lol indeed!
but i gotta say, the wait has been worth it.
I finally got my hands on them today, so after a good 4 hours with them here are my first impressions:
- the fit is perfect, which is a great relief since my impressions werent silicone but rather the 2 part paste thing. which reminds me, since i got that done free i really ought to send the audiologist a gift, cos the fit turned out perfect.
- these are my first customs, it takes maybe 10 minutes of getting used to them, and then they kind of melt away. i dont know how else to describe it. you forget about them until you do something like jerk your head around real fast for some reason,... and even then, they dont pop out but you're just gently reminded about them.
--- as a side note, i like blowing my smoke out to the side, like extreme side and the customs jiggle the tiniest bit, but they settle quickly when my jaw returns to normal.
--- no microphonics at all, and there's a little metal wire in the cable bit to mold round your ear which i quite like. they do really cut out ambient noise and my first few steps had me a bit wobbly cos i could hear my footsteps. i quickly over came that by focusing on the transmission of vibrations for my tactile feedback while walking.
- the same yucky initial sound that you first hear from the sm3's was there too, but it seems to be rectifying itself quicker than the sm3's did. perhaps thats one of the benefits of the custom fit. over the course of Roots Manuva's several albums i could hear his voice get clearer and clearer as time went on,... every 10 songs or so i would realise that his vocals have developed more definition than when i started.(randomly played so not just the difference between one album to the next)
- eq-wise,... similar to the sm3's,... you can hear that they belong to the same family, or atleast were designed/made by the same man. so if you know what the sm3's sound like, you'll have no surprises with the em3,.... so just like the sm3's that blossomed and opened up on the bass and treble region about a week later,... i'm gonna give the em3's the same amount of time to do the same. but yeah same Lopez sound.
- the rendering of space, just as good as the sm3's and since they're still burning in i think they're going to get better, so i'll hold off on discussing this too much. i remember with the sm3's i didnt notice the space rendering until 2 weeks in or so.
- compared to the sm3's from memory,... so far these are just more,.... a chunky kitkat to a regular kitkat, a supersized meal with large fries and large coke as opposed to regular, a first class seat as opposed to business class, a lexus SUV to a regular toyota suv,...... i think you get the point by now.
which makes sense,... i mean the em3's have been around longer than the sm3's, so perhaps instead of looking at the em3's as a better sm3, perhaps the more accurate perspective would be to view the sm3's as a budget em3pro designed to be mass produced. not that there's anything wrong with that, i would have been quite happy with my sm3's had circumstances been different.
I am so happy with these that if they blossom the same way the sm3's did, i'll probably never have to come back to head-fi,... until i break them. and if i did, i'd probably just give franck a call again and go with whatever happens to be his flagships at the time. so thank you everyone that has commented on their em3pros and of course the sm3's which were my gateway iems.
anyway, more listening burning in to do,... and i'm excited about recording/mixing with customs for the first time.
cheers.
