I tend to stay away from Chi-Fi given quality control and customer service concerns. Do you have any specific value recommendations that can approach the sound quality of the two mentioned in OP?
I tend to stay away from Chi-Fi given quality control and customer service concerns. Do you have any specific value recommendations that can approach the sound quality of the two mentioned in OP?
The past 2 years especially, the CHIFI products have really caught up to the western stuff in the budget to midfi segment in the area of sound quality. To give an example, I had a KZ ZS10 Pro that could give subjectively 80% sound quality (in details, instrument separation, clarity, imaging) to my Westone 3 and Westone W30, which costs 10 times more. Customer service should be ok if u purchase stuff from Amazon where there's a returns gurantee. The way I see it, for 10 CHIFI products (that give about same sound quality as a western set that costs 10 times more), even if one turns out to have QC problems, I can still get 9 more and maybe the other 9 will work fine, rather than one expensive western set dying on me.
Actually I was like you until 3 years ago, when I realized CHIFI QC and sound is not bad. I've been using IEMs for the past 15 years for stage monitoring and casual music listening and I was always snobbish towards CHIFI products, thinking their QC and sound cannot compare with western stuff. I bought lots of western gear before that, like Shures, Beyerdynamics, Westones and Sennheisers. And then I realized the western gear QC is not the best too, I had a few western multi driver midfi sets (costing $400 USD upwards) die on me at the cable insertion point with just a few months of use. Most of the budget to midfi Western gear is made in China anyway, short of some TOTL stuff. Surprisingly I have bought upwards of 20 CHIFI IEMs/headphones/buds and for the past 2 years I had not have much major QC problems, all of them are still working fine today, some with daily use, thrown into backpacks etc.
Even today, some of the CHIFI stuff like QDC can compete head to head with TOTL western gear in the area of sound quality. Western gear I feel is established, but they have lesser price to performance ratio, but of course they have marketing, R&D and labour/materials costs that can't compete with CHIFI products, but I have never regretted jumping down the CHIFI rabbit hole as that really saved me a lot of cash in this hobby in the long term. YMMV.
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