Is it me or is this issue of iems arriving "out of phase" becoming more and more prevalent lately?
It’s an easy mistake to make, so it’s been happening since speakers and headphones were invented.
However, the risk gets multiplied with each pair of drivers you add.
So in a pair of single driver earphones/headphones, there’s only 2 drivers to keep track of and make sure you solder the + and - correctly.
But now that gear with 2, 3, and even 5 and 6 drivers (per side) are becoming commonplace, that’s a ton of drivers to keep track of.
It doesn’t help that the drivers are often the size of a grain of rice.
Years ago, multi-driver gear was only available from mainstream western companies for thousands of dollars. Those companies have extensive multi-step QA procedures in place (involving multiple people), because the per unit cost justified it (as well as the reputation of the company).
Therefore, you are more likely to get an out of phase set from a small ChiFi operation selling $20 IEMs, because the price doesn’t allow for a multi-step QA procedure by a whole team of dedicated QA employees.
Using Shure as a generic example of the typical “high dollar western company”:
1. The profit margins are slim (vs higher profit arbitration Shure)
2. The production employees are not always the most skilled (vs the average production employee working at Shure)
3. There is minimal QA testing (vs massive QA testing at Shure)
Obviously, there are multiple levels of ChiFi gear just like there’s multiple levels of Western gear. The points I stated above are just generalizations. There are western companies with poor QA, just like there’s ChiFi companies with good QA.
