I started typing this just as an update, but i felt I had so much to share to you about the sound that it has turned into a short review. It would have been easier for me to write this in Swedish, but I'm doing my best writing in English.
Okay, so two pairs of UE-11s arrived last Tuesday. Estimated delivery date was Friday the week before that, and I got a little pissed at the Swedish customs because they messed up and delayed the delivery so I didn't get them before the weekend (the whole point, right?). The Swedish import taxes were the same as my calculations: 4500 SEK or $720 for both pairs. I went on a little trip last Tuesday to the airport to pick them up to keep me from waiting another day.
So I got home, all excited and nervous and ripped open the FedEx package. My monitors looked great, not as dark as I had expected (they look darker in the pictures than they are in real life, they have more of a grey tone to them than black). My mom's UE-11s look gorgeous; Ultimate Ears totally nailed her art work request. If you wonder why I have the horse logo in my ear on the pictures below look ahead.
So I struggled with getting my translucent black UE-11s in my ears. No matter how hard I tried I could not get something even close to a fit. They isolated about as good as a pair of open cans that sit on your ears loosely.
After about half an hour pushing them in and out of my ears I gave up. I didn't even bother putting any music on because I knew that it would sound bad.
Then I went to try the other pair of UE-11s just out of curiosity to see how they would fit. Grabbed the right earphone, did the rock forward movement as seen on the UE-website, and BAM! They just popped in comfortably in about 1.5 sec, the same with the left earphone. The isolation was extremely good, better than my previous SF5 Pro with shure olive foamies (which isolates much better than the original silicon tips). When I later heard that my translucent black fit my mom's ears perfectly, there was no question about it - the impressions were mixed up. Still, I was very happy since I got a great fit, now all I needed to do was send them back to UE to get them replaced.
But enough talking, let's move on to the sound! Keep in mind that this is listening straight from a 2nd gen 8gb nano. The music I listen to varies a lot, from classical to rock to pop to just about anything. I have yet to find a music genre that sounds worse than any other, with a slight exception of classical piano. It's been a while since I auditioned the GS-1000 so I would not be confident enough to do any comparisons there. Up until I got the UE11s I have been listening to SR 325i, however some comparisons will be made to the Super.fi 5 Pro's since those are the only ones I have owned up until now. If someone is interested, I will post comparisons to the SR 325i when they get here (bought a pair on Ebay)
Okey, so the first thought when the music started playing for the first time with a proper seal: Damn, I should have gotten the UE-10s instead! These have a massive amount of low end, and it's not just the two lowest octaves of human hearing capabilities, there is also a midbass hump. The bass QUANTITY is what I remembered my old super.fi 5 EBs to have (further researching has shown that this is not the case, the quantity is somewhere between the Pro's and the EB's, but still a lot more than the Pro's). Now folks considering buying the UE-11s don’t be discouraged. Remember I am talking about quantity, not quality.
Anyway the first hour or so was all about getting used to the new sound signature (read: bass). I have a tendency to dislike new sound signatures at first, then start to appreciate the sound more and more. I don't believe strongly in mechanical burn-in, more in your mind adjusting to the new sound. After a while, I started to really enjoy these earphones.
As someone here has mentioned before when referring to the UE-11s: how is it possible to combine the musicality that the huge and addicting low end gives you without losing the reference quality to the sound? I think the answer here is that the bass have so little interference with the other parts of the frequency spectrum, or more specifically that no detail is lost even though the bass is prominent.
An example: I was listening to Victor Wooten’s relaxing bass line in "Yinin' and Yangin'" If you haven't listened to Wooten before, please do so, amazing bass player. In this song, you can really feel his bass guitar vibrating in your ear. You can hear his fingers tapping and sliding along the strings and the bass detail is so good that you get a vivid image in your head of the string vibrating back and forth as the lowest bass guitar notes vibrates your ear drum. The bass guitar with these phones is definitely more forward than the guitar and drums, still if you leave the bass and shift the concentration towards the guitar you can clearly hear how the guitarist sometimes leave his fingers on the fret board touching the string still vibrating, leaving a sharp and very realistic sound of the distortion that occurs (sorry I can't describe this better).
They also have that addicting thumpy feeling to the bass drum. Example: The intro bass drum in Rage Against the Machine’s "Take the Power Back" hit your eardrum with such brute force that you get surprised that your whole body doesn't follow through. Still, the bass kick is extremely tight, and lets you listen to the reverberation tumbling around in the room which lasts just over half a second. The reverberation makes it so easy for you to analyze the size of the room and its acoustic properties
The midrange is warm and very smooth. Female vocals have a warm, relaxing feeling to them. Listening to Colbie Caillat's Magic, her voice is superbly textured. I am not sure if it is the warmth of her voice or the treble detail with her singing the letters K, F, T or S that make her voice sound so realistic. However, I'm still not sure if the midrange is perfect according to my taste, I want a slightly more forward and aggressive midrange. Just like the Super.fi 5 Pro’s I feel the upper midrange is slightly attenuated, although not at all as bad as the SF5’s. I have the feeling that this is because of my source, I believe the Imod has been said to solve this. Also, someone that have an amp that have the ability to bring the upper midrange forward, please tell me as I am searching for an amp to pair these up with.
The treble has a clarity and an upper extension I haven’t even been close to with other IEMs. I have the whole Chesky Ultimate demonstration disc on lossless .wavs on my Ipod, and Johnny Frigo's I Love Paris is a great demonstration about how cymbals sound. The cymbals in this song are on the edge of sounding too splashy; still I have yet to encounter this problem with the UE-11s. The only thing keeping the cymbals from sounding completely realistic, I mean like they are a couple of feet from my ears, is a slight compression of the treble extension (I'm only 20 so I can still hear a bit above 16 kHz) and the absence of the unbearable bright sound characteristics of a cymbal close to your ear. Since that is a bad thing, I am glad these sound the way they do, but real live cymbals ARE bright.
As have already been said when describing the sound by one frequency range at a time, the transparency is one of the main strengths of the UE-11s. What I like to do when I listen to music is to start focusing on one part of the music, for example the guitar, keep my focus on the guitar for a few seconds until you can almost see the guitarist playing. While still keeping the focus on the guitar I add another part of the music to my attention, let’s say the drums. Now, the more attenuated or distant the sounds are, the harder it gets to keep them in memory. After having too many things at once, I lose focus of everything and have to start all over again. This is a good exercise for your short-term memory; the better memory you have the more things you can focus on at the same time. Keeping many things at once in your focus put high demands on the system to be as clear and transparent as possible. With the UE-11s I can not only keep more sound layers in focus, but I can also, because of the transparency, keep focus on details that are in the background. I am noticing micro-details that I have never heard before in so many songs.
Well, even though my experience with receiving them was bad, the famous UE customer service has been great dealing with. Brad offered me to keep these current faulty pairs as a backup with a "huge discount", while receiving a second pair with the correct artwork. I am still not sure about this, I haven't gotten a price yet, but the thought about separating from these babies for maybe two weeks is almost unbearable.
Finally, just to leave the analytical talk and express how much I am enjoying these phones in a more emotional manner: I was sitting on the bus on my way to work a couple of days ago. I was listening to low volumes; about 25% of max on the Ipod. The bus ride was about 20 minutes long and I swear I had goose bumps the entire ride.
I checked my forearms every now and then and the hairs were standing straight up. The amount of detail these phones can put out even with low volume is amazing. They never give you any second thoughts or let you think you are crazy for spending $1150+ for a pair of earphones.
