Driver size of that few mm difference is at least to my ear, inaudible, I’m not confident enough in telling the driver’s size with it’s sonic performance associated with, unless 6mm DD vs 10mm DD class huge difference. It’s not like car world, the higher the rev-counter, higher horsepower in a particular converts to more power.
For that ranking list, I see Timmy is inclined tonality/timbre over what IEM has to offer with their combination of drivers/crossovers/passive-crossovers. You see he ranked 4BA+1DD as S-. Among other EST hybrids and 6BA +multi BA models. I do it too, my backend computation of final score is 80:20. Timbre/Tonality vs Technicalities. But his weight could be higher.
Most of his top S tier is Elysian, which tells his biases toward certain tuning.
And from objective observation for Scoring DUNU’s SA6 ultra as S- noting with Anole VX-ish tuning, and Actual Anole VX as A-, is a solid evidence that ranking has “significant” bias weight in tonality over hardware specs.
To put this in a plain English, Timmy the car reviewer guy, is saying “I think Porche 911 V6 engine, is a better performance car over Lamborghini Sesto Elemento (V10). “ you can see that’s not hardware spec evaluation.
So I’d first find if Timmy’s tonality preference is in alignment with yours. If it matches to a great degree with yours with those common denominators, yea you’d probably find it very reliable. Otherwise I’d take it with tonality-favor biased ranking list.
For Wu Zetian’s Heyday edition, as someone went thru this industry from time where IEM hasn’t existed yet— That HBB’s safe tuning for heyday pulled the plug of Wu’s beauty.
Nothing personal, and not meant to offend someone who purchased. To me, heyday is a “Not worth a try”.
Tangzu’s recipe for Wu, as current owner, is Warm-neutralish tuning without sacrificing sense of staging, and detail articulations.
What HBB did is killing that sense of sensation, because he doesn’t like anything hits over his target curve. And nerf’ing warmth that Wu had, for less colorations.
It is an act of ripping Wu’s make ups off.
From this
To this
It’s understandable and his virtue toward colorless tuning to his HRTF is well executed in many Collaborations IEM, I like his DQ6S tuning (64 audio u12t copy though).
But in making beautifully tuned Wu, to colorless Wu, is highly questionable. Yea different taste, warm-harman curve taste. Nicely tuned by boring warm-harman curve that we see it in almost every pricing segments, just another harman spinoff.