AmericanSpirit
Member of the Trade: Night Oblivion
Wow!!! I haven’t seen those names for at least 10 years. Your IEM/Cans do bring some nostalgia.i need faith and devotion to move beyond 535 and UM3X
And not really Grado Headphones, same old pain of bright and non-comfy
Why not try Tripowin Lea? It cost less than that Comply form ear tips that comes with SE535. A mere $20 and may surprise you.
If you liked laid back Westone tuning, My heartful push is Mangird Tea. Not a Grado-ish tuning.
Also you maybe enlightened by new technology of IEM’s EST(those old STAX cans or Senn’s Orpheus used electrostatic driver ) driver, as well as Planar IEM(technically it existed even from 1980s, First Planar was created by Yamaha, by the name of “Orthodynamic”, and I do own the very first Planar headphone HP-1) as well.
For planar, and laid back tuned (non-harsh treble), Wu Zetain (around 100-150usd depending on the sale) maybe a good musical one you may find enjoyable.
Pulling my memory of Single Knowles BA (like Ety’s ER4) ,First BA+DD hybrid (UE 5EB), and multi BAs(TF10Pro, 535, UMs) , things have changed. But I still remember world’s first BA+DD hybrid, UE5EB sounded utterly terrible!! bloated and muffled bass dominating the whole spectrum, with an edgy V-shape grainy BA timbre clicking around.
Here is what happened for past decade.
The issue with BA was that single BA could only handle so much of frequency dynamism without distortion, the best one was ER4, then Shure/Westone/UE started to increase the number of BA, the crossover design was still limited to 4BA or so. Then UE and other small shop brand (like JH audio) started to craft 8BA+ for Custom-IEM.
Single dynamic driver has evolved as well, Sony used LCP for their high-end IEM, but now that same technology is readily available from $20USD (the recommended Tripowin Lea, and Moondrop’s Aria/Chu also uses LCP). Many attempts to make pure sounding single dynamic, mainly by chaning diaphragm material, to elastic yet solid, some used pure beryllium, which costed $$$, some used latest nano-technology Carbon-nanotube, and some simply coated diaphragm with beryllium, titanium etc. Single dynamic has the physical energy, but the weakpoint of single dynamic is the sound image separation is limited.
The solution so far is bring multi-BA and add dynamic driver to it, mainstrram is 4BA+1DD, such as Moondrop Blessimg2.
However BA+DD isn’t perfect, the last niche of treble extension was missing. It affects presentation of airiness, so the solution was to bring electrostatic driver into an IEM. As the hot electrostatic driver needs a huge amp, Sonion applied passive electret to their EST driver. I have AKG’s passive Electret +dynamic hybrid headphone, K340, and it does sound wonderful.
There is piezoelectric driver which resembles to EST in terms of sound, but it’s a EST 0.8 to my impression, it’s distorted compared to EST.
After the EST for IEM invention, which was a mere couple of years ago, the tribrid, EST+BA+DD, is our current major config for an IEM.
Some new attempt was done by Unique Melody (they were private remold small shop before, and now a big name) improvised that EST+BA+DD and added Bone-conduction driver to it. A quadbrid, BC+EST+BA+DD. Very iimmersive and holographic.
The old Earbuds shop Head-Direct, now is renown as HifiMan, and their headphone is one of the best of all.
A small company named FiiO introduced a cheap plastic headphone amp that only costed $6USD, where a headphone amp costed at least $100, and main stream was $300-500(RSA/iqube). Now that FiiO grew to world’s one of the big3 high-end DAP maker. They do make IEM as well, and you may like it, because FiiO’s take on IEM mainly focuses rich bass and mid.
One last innovation was a finely sound Planar IEM. The planar IEM existed but not fully executed until very recent. Planar IEM, has faster attack/decay than dynamic, and has actual physical energy that BA lacks, so it’s somewhere in between BA and DD.
The new approach is to take Planar as primary source and mix with what ever existing technology(EST/piezo/BA/DD) to come over limited separation capability of Planar.
Rolling a decade back, there wasn’t really any choice besides to go with either Shure/Westone/UE, simply because there wasn’t any fully potent single dynamic IEM until Sennheiser started high-end single DD with IE7/8 series, now they are still running with same IE series, but its just lacking innovation from there.
Sennheiser basically lost the competition and sold off their consumer segment to a third party, now Sennheiser’s business is their Neumann brand and professional audio segment.
AKG also left the market, now Samsung is in charge of AKG brand.
STAX, left the market as well, they were sold to Edifier.
Japanese audio companies like Denon/JVC/Pioneer/Kenwood doesn’t exist anymore.
Etymotics/Westone left the market and sold the business to the new owner as well, thats why you see Westone/ety altogether.
UE is sold off to mouse/keyboard consumer electronics, the Logitech.
So major shift has occured. Western audio company lost competition, and now we only have Sony left as a hardcore players.
I forgot about Bose, but they were not high-end from the beginning. Bose kept B-Grade product for a decade and their specialization strategy worked, a decade later Bose still makes nice B-grade IEMs.
So that’s the end of the what happened for the past decade.
The recommended Wu Zetian, is the fully executed Planar, which may fit your new expectation. That’s the new IEM ground of 2022.
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