I'm stuck with a dilemma here and I'm not sure what to do. I love the roxanne, it sounds amazing to me. I've tried 10+ over different high end IEMs (Campfire, other JH, Westone, Shure, T8IE) and none of them really made me say wow like roxanne does. Its a little weird, my personal favourite IEM is the ER4S and I love the detailed sound of ER4 with the tiny bit of bass that comes along with it. I've always disliked warm/bassy IEMs because I've never liked how bass sounded on IEMs. Now, the Roxanne is the first and only IEM that clicked in terms of how the bass sounded, even when I crank the bass knob up to 3PM. The bass has the correct amount of punch and doesn't feel overly bloated, and the vocals and trebles continue to sound smooth while retaining clarity which many other IEM's that I've tried don't. The short story here is that Roxannes sounded great to my ears and I don't think I could find another earphones that sounded better.
Now heres the problem. I've got the universal roxanne 2 and the build is atrocious. In less than a month, I've RMAed it 3 times and every time the glue on the backplate falls out while the 3rd time included a cable problem on top of the backplate issue. As much as I like how it sounds, it simply doesn't make sense for me to continue to use such a shabbily built earpiece, worrying that the backplate will fall out of the newest set that I've got. I'm not entirely sure what I should do. Do the JH customs have build related problems as well?
A couple of options:
1. Customs JH roxanne. I'm not sure if I can continue to trust the build quality of JH products with my bad experience, so I'm going to take the worse case scenario. Are there any big issues that people had with custom roxanne?
2. Any other earpiece recommendations. I've tried many IEMs, none of them sounded great like the roxannes, or too different from my ER4S to justify a purchase. My personal favourite setting for the roxannes is to have it at 10AM - 11AM bass knob. I've tried other products,
- JH Rosie sounded nice, but the bass sounded off. Anywhere higher than 0% bass is a straight turn off for me, but 0% rosie sounds decent.
- Angie 2 sounded bad to me, the sound feels like its muffled to me similar to westone's house sound.
- Layla sounded great, but I've found that it suffer from a similar "muffled" feeling as angie 2 (to a lesser extent). Also reminds me closely to my Er4 at 0% bass while turning up the bass doesn't sound good to me.
- Campfire Vega and Dorado - trebles feels too weak, but bass/mids sounded great.
- Campfire andromeda - I'm surprised at how harsh the trebles sounded. Not a comfortable sound to listen to for long, and the fitting is odd with the edges of the IEM.
- AK T8IE - Not a very big fan of U shaped EQ, although it sounded great on electronic music, rock sounds terrible with the vocals sounding weak.
- Westone W50/W60 - W50 sounded like trash to me. Its muffled, like the other westone IEMs. W60 seem to move away from the muffled sound (still has traces of it) but doesn't impress me anywhere else my ER4 don't already do. Bass is stronger than the ER4, but nowhere as solid as the Roxannes.
- DITA the brass - I tried this for a short period of time and my impression is that this is a very well balanced IEM, but the fitting and isolation feels really bad. Partly because of its weight perhaps, but I couldn't get a nice fit on this. This felt like ER4S with slightly more bass without being overwhelming. Definitely a good choice for me but I'm looking at something that is a little different from how the ER4 and the price doesn't justify the small difference with the ER4S.