[drftr]

I've been reading hundreds of IEM reviews in the past few weeks in the $300-$800 range, and it struck me that 90% of the reviews ends up with similar conclusions:

- bass boost
- shouty mids
- plasticky upper mids
- either dark with very little sparkle and air, or very brightly tuned

The way these effects are described on average seems to make them a perceived negative, so apparently we want something different than the market is offering. That may be due to the combination of technical and budgetary limitations, but apparently that is not always the case.

So I wondered, do we want the wrong thing, are producers' ears better than reviewers' ears, or is the market trying to sell us something we don't really want?

drftr

 

[Jenz]

The IEM market is almost entirely dependent on Asian buyers. I think European & American customers are clearly in the minority.
And in Asia they just like this special tonal tuning (screaming mids and lots of bass).
However, the in-ear market is so big that everyone can find their sound reference.

 

[HiFiHawaii808]

98% of consumers do not know good sound from bad sound. So, people just buy what someone else told them about, what has the coolest commercials, what they see in a high fi store or what is on the shelf in Best buy or on sale on Amazon. Consumer reviews are terrible because the blind are leading the blind.

As with most things, IEMs follow a normal distribution of quality. What you want to do is use the reviewers to screen out all of the garbage. Then, listen to enough alternatives so that you know roughly what you like and use the professional reviewers to get down to a short list. I find the professional reviewers are pretty consistent in technical merits of IEMs. Where they differ is in tuning preference. Everyone likes something different. You need to figure out what you like. That is not an easy feat. It takes a lot of critical listening time and A/B testing a lot of products. That's what audiophiles do.

 

[drftr]

What are currently considered the "best" balanced / neutral tuned IEMs in this price class? I wanted to add "Western tuned" to balanced / neutral but I honestly think V-shaped IEMs are as highly regarded in the West as in the East.

drftr

 

[KutuzovGambit]

ThieAudio Oracle/Clairvoyance/Monarch are quite highly regarded. Softears RSV is a rather neutral choice that is highly praised if you go in for all-BA IEMs.

 

[Acuno]

Ety EVO

 

[drftr]

ThieAudio Oracle/Clairvoyance/Monarch are quite highly regarded. Softears RSV is a rather neutral choice that is highly praised if you go in for all-BA IEMs.

I wondered if the ThieAudios would be too bassy for me (same story for probably all Moondrops) although the Clairvoyance (from reading) seems to be the most neutrally tuned. Boring is juuuuuust fine for me

What all 4 seem to have in common is that their shells are rather large I'm also a bit worried about the RSVs fully sealed enclosure (spending most of my time in the tropics and sub-tropics and often having 5-8 hour listening sessions).

drftr

 

[drftr]

Ety EVO

I have held off reading about them so far because of their suggested "comfort". Will add them to my research list.

drftr

 

[drftr]

@Acuno After reading close to a dozen reviews I think this IEM actually indeed gets extremely close to my preferred tonality. Still, as the whole experience it gives you I would hold off. Deep insertion, heavy shells, super light and thin cable with non-standard T2 connectors, and power hungry are just a few of my notes. That's simply too many ifs and potential problems. Sound-wise I noted a few slightly this and slightly that's but nothing that doesn't belong in this price range. At all.

drftr

 

[gmdb]

bass boost
- shouty mids
- plasticky upper mids
- either dark with very little sparkle and air, or very brightly tuned

The way these effects are described on average seems to make them a perceived negative, so apparently we want something different than the market is offering.

I wonder if there's a couple of things going on here:
1. that it is in fact difficult (impossible even?) to make an IEM that has controlled bass, natural mids and an upper end that matches most people's hearing as well as some sweet overall tuning; and
2. expectations in the $300 - $800 market. That is starting to look like a good chunk of money for many people and they're no doubt expecting performance that eliminates the usual drawbacks they find with cheaper IEMs.

I've spent quite a bit of time in the last few months reading reviews of, and listening to, IEMS in the less than $80 range. Lots of positive reviews along the lines of "good value for money" and punches above its weight" - and having listened to around 10 IEMs in this market segment I generally agree. For the outlay, the quality is very good indeed. And perhaps this is part of what is impacting on expectations for the more expensive end of the market. A bigger improvement is expected than what is technically possible.

 

[Redcarmoose]

Why is nobody even mentioning source used? There is a spectrum of reproduction at times, where an OK IEM gets better with a better source. The sound response of an IEM is a combination of everything, DAP and IEM.

I've been reading hundreds of IEM reviews in the past few weeks in the $300-$800 range, and it struck me that 90% of the reviews ends up with similar conclusions:

- bass boost
- shouty mids
- plasticky upper mids
- either dark with very little sparkle and air, or very brightly tuned

The way these effects are described on average seems to make them a perceived negative, so apparently we want something different than the market is offering. That may be due to the combination of technical and budgetary limitations, but apparently that is not always the case.

So I wondered, do we want the wrong thing, are producers' ears better than reviewers' ears, or is the market trying to sell us something we don't really want?

drftr

It’s fine for you to generalize to a point, but over generalization gets you only so far. The fact is this is all about personal sound preference and that is the main reason why there are arguments about sound quality......that and the source used.

What a difference a source makes can be from very small to huge in the response of IEMs. Many many takes on a sound response have also to do with the experience of the reviewer, and again......his personal taste in FR. And of course people don’t always know what good and bad are.

But you are right in a way as recently there has been a huge influx of $500 to $800 IEMs. It’s funny too as maybe there is still a huge valley between the $600 and $2000 IEMs. But reviews all basically do the same thing, they try and find value and criticize what they feel is missing. Probably the biggest change has been what you can get under $100.00. That area of the market has surprised me in the last year! Still you always get what you pay for somehow? Meaning so many who are just getting into this are hoping to find end-game sound for $800. Again I guess it comes down to what sound your after. The IEMs being reviewed don’t all sound the same. It’s just people do their best to transfer their ideas and concepts. Ideas and concepts actually change too. That means that 1 year from now they (the reviewer) may view some sound characteristics or concepts as different than they do today. How is that?

Because people are always changing there ideas due to experience and sometimes they just like a different sound.

A different source other than an Apple Dongle will at times use distortions to improve sound. Not all DAPs are the same too. Some have a bigger soundstage than an Apple Dongle or result in different imaging than the Dongle response. There is as many different sounds almost as there are DAPs and Dongles. Some sources are actually very bright. Others are darker and even sound slower. All this affects the IEM. Some a little, but some a lot!

The best thing for you to do is just jump in and try gear. The end of the road is obtained by many Head-Fi members. Meaning there really are many who don’t post anymore but are happy with what they found. Head-Fi is filled with many that are experiencing the chase. There is nothing wrong with the chase except it depends what you will do when you find something that causes you to stop buying. Are we truly interested in spending and spending, looking for something that doesn’t exist? Or are we going from one thrill to another just for the sake of it. The truth is the happy people often are not around any longer to share their story. They came here for information, now they are gone.

I’m not sure Chinese IEMs can be totally narrowed down to one FR, except their music is different, so maybe there is something to that?

General Listeners:
Some of this may have to do with what music they like. Meaning there is no set response curve for studios. So every recording is a different tonal response. So in that, some are too bright, others dark and we are trying to find one response from an IEM and DAP combination that works, not only for out taste in music, but our tone wanted as well. So imagine that, the thing that was recorded is lost in time, there is no example left for us. Only we have a producers idea as to what it is to sound like. Only the monitors he used is different in every studio! So that is one reason for the confusion.


Will one IEM work? I think so but it may take a while to learn how to hear and also find one that is detailed but also forgiving enough and musical. I use two IEMs that I’ve had for a very long time and I’m happy. One is $1700 and one is $1850. So I also have a bunch of IEMs that are $200 to $400. Some $700. I normally listen to the more expensive ones? But that’s not to say the lesser ones don’t have redeeming values.

But the longer you do this the more you “kinda” know. If anything you learn to know yourself and what tone you like.

 

[drftr]

Why is nobody even mentioning source used? There is a spectrum of reproduction at times, where an OK IEM gets better with a better source. The sound response of an IEM is a combination of everything, DAP and IEM.


It’s fine for you to generalize to a point, but over generalization gets you only so far. The fact is this is all about personal sound preference and that is the main reason why there are arguments about sound quality......that and the source used.

What a difference a source makes can be from very small to huge in the response of IEMs. Many many takes on a sound response have also to do with the experience of the reviewer, and again......his personal taste in FR. And of course people don’t always know what good and bad are.

But you are right in a way as recently there has been a huge influx of $500 to $800 IEMs. It’s funny too as maybe there is still a huge valley between the $600 and $2000 IEMs. But reviews all basically do the same thing, they try and find value and criticize what they feel is missing. Probably the biggest change has been what you can get under $100.00. That area of the market has surprised me in the last year! Still you always get what you pay for somehow? Meaning so many who are just getting into this are hoping to find end-game sound for $800. Again I guess it comes down to what sound your after. The IEMs being reviewed don’t all sound the same. It’s just people do their best to transfer their ideas and concepts. Ideas and concepts actually change too. That means that 1 year from now they (the reviewer) may view some sound characteristics or concepts as different than they do today. How is that?

Because people are always changing there ideas due to experience and sometimes they just like a different sound.

A different source other than an Apple Dongle will at times use distortions to improve sound. Not all DAPs are the same too. Some have a bigger soundstage than an Apple Dongle or result in different imaging than the Dongle response. There is as many different sounds almost as there are DAPs and Dongles. Some sources are actually very bright. Others are darker and even sound slower. All this affects the IEM. Some a little, but some a lot!

The best thing for you to do is just jump in and try gear. The end of the road is obtained by many Head-Fi members. Meaning there really are many who don’t post anymore but are happy with what they found. Head-Fi is filled with many that are experiencing the chase. There is nothing wrong with the chase except it depends what you will do when you find something that causes you to stop buying. Are we truly interested in spending and spending, looking for something that doesn’t exist? Or are we going from one thrill to another just for the sake of it. The truth is the happy people often are not around any longer to share their story. They came here for information, now they are gone.

I’m not sure Chinese IEMs can be totally narrowed down to one FR, except their music is different, so maybe there is something to that?

General Listeners:
Some of this may have to do with what music they like. Meaning there is no set response curve for studios. So every recording is a different tonal response. So in that, some are too bright, others dark and we are trying to find one response from an IEM and DAP combination that works, not only for out taste in music, but our tone wanted as well. So imagine that, the thing that was recorded is lost in time, there is no example left for us. Only we have a producers idea as to what it is to sound like. Only the monitors he used is different in every studio! So that is one reason for the confusion.


Will one IEM work? I think so but it may take a while to learn how to hear and also find one that is detailed but also forgiving enough and musical. I use two IEMs that I’ve had for a very long time and I’m happy. One is $1700 and one is $1850. So I also have a bunch of IEMs that are $200 to $400. Some $700. I normally listen to the more expensive ones? But that’s not to say the lesser ones don’t have redeeming values.

But the longer you do this the more you “kinda” know. If anything you learn to know yourself and what tone you like.

Excellent write-up - tnx for the efforts...

I was generally comparing with a sound that I have accepted a long long time ago as not doing too many things bad: the Stax Lambda Pro. When recording, say, an acoustic ensemble, and listening back directly over a quality source a clarinet should still sound as a clarinet, an acoustic bass as an acoustic bass, and the full spectrum of a piano as the full spectrum of a piano. One piano though, and not three totally different ones because it's a trybrid with possibly huge cross-over problems. Piano is probably the nastiest instrument for faithful reproduction, especially for an IEM, but as much as there's ways to tune a piano there's ways to tune an IEM. I take it the drivers and techniques used to build an IEM are less important than both the tuning and the way they fit in your ear. Of course there's the source that drives them too plus cables, connectors, etcetera, but we're talking details here (albeit important ones!) as 80% of IEMS in that price range are reasonably easy to drive. There's exceptions for shure, and the less you have to trick with crossovers the more obvious a better source becomes; a fantastic example being some relatively cheap planars without a muddyong cross-over that can become a totally different beast with a good front-end.

But back to that tuning. If we have a good front-end and use the assumption that 80% can be driven quite well then we still have the issue of creating a faithful reproduction of acoustic instruments and voices, or using tuning or tricks to add distortion to make it sound more pleasant to a certain group. My gripe is that that group seems to be mostly Asians as someone correctly pointed out earlier (I hadn't thought of that) and that the tuning is used to pronounce frequencies that line up with their favourite instruments, vocals, and music in general. Long story short: I wished they wouldn't and with that produce far more balanced / neutral sounding IEMs of which the sound quality depends on materials used (read: budget limitations) instead of adding distortion to either hide sonic shortcomings or to favour one market over another. But in the end it's all about money and for that reason we'll see hundreds of new releases in a year of which most aim for a similar sound profile. It's not unlike walking in a street in China where they have 40 karakoas (yes, those streets do exist) or another street with 25 greengrocers next to each other selling the exavt same things and even having the fruits and veggies arranged and displayed in the exact (as in: 100% the same) way. That is exactly where the IEM market is heading as ChiFi will be 90% of the market. I think this development is not even great or even good for Asians as this totally limits thinking out of the box. Like an education in which there is only one truth and all others are neglected.

drftr

 

[Redcarmoose]

“- bass boost
- shouty mids
- plasticky upper mids
- either dark with very little sparkle and air, or very brightly tuned”

Above your quote:

These are the results that you read about many reviewers finding? But still there may be a greater difference, those are just generalizations in an attempt to describe sound replay? I haven’t heard all the IEMs out there but I would take a chance and say there are more variation than what’s described by the writers? I mean yes, stuff has changed in the last 5 years in the quality of IEMs from China, but also things have somewhat stayed the same as far as stepping back and trying to understand reviews. Quality of realism in replay, I get to farther down in this response.

So?
I mean is it true that the emperor has no cloths? Is everyone dealing with the fact that tunings are “off”. Yet maybe they are still doing business (exchanges of cash) for a product that’s good yet not perfect? I would have to say actually I don’t know? The general public of audiophiles is voting with their wallets and buying. They are putting their hard earned cash on the line and transactions are being made. So? That’s one thing.

I’m going to go with my default answer that it’s very hard to make a real sounding IEM. We are dealing with the illusion of music playback. It’s infinite as to how it can be interpreted. Because yes, parts are basic principles of playback but also part is subjective ideas as to tone. So.......

I think the same issues come about from IEMs made from many parts of the world. The same could be said for the Sony sound, or maybe IEMs made in the USA. That it’s always going to be the task of getting someone to understand and “agree” that reproduction is correct. When in fact it is an illusion always. That maybe it would be actually easier to step back and judge the whole history of reproduction of music. This synthetic thing that we all take as real. It may even be delusional that as a group we truly believe we are getting sound reproduction that’s faithful to life? But maybe there is a preponderance of treble in a certain way in many Chinese IEMs? Still I argue that there are far more of a variation in reproduction to simply take the group and say one thing about it. There probably are tone trends but you just have to get out there and listen.

Quality in realism:
Truthfully I don’t know. Meaning it’s an illusion what we are hearing. I have heard the Stax Lambda Pro at a meet, but it’s been awhile? If we are to spend money on “truth in replay”......still it is a mental thing as well as an actual response from the product. It’s a trained way to hear music which we tell ourselves is something correct. I mean how would you have polarized opinions on the latest TOTL if that wasn’t the case? Yes, there are the obvious physical differences in each person which change the sound. The way each ear canal is a different shape, the way the walls of the ear are different............degrees of dryness or wetness. The distance to the eardrum is different, the resonance points vary. The neutral/physiology response of hearing is different for everyone as well as their personal history of music and what they judge as correct playback. But.....FR is maybe 80% of getting the IEM to sound correct. An even, complete and correct frequency response can actually be of many variations and still be acceptable, don’t forget that.

Again though you talk about 80% of IEMs being easy to drive.

What I’m saying is that many tonal response characteristics from DAPs are different. It’s not just power we are talking about. Of course there are the camps that also believe in cables........but all this “stuff” has an end goal of acceptance in playback. You need to accept what ever your eventually like as an IEM. It’s a long process and has nothing to do with where the IEM is made. It’s the combination of everything put together and the final aspect is you the listener. It’s a mental thing if you can listen to 30 different recordings and they all sound natural, and even exciting!

It’s partially also the playback system but the reason we take so long to “know” if we are happy is the mental part of the equation.

There are $4000 and $6000 IEMs, there are $400 and $600 IEMs.....in many ways the concepts are the same in learning to like them. There is no perfect IEM, only perfect listening moments.

Somehow over time we learn to ignore the issues and may find replay that is more than acceptable. You need to find an IEM you love regardless of quality of response as there is no perfect reproduction to be found. There may be times when you think you hear perfect reproduction but then you may find other issues, until you find one or two keepers.

Though I think the more you spend the better the IEMs get. I have one IEM that I have had since 2018 and it’s not perfect but I listen to it and don’t judge it but simply listen to the music. It costs about $600. I don’t need to exchange it, or am I looking to better it. It’s not one that I listen to all the time but I really like it. It was made in China. I use it every day. The point of this is there was a time when I judged it more. There was times when it was lower on my list of preferences. But over the years I slowly liked it more and more until now when I accept it in it’s entirety. How this happens, I don’t know?

 

[castleofargh]

I don't know if the market is at large overly bright. But I know that many people will not insert their IEM well enough(if they even can), and won't have an ideal seal. Both of which will alter the FR in a significant way(along with the choice of tip that's also possibly impacting all the rest).
As mentioned by Red, what is driving the IEM can also have some noticeable impact. Single BAs will have a rising impedance with higher freq, so anything driving them that is fairly high impedance, will make the IEM brighter than it should by some amount. With multidriver design, it's total chaos and in the most extreme cases, just an extra ohm at the amp's output can turn it into something that feels very different.

Can all those causes of differences between users and IEMs, lead to trends about the perceived tuning being bright? some clearly shouldn't and would take us away from any trend. But some could. So, who knows? not me ^_^.

Maybe IEMs are just not good at doing much beside being small. But people still expect them to sound very detailed because of the increased isolation and proximity? perhaps that did create a demand for something that won't happen. In turn creating a trend of boosted mid and/or treble, for the purpose of making listeners mistake it with resolution/detail? IDK

My guess is a trend for IEMs coming close to the Harman target(that I personally happen to find a little too bright). Harman didn't do a real big study for in-ears, but they did for headphones, and back in the days for speakers. Both times with a huge impact on the audio world. So it's really no surprise if more people in the industry are now paying attention to what Harman thinks is right/preferred. As an IEM designer, you just try to vaguely follow their suggested preferred curve, and you're done! Tuning is a leading variable in listener's preferences, so you ensure production of something that will probably satisfy a percentage of the population that's bigger than your wildest dream for sales expectations. Pretty good deal without wasting any time or money on R&D. It's chifi paradise IMO, and still a very good plan for more serious manufacturers.

As for reviewers, they're just one more pair of legs on the marketing centipede. I know doing proper reviews is a hard job taking way too much time(I gave up real fast even at a totally amateurish level because of that). But it's a marketing tool nonetheless and should be treated as such IMO.

 

[drftr]

My guess is a trend for IEMs coming close to the Harman target

I think that's a huge part of the problem I'm referring to and I probably should have mentioned it. Everyone is flirting with the same target, pinna rise, etcetera, and still want to come out ahead to be the better set. How? Just a taaaaad more treble and suddenly you seem to have a much more dynamic headset. And for marketing more bright = more dynamic = more better = more everything.

But what if you don't like the target followed because you don't consider it balanced at all? Then you simply have bad luck. Bummer...

drftr