clastorder
New Head-Fier
I'm also chipping in to talk a little bit about the BL-03, because the process of understanding and getting to know this IEM was an experience.
I've bought fully into budget chi-fi hype and gotten burned before, so I was reticent about this from the get-go. And the hype machine makes me want to like these less. Everyone and their mother was gushing over these things. How good were they really, and was it really just budget hype - whenever something cheap and good appears, everyone seems to lose their fricking minds.
I've reached "audio endgame", as cliche as it is. I don't need to buy another pair of headphones. I own a desktop monoprice 788, a DanClark Ether CX, Klipsch HP-3, a heavily modified pair of Thieaudio Phantom. Where IEMs are concerned I'm a Moondrop fanboy, I have KXXS and recently S8. So when I heard about the BL-03 I eyerolled, watching people flip out about all the stuff Linsoul and Aliexpress vendors pimp month after month was making me jaded.
But the price wasn't anything worth thinking too hard about and the overwhelming praise made me suspicious, so I decided to eat packaged food for a few days to offset the budget and give it a shot. At worst the packaging would be good for meme value.
Cable is thin and unimpressive. I immediately swapped for a 6-core OCC, and threw out the tips for Acoustune AET07 (I freaking love Acoustune tips). Shoved them in my ears, took a deep breath. Haha, I was right I thought. The build was good, the shells were small and pretty, but didn't fit my ears very well. It really tough to get a good seal even with my preferred tips, and I found myself really having to shove these in. I also felt, overwhelmingly, that these were thin and lacking in mids. Thinking nothing of it, I brought them to work and hocked them around a bit. There was a taker eventually, but mostly we spent time laughing at the packaging.
Fast forward a month or so and the colleague who picked these up had been telling me how great these were. I again, eyerolled, assuming it to be another case of 'first time listening to headphones or iems that don't sound like complete garbage' or babby's first interaction with hi-fi. But he was irritatingly persistent even after I shoved the S8 in his ears (while WTFing about the "holy god how much did you say those cost" section).
So I go home, take the BL-03 with me and really take some time trying to understand what the deal was with these things. I try a variety of sources, and try to understand them in isolation without A/Bing them hard against anything else I own.
I get it now.
My initial impressions were not entirely wrong, but they also stray a fair bit from my preferred (Harman?) tuning.
First, the good. The separation on this thing and sense of space between instruments positionally is ****ing wild for a $35 iem. We're talking a wide and decently expansive soundstage with decent positional accuracy. The bass does literally everything anyone can ask for in a DD IEM. It kicks hard, it rumbles, the attack and decay is tight and fast. I'm hearing a midbass hump (I could be wrong). Songs with good slap bass are a total dream on this thing and I caught myself nodding my head a few times. Even counting in cable and tip upgrades (pushing it to around $50 USD region) I would happily put this up against anything in the $150 range. Beyond that competition gets stupid fierce and we start looking at driver type, multi-BA, hybrid sets, but yes, the BL-03 drastically overperforms.
The bad, and the entire reason I dismissed this thing in the first place - mids and lower treble suckout. I don't know if the tuning on this thing is an accident or something, but the width of the soundstage almost seemed to work against the mids. Vocal presentation, both male and female, suffers heavily - detail is not the issue here, but richness. Voices sound thin and have a slightly metallic quality that's really unpleasant to my ears. The soundstage is wider than it is deep, and what sound like recessed mids are possibly an attempt to add depth and height to the sound. This seems to go all the way to the treble region. This is especially notable in songs with lots of percussion or hi-hat work; while the bass drums kick and thump like they should, ride cymbals and intricate hi-hat work never quite sound like they should and have a fuzz or this veiled mess on them that makes it occasionally difficult to pick out individual strokes.
The tradeoff, of course, is that the BL-03 never comes close to being sibilant or harsh. Despite my personal beef with the mids, the bass and midbass presentation being as strong as they are makes it all work together somehow, and overall, it is cohesive.
So are the BL-03 worth the hype?
I'd say for the price... very yes. Rap, hip-hop, anything with strong thumping bass is going to have a great time. Rock is ok, even if distorted guitars sound a bit further away than they should. Bass, soundstage, and resolution are unlike anything I've hard at this price point. The overall signature is not to my taste... but at the bargain price of $35, I'm not sure you can get comparable quality.
I've bought fully into budget chi-fi hype and gotten burned before, so I was reticent about this from the get-go. And the hype machine makes me want to like these less. Everyone and their mother was gushing over these things. How good were they really, and was it really just budget hype - whenever something cheap and good appears, everyone seems to lose their fricking minds.
I've reached "audio endgame", as cliche as it is. I don't need to buy another pair of headphones. I own a desktop monoprice 788, a DanClark Ether CX, Klipsch HP-3, a heavily modified pair of Thieaudio Phantom. Where IEMs are concerned I'm a Moondrop fanboy, I have KXXS and recently S8. So when I heard about the BL-03 I eyerolled, watching people flip out about all the stuff Linsoul and Aliexpress vendors pimp month after month was making me jaded.
But the price wasn't anything worth thinking too hard about and the overwhelming praise made me suspicious, so I decided to eat packaged food for a few days to offset the budget and give it a shot. At worst the packaging would be good for meme value.
Cable is thin and unimpressive. I immediately swapped for a 6-core OCC, and threw out the tips for Acoustune AET07 (I freaking love Acoustune tips). Shoved them in my ears, took a deep breath. Haha, I was right I thought. The build was good, the shells were small and pretty, but didn't fit my ears very well. It really tough to get a good seal even with my preferred tips, and I found myself really having to shove these in. I also felt, overwhelmingly, that these were thin and lacking in mids. Thinking nothing of it, I brought them to work and hocked them around a bit. There was a taker eventually, but mostly we spent time laughing at the packaging.
Fast forward a month or so and the colleague who picked these up had been telling me how great these were. I again, eyerolled, assuming it to be another case of 'first time listening to headphones or iems that don't sound like complete garbage' or babby's first interaction with hi-fi. But he was irritatingly persistent even after I shoved the S8 in his ears (while WTFing about the "holy god how much did you say those cost" section).
So I go home, take the BL-03 with me and really take some time trying to understand what the deal was with these things. I try a variety of sources, and try to understand them in isolation without A/Bing them hard against anything else I own.
I get it now.
My initial impressions were not entirely wrong, but they also stray a fair bit from my preferred (Harman?) tuning.
First, the good. The separation on this thing and sense of space between instruments positionally is ****ing wild for a $35 iem. We're talking a wide and decently expansive soundstage with decent positional accuracy. The bass does literally everything anyone can ask for in a DD IEM. It kicks hard, it rumbles, the attack and decay is tight and fast. I'm hearing a midbass hump (I could be wrong). Songs with good slap bass are a total dream on this thing and I caught myself nodding my head a few times. Even counting in cable and tip upgrades (pushing it to around $50 USD region) I would happily put this up against anything in the $150 range. Beyond that competition gets stupid fierce and we start looking at driver type, multi-BA, hybrid sets, but yes, the BL-03 drastically overperforms.
The bad, and the entire reason I dismissed this thing in the first place - mids and lower treble suckout. I don't know if the tuning on this thing is an accident or something, but the width of the soundstage almost seemed to work against the mids. Vocal presentation, both male and female, suffers heavily - detail is not the issue here, but richness. Voices sound thin and have a slightly metallic quality that's really unpleasant to my ears. The soundstage is wider than it is deep, and what sound like recessed mids are possibly an attempt to add depth and height to the sound. This seems to go all the way to the treble region. This is especially notable in songs with lots of percussion or hi-hat work; while the bass drums kick and thump like they should, ride cymbals and intricate hi-hat work never quite sound like they should and have a fuzz or this veiled mess on them that makes it occasionally difficult to pick out individual strokes.
The tradeoff, of course, is that the BL-03 never comes close to being sibilant or harsh. Despite my personal beef with the mids, the bass and midbass presentation being as strong as they are makes it all work together somehow, and overall, it is cohesive.
So are the BL-03 worth the hype?
I'd say for the price... very yes. Rap, hip-hop, anything with strong thumping bass is going to have a great time. Rock is ok, even if distorted guitars sound a bit further away than they should. Bass, soundstage, and resolution are unlike anything I've hard at this price point. The overall signature is not to my taste... but at the bargain price of $35, I'm not sure you can get comparable quality.
