Hey everyone. I got the E100 yesterday and I've been playing with them for a while. The exact model I bought was the "GranVela Mrice E100". Box is marked Mrice and comes with the headphones in a small plastic bag and two pairs of foams (one donut type). Headphones are marked "Baldoor" on the plug, so yeah there's some weird chinese corporation stuff going on with these in Europe. These costed me 20€ shipped.
That being said, a quick first impression review.
Build quality: pretty good all-plastic, cable is interesting to say the least, seems very sturdy. Manufacturing quality is overall ok. Jack is "gold" plated.
Comfort: these are relatively big and I wish they had that part extending downward from the driver (sorry for the crude explanation, my English is not cooperating this morning) like regular earbuds because this way they are kinda hard to keep in place, as soon as you touch the cable you get some slight movement. Other than that they're regular earbuds and don't take much adjusting to do. You'd have to have a gaping ear canal to fit these sideways or insert them, so I wear them normally.
My usage: I bought these as portable and chillout headphones for when I don't want to wear my fullsize cans and because I don't like ear-canal earbuds. Most of my collection is 320kbps mostly, and I have no amps. My PC has a Xonar DGX low end dedicated soundcard, and I have two smartphones, a Sony Xperia Z3 and a Samsung Galaxy S4. I highly recommend using the foams, I use regular foams.
Sound: these do sound really good (for earbuds). There's literally no way these sound better than full size headphones or IEMs, but when it comes to earbuds, I'd say they're like a darker sounding K319 with much better bass, which is top tier in my opinion. The K319 was extremely bright with insane amounts of treble detail but these are less bright than those and just as detailed. They definitely beat the Senn MX580 and MX880 in all respects, and there's no competition with the cheaper AKG Y15 (15€). There is lots of micro details, bass is punchy and not bloated, and midrange is ok. Vocals sound very nice on those, especially female vocals. These can also resolve fast and "messy" music very well, stuff like uplifting trance, japanese eurobeat, chiptune and stuff like that definitely sounds good and well defined. Classical also sounds good to me, I'm no connoisseur and unfortunately I've never been to a live performance, but I think my favourite classical cd (Vivaldi La Stravaganza by Rachel Podger) sounds very good, not as good as my Senn HD558 obviously but totally listenable.
Something that I expected to be better is Soundstage, it's there but I feel like there's something missing, sound is not as spacy as I hoped, but still pretty good for earbuds.
Finally, one note on the volume, these are insanely loud, you will blow your ears off if you max out the volume on a PC. On my PC, the AKG Y15 needs 90-100 to sound loud, these are loud enough at 40. My phones can drive these well enough, volume is good at around 70%. Unfortunately since Android only has 15 steps, there's quite a bit of a sound gap between say, 12 and 13, so since these are this crazy loud you'll have some songs sounding either too low or too loud.
Prices MX580 (35€) E100 (20€) Y15 (15€)
Comfort MX580 (literally perfect for me) -> Y15 (just as good as the MX but slightly bigger) ----> E100 (average)
Build Quality Y15 (metal meshes, high quality plastic, ok cable) ----> E100 (good cable, good plastic) -> Mx580 (crappy everything)
Sound E100 (highest details and bass quality) -> MX580 (laid back, darker, good detail) ----> Y15 (muddy)
Volume output E100 ----> MX580 ---------> Y15
There's no K319 because I broke them, I can only remember their impressive clarity. Also note that E100doesn't have a volume control, MX580 has it but it's worthless and has been uneven and with huge gaps since day one, Y15 has it and it works well (same piece as the one on K319 actually).
Thanks for reading, I'll update this if the sound changes with burn in or if I find out something else about them. Now I'm waiting for the JiuShao, hoping the do arrive at some point.
