Quarantine Catchup: The Campfire 2020 Roundup
Campfire is not a brand I’ve been particularly kind to in the past. That much can be said by anyone who has kept up with this thread. It’s not because of any sort of personal beef or anything like some may think, I just genuinely disagree with a lot of their tuning direction. The Andro and Solaris sounded, simply put, wrong to me. And for one reason or another, the same applies to every other product from them that I’d heard so far. Their tuning style was always either some variant of excessively bloated and bassy or a weird wannabe colored-neutral that had some sort of glaring tonality issue.
But every company has the ability to improve, and Campfire is no exception. The Andromeda 2020 is, dare I say it, actually good. I abhorred the original Andromeda’s excessive thickness and murkiness, and used as many synonyms for “suffocation” as I could think of to describe its upper mids. But I don’t need to do that for the Andro 2020. Gone is the excessive lower midrange thickness (though by no means is it a lean IEM), and the awful flabby bass has be tightened up a decent bit. Make no mistake, this is still BA bass, but it’s gone from “offensively bad” to “not great”. Still an improvement in my eyes.
Curiously enough, the legendary 7-9khz Andro treble plateau is gone. I actually prefer this treble response more. It’s more mid-treble oriented than the original Andro’s treble tonality, but it also doesn’t sound as one note and artificially crashy as the original Andro. Perhaps it might be due to the introduction of a pinna gain region on the 2020 (finally, jesus) but I hear a lot more of the sonic wall-less soundstage on the 2020 that was, in my eyes, plainly not there on the original. This too comes with a massive (and I mean massive) improvement in layering capability. The Andro 2020’s layering is on par with some of the best in this category, and I’m really surprised by this considering the original sucked bad at it.
My primary criticisms with the Andro 2020 would lie in, once again, its lower midrange. I'd say they trimmed a lot of the fat, but they didn’t trim all of it. There is still too much lower midrange on the 2020 that at times sounds odd and a little bloated. Male vocals do have an occasional uncanny valley effect to them that’s... not great. This also comes with a bit of midbass bloat as well. Needless to say the two of these hand in hand is not exactly a good combination, though I don’t think it majorly detracts from the listening experience. There’s also a lack of dynamics which was present in the original - that one had a compressed-everything-downwards kind of sound to it not unlike an overly dampened headphone, this one sounds a little more like everything is pushed up ala PP8. Gun to my head, the latter is not as bad as the former, but neither is really that ideal.
All in all? Of the uncountable number of Andro refreshes, limited or main line, this is the only one that’s warranted. This is not an IEM that needs residual hype from 2016 to sell itself, it is a genuinely good product that I wouldn’t mind recommending to someone after the layering ability and tonality it has.
Though as much as I genuinely think the Andro 2020 is a good product, I’m also not quite fond of the Solaris 2020.
Let’s start with the mids. I disliked, no, despised the OG Solaris’ mids. Not even because of the oft cited 4khz upper midrange dip that effectively killed all female vocals, but because of the 2khz spike that rendered any sort of the lower midrange instrument a harsh grating disaster. The Solaris SE actually improved this latter point, but the 2020 is a regression in this regard. I wouldn’t necessarily call it harsh anymore so much as I would sharp or shouty, though it still is equally grating. Not helping this at all is an awful sibilant treble peak which pushes an already edgy frequency response right into painful territory on certain tracks. On more forgiving material the Solaris 2020 just has a general sense of wrongness to its midrange. It sounds lean, but at the same time the midbass is bloated and the upper mids sound sucked out. It’s a bizarre combination of things that should not have been put together and it ends up producing a really weird sounding product that’s as hard to describe as it is disconcerting to listen to.
What else... I do hear a general improvement in resolving ability and layering capability, but I don’t find this to be a particular improvement over the Andro 2020. The bass response is also not great either - not that the original Solaris ever had good bass, but this one sometimes pushes on nigh indistinguishable compared to the Andro 2020’s bass, which is nothing new considering BA-like bass was something the OG Solaris was pretty infamous for. While the dynamics are certainly not compressed like the Andro 2020's, they’re also nothing amazing either. There is a fairly large margin between this and heavyweights like the U12t or the NT6. Not a fan of this one.
And I saved the best for last. Ara. I use the word “best” sparingly because the Ara is pretty much what I would classify as a total mess.
Let’s start with the treble response. Had I listened to the Solaris 2020 after the Ara I probably wouldn’t have minded its treble response that much considering the Ara is infinitely worse in the same regard. Jesus this thing is sibilant, sharp, and generally painful to listen to. The treble is a splashy disaster that hisses more than a den of angry snakes dropped into a swimming pool. It’s not even like the midrange is any good either. I can’t decide if the mids are sucked out, veiled or both at the same time, and I don't think the Ara can either. Though resolving, it’s not like it sounds exponentially more detailed than the Andro 2020 or Solaris 2020. And the bass response and dynamic ability on the Ara is by far the worst of the trio - where the Solaris sounds like DD bass mimicking BA bass and the Andro sounds like BA bass trying (and failing) to be DD-ish, the Ara is just plain BA through and through. Its dynamic capability is flat and unengaging, failing at both macro and microdynamics like a lot of other “boring” IEMs do. I really don’t see any redeeming factor with the Ara, doubly so next to the genuinely impressive Andro 2020. I’m confused by the point of this release, but then again the same can be said for a few too many of Campfire’s products.
All listening was done with the WM1A’s 3.5mm jack.
The Andro 2020 is pretty definitely my favorite Campfire product yet. The Solaris 2020 and Ara on the other hand... need work. In any case I’m pretty impressed by the massive improvement that the Andro 2020 is over the original, though I’m not sure if fans of the OG will like the 2020 refresh. They’re pretty different IEMs overall and I can see OG loyalists not liking the 2020 due to the lack of the distinct treble plateau and the greatly trimmed lower midrange. In my eyes though these are steps in the right direction, and I hope that Campfire continues making more of them in the future.
Scores:
Andro 2020: 6/10
Ara: 2/10
Solaris 2020: 3/10
