you throw at them.
But enough of that. I think it’s worth it to talk about the future direction of the industry, namely its products. What I see happening is a stronger push towards more exotic driver types and more advanced material science. This is already happening with the Sonion electrets as well as numerous attempts at advanced DD diaphragm materials with varying results. But gone are the days of putting BAs in a shell and calling it a day; not because they’re acoustically lacking, but because they’re not marketable enough. Expect to see more badly implemented electrets, more incoherent hybrids and tribrids, more dynamic drivers that sound closer to BAs than any respectable DD should, more bizarre planar IEMs that sound like a burning trashfire with or without DSP, and on and on and on and on. The industry’s propensity now is towards marketing with more and more out there technology, and while this is a good thing, a lot of the times it’s, well, unwarranted. There nothing special about planar IEMs, not until someone manages to make one that sounds something approaching decent. There’s nothing special about electret tweeters anymore, no one knows how to implement them right except 1 random Malaysian guy who’s barely known in Asia, nevermind outside of it. There’s nothing special about ADLC or beryllium or aluminum or magnesium dome DDs, because half the time they’re just tuned badly enough that their transients and detail retrieval and timbre just don’t matter. Technology that tries to innovate is nice and all, but how much of it actually succeeds?
But that aside, whatever scraps of innovation there are in the slow but steady engine that is the IEM industry seems to have an effect for the better. The hybrids of today are lightyears ahead of the ones of yesteryear. At least one (1!) successfully implemented tribrid exists, and hopefully others learn from it and take suit. Companies seem to be, to a certain extent, paying attention to the intangibles that affect sound, and are trying to create technologies that actually fix them, rather than the same old tubed BA spam with some voodoo crossover/phase technology that doesn’t really help all that much.
Here’s an example: one of the most recent trends in IEMs over the last half-decade is the idea of using acoustic chambering over standard tubing, which seems to help with making IEMs have a more diffuse and open presentation. The Z1R, Fourte and Solaris obviously come to mind, but so do lesser known IEMs like FAudio’s single DDs. I think this is a trend that people are going to copy based off of Sony and Campfire’s successes, and I do want to see more of it.
I also see less of a strong push in CIEMs and more of one in UIEMs. Part of this might be because a lot of the vanguard technologies in the market are hard to implement in CIEMs, not to mention implementing it consistently. 64 have consistently stayed away from CIEMs for their tubeless hybrids. That, and the fact that a lot of the most advanced IEMs these days use a DD in some capacity, and consistently implementing a DD in CIEM form seems exceedingly hard.
What I really do want to see, however, is a push towards single DDs again. Not every company can invest the R&D into the dynamic driver diaphragm design required to make a truly competent single DD IEM, but of the handful that can, I really want to see someone try and make a single DD IEM that succeeds the EX1000. Everything else since that seems to have missed the mark, some moreso than others, but at the end of the day it feels like everyone else is struggling to catch up to Sony’s decade old flagship.
Another thing I want to see is improvements in coherency in hybrid technology. I’ve talked about this before in my driver types rants but it’s worth stating again. Many hybrids on the market don’t integrate their different driver types with enough finesse, and obviously so. The handful that do are the likes of the Campfire Solaris, which does it for all the wrong reasons, and the Elysian Annihilator, which is a step in the right direction but is far too unique of a tuning and sonic direction to really use in this context. The goal that needs to be achieved with a hybrid IEM, ultimately, is to make the full driver range sound like a single coherent DD. Making it sound like a BA is for the worse, as BAs have undesirable timbre and decay characteristics. I still maintain that a single DD sound is the endgoal of hybrid design, and no one has really pulled it off convincingly yet.
So what are my thoughts on the future? Well, I think the only way is up. Yes, the industry is flawed, yes, there’s more garbage and mediocre trite than there are genuinely good products, but at the end of the day, the good products only get better. And I think this is worthy of looking forward to. Portable audio has some ways to go, but it’s certainly making progress, enough that the IEMs of 2019 leave the IEMs of 2014 in the dust. I can only hope the same applies for the IEMs of 2024.
But really, don’t let this rant mislead you. I’m eager to see what happens in 2020. The direction companies have been heading in is slow and full of failed experiments and filler, but is ultimately on the whole positive. One can only hope that things continue to progress, and not stagnate.
Score: And you thought the last 10 years were
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The kilo buck iem market has evolved quite a bit, but took a very slow plummet since 2015.
Nothing has been as exciting since the KSE1500, and I’ve spent over 7 grand in buying and reselling iem’s over the last 2 years trying to rid myself of the Shures; and I simply cannot do it.
Closest I’ve gotten was 2 years ago, a big year with the names like LCD-i4, U12t... but only one was realistic for daily commute, yet had its shortcomings.
Fast forward to Spring 2019, good weather coming back yet not having a jacket with extra pockets to cater to the silly Shure stack... I embarque on a quest to find a suitable replacement. 2019 was frankly pathetic as TOTL iems seemed to have regressed. Solaris, Z1R, VX... all great, but with their respective shortcomings. Sony’s tuning absolutely missed the mark on being the EX1000’s proper successor; bass is tremendous, yet the lower mids disjoint from the dynamic driver, it’s not coherent, it’s not linear and then the lower treble is too sizzly Solaris sound holographic and tuned very tastefully, but lacks dynamic and prat, and that extra bit of resolution than the others have. VX, the best iem after KSE/LCDi4/u12t/u18t almost won me over, but it was more than a reference monitor with its razor sharp and fast highs, requiring the eq switch to tame them... which consequently kills dynamics.
Biggest surprise for me? Sony IER-M9. Not quite the same level as those 3, but the most realistic sounding and listenable. It’s outright more impressive because it’s priced somewhat within reason. It’s more of a progression of EX1000 than z1r is, sadly. It fits marvelously. But does it replace the Shure?
Of course not; not until advances are made in e-stat implementation and some other companies gets some R&D. Companies like Sony, Sennheiser are the ones who can make this decade a revolution in ear monitors. Shure cracked the boundary of technical prowess and coherence of a transducer; two extremely difficult feats to overcome. But downsize the package, and correct its frequency response and you’ve got yourselves your next in-ear revolution.
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headphonesaddict123
Member of the Trade: Aya Workshop
I don't know if KSE is the only exciting IEM since whenever you mentioned , but it surely holds up well as (still) one of the best in 2020 , and maybe even longer 
KSE is more of a proof of concept than anything else to me. It's proof that a true estat can be done successfully in IEM form, but beyond that it's lacking. The tuning is terrible and it has the typical estat lack of tactility, decay and dynamics. Never really liked it, but in general I find myself disliking estats more and more as time goes on. I think it's a good example of actual engineering effort being put into an IEM. You know what they say about pioneers and never being the best.
Regarding the Z1R, it's really not supposed to be an EX1000 successor. People don't realize that the EX1000's designer, Bandai-san, is now working with Justear. That, if anywhere, is where the EX1000 successor lies. The Z1R was tuned solely by Eiji-san, who also tuned the XBA-N3, which interestingly enough shares a lot of design concepts that would later go on to be used with the Z1R. Looking at it from the perspective of a refined and polished N3 tempers one's expectations in comparison to looking at it as an EX1000 successor. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But as per what I personally am looking for, it's as close as it gets for now.
And VX... that review is coming. Soon.
headphonesaddict123
Member of the Trade: Aya Workshop
Wut's the best dynamic & hybrid in your preference Animus?
If by dynamic you mean full DD, EX1000. For hybrid, it’s the Z1R.
candlejack
Headphoneus Supremus
So what would the expectations be for a true EX1000 successor?
Single DD. Wide soundstage. Neutral/neutral-bright tuning. High amounts of bass tactility without any bass boosting. Equal to or better than EX1000 technicalities.
Campfire Audio Solaris SE:
I didn’t like the original Solaris. I think I’ve made that abundantly clear. The odd midrange tonality, not just the dipped upper mids but the general center midrange focus and harshness sounded off to me. In addition it had this icky BA timbre in the bass which was just an all around turnoff. I appreciated its intangibles (timbre aside) but its tonality just sounded like all sorts of wrong to me.
Enter the Solaris SE. I didn’t have much expectations for this, I even mocked the ugly faceplate and the stock photo guy for looking like a dork. To me it was pretty simple: Campfire have had a track record of releasing IEMs built entirely around hype with no substance, why would yet another special edition of one of their handful of well selling IEMs be any different? And so I expected nothing. Hell, I expected it to be bad.
Well, to start with, the SE’s bass seems to have been stepped up from the Solaris OG (henceforth referred to as OG). The time domain issues are still present (that is, the SE’s bass decays too fast for its own good, almost like a BA) but the general bass tonality seems... different. The SE’s bass seems to be thicker now, with less upper bass focus. This does add a level of murkiness to it, but for some reason it seems to have mostly done away with the plasticky timbre of OG. That’s a plus in my book really, because there’s few things I hate more than BA timbre. I still have gripes with the overly fast decay, lack of slam and less than stellar subbass extension, and still think it sounds BA-like. But it’s not as much of an uncanny valley half-BA half-DD mess like the OG anymore.
The midrange is the SE’s most marked departure from the OG. Gone is the unusually shouty, harsh and center-mid focused tonality of the original, instead it’s just... thick. The SE’s mids are closer to something like the original Andro now than the OG Solaris. On one hand, I’m not immediately offended by any sort of guitar on the SE like I was on the OG. On the other hand, I’ve never been a fan of lower mid focused tonalities. But the big deal here is that I actually don’t hate what I’m hearing with the SE. The strangely distant presentation and hollowness of the OG seems to be mostly gone, though that seems to be because the entire upper midrange as a whole has been smothered by the dense lower mids. It’s certainly a more pleasant and less immediately grating sound than the OG, though I’m still not really fond of how overly dense it is.
The SE’s treble also seems different. Rather than the forward and aggressive but lively sound of the OG, the SE has laid back the treble, almost to the point of darkness. This actually works well with the thicker midrange and bass, giving the SE an essentially smooth and slightly warm and dark sound. Make no mistake, this is certainly not a dark IEM. But the general presentation certainly makes itself less energetic in comparison to the OG. While the treble was one of the few things I liked about the OG, I like how this more relaxed treble response meshes with the rest of the SE. It works.
As for intangibles, the SE is sort of a stepdown from the OG. The OG does feel like it has wider staging as a whole, and due to the brighter and more aggressive tuning seems to have more resolution and clarity. The SE isn’t as good in this regard, but doesn’t feel like a technical slouch either way. Much like its predecessor it easily surpasses the sonic wall and is capable of imaging beyond the confines of its shell, though not by as much as the OG. A tradeoff for better tonality, is how you could look at it. The SE still performs respectably technically, but I really don’t think it lives up to a lot of the real benchmarks in this field. Regarding the other intangibles, the Solaris has never really had dynamic issues, and it remains fairly coherent for a hybrid (though not in the best way). I still maintain that the Solaris, both OG and SE, are intangibly capable hybrids with just generally wonky tonalities, with the OG being the more screwed of the two. Not much there is to fix that.
But my final thoughts on the SE are clear: it’s a decent improvement over the OG, fixing some (not all) of the tuning issues with the OG. I still think the faceplate is an ugly turd (the demo unit I tried had an extremely obvious seam in the right faceplate between what seems to be two cuts separate of abalone used on the same faceplate), but the SE is a respectable sonic fix of some of the pitfalls of the OG. Oh yeah, and the nozzle is less rough too. Way more comfortable.
All listening was done out of the WM1A’s 4.4mm jack.
Anyone who liked the OG Solaris will probably not go wrong with this, unless the possibility for some darkness and the slightly mushier tonality of the SE is something you want to avoid. Despite the fact that the SE is an improvement, it still has quite a few glaring issues, some leftover from the OG and some of its own design. I’ll wait for Campfire to figure out how to fix them. Until next time.
Score: 4/10
Note: The OG unit compared in this review is NOT the same unit as the one I originally reviewed. To what extent this OG unit and the one I reviewed are different I cannot ascertain, but chances are they are different. I also cannot guarantee that the same does not apply to the SE. The SE unit I heard was alright. The SE unit you hear may not be. Until further confirmation from measurements that Campfire have fixed their unit variance bonanza, beware.
In addition, the Solaris OG score has been lowered from 4/10 to 3/10. The tonal issues are too simply major to ignore, particularly the overly harsh and shouty midrange. Simply not good enough.
I didn’t like the original Solaris. I think I’ve made that abundantly clear. The odd midrange tonality, not just the dipped upper mids but the general center midrange focus and harshness sounded off to me. In addition it had this icky BA timbre in the bass which was just an all around turnoff. I appreciated its intangibles (timbre aside) but its tonality just sounded like all sorts of wrong to me.
Enter the Solaris SE. I didn’t have much expectations for this, I even mocked the ugly faceplate and the stock photo guy for looking like a dork. To me it was pretty simple: Campfire have had a track record of releasing IEMs built entirely around hype with no substance, why would yet another special edition of one of their handful of well selling IEMs be any different? And so I expected nothing. Hell, I expected it to be bad.
Well, to start with, the SE’s bass seems to have been stepped up from the Solaris OG (henceforth referred to as OG). The time domain issues are still present (that is, the SE’s bass decays too fast for its own good, almost like a BA) but the general bass tonality seems... different. The SE’s bass seems to be thicker now, with less upper bass focus. This does add a level of murkiness to it, but for some reason it seems to have mostly done away with the plasticky timbre of OG. That’s a plus in my book really, because there’s few things I hate more than BA timbre. I still have gripes with the overly fast decay, lack of slam and less than stellar subbass extension, and still think it sounds BA-like. But it’s not as much of an uncanny valley half-BA half-DD mess like the OG anymore.
The midrange is the SE’s most marked departure from the OG. Gone is the unusually shouty, harsh and center-mid focused tonality of the original, instead it’s just... thick. The SE’s mids are closer to something like the original Andro now than the OG Solaris. On one hand, I’m not immediately offended by any sort of guitar on the SE like I was on the OG. On the other hand, I’ve never been a fan of lower mid focused tonalities. But the big deal here is that I actually don’t hate what I’m hearing with the SE. The strangely distant presentation and hollowness of the OG seems to be mostly gone, though that seems to be because the entire upper midrange as a whole has been smothered by the dense lower mids. It’s certainly a more pleasant and less immediately grating sound than the OG, though I’m still not really fond of how overly dense it is.
The SE’s treble also seems different. Rather than the forward and aggressive but lively sound of the OG, the SE has laid back the treble, almost to the point of darkness. This actually works well with the thicker midrange and bass, giving the SE an essentially smooth and slightly warm and dark sound. Make no mistake, this is certainly not a dark IEM. But the general presentation certainly makes itself less energetic in comparison to the OG. While the treble was one of the few things I liked about the OG, I like how this more relaxed treble response meshes with the rest of the SE. It works.
As for intangibles, the SE is sort of a stepdown from the OG. The OG does feel like it has wider staging as a whole, and due to the brighter and more aggressive tuning seems to have more resolution and clarity. The SE isn’t as good in this regard, but doesn’t feel like a technical slouch either way. Much like its predecessor it easily surpasses the sonic wall and is capable of imaging beyond the confines of its shell, though not by as much as the OG. A tradeoff for better tonality, is how you could look at it. The SE still performs respectably technically, but I really don’t think it lives up to a lot of the real benchmarks in this field. Regarding the other intangibles, the Solaris has never really had dynamic issues, and it remains fairly coherent for a hybrid (though not in the best way). I still maintain that the Solaris, both OG and SE, are intangibly capable hybrids with just generally wonky tonalities, with the OG being the more screwed of the two. Not much there is to fix that.
But my final thoughts on the SE are clear: it’s a decent improvement over the OG, fixing some (not all) of the tuning issues with the OG. I still think the faceplate is an ugly turd (the demo unit I tried had an extremely obvious seam in the right faceplate between what seems to be two cuts separate of abalone used on the same faceplate), but the SE is a respectable sonic fix of some of the pitfalls of the OG. Oh yeah, and the nozzle is less rough too. Way more comfortable.
All listening was done out of the WM1A’s 4.4mm jack.
Anyone who liked the OG Solaris will probably not go wrong with this, unless the possibility for some darkness and the slightly mushier tonality of the SE is something you want to avoid. Despite the fact that the SE is an improvement, it still has quite a few glaring issues, some leftover from the OG and some of its own design. I’ll wait for Campfire to figure out how to fix them. Until next time.
Score: 4/10
Note: The OG unit compared in this review is NOT the same unit as the one I originally reviewed. To what extent this OG unit and the one I reviewed are different I cannot ascertain, but chances are they are different. I also cannot guarantee that the same does not apply to the SE. The SE unit I heard was alright. The SE unit you hear may not be. Until further confirmation from measurements that Campfire have fixed their unit variance bonanza, beware.
In addition, the Solaris OG score has been lowered from 4/10 to 3/10. The tonal issues are too simply major to ignore, particularly the overly harsh and shouty midrange. Simply not good enough.
Just to clarify, you had an OG and SE Solaris to hand when comparing the two and this overview wasn’t based off of past experience with the OG?
Correct, I had one of each to directly compare for the review.
I certainly hope you are wearing your flame suit Aminus, The Campfire fanbois will be ready to pounce! But I certainly agree with your review! There is no question that I am personally known as a Campfire Audio Basher, simply because I feel all their IEM's are overpriced and all miss the mark, and some (like the Atlas) by a large margin, and I have owned (and returned or sold) almost every model in the range. That is how much I was dedicated to believe all the hype I had read, how much I wanted to believe. But hear we are, reading an un-biased review on an IEM that should have been better tuned.
Oh, and I finally met another member of the public today (at our headphone store) that totally agrees with my view. Now I need to find my flame suit, and unlike the Solaris it is not too big and fits perfectly!
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