[Sarthak117]

As far as a thousand dollars goes, would a full headphone setup (amp, dac, headphone) from scratch with that budget match up to an un-amplified custom IEM like jh audio's offerings or Westone's ES5. I keep hearing stuff about how the sound quality of CIEMs is going closer to that of its similarly priced headphone offerings, but does that include a full setup for the headphone offering in the price? Thanks in advance.

 

[ZARIM]

The custom IEMs sound superb out of complete setup and sound amazing with DAPs like iPods and improve more with highend DAPs. The mid-fi fullsize headphones in compelete setup sounds great but still hard to beat the CIEMs like JH16Pro/JH13Pro, UM Miracle, ES5.

 

[ronrad]

Quote:

As far as a thousand dollars goes, would a full headphone setup (amp, dac, headphone) from scratch with that budget match up to an un-amplified custom IEM like jh audio's offerings or Westone's ES5. I keep hearing stuff about how the sound quality of CIEMs is going closer to that of its similarly priced headphone offerings, but does that include a full setup for the headphone offering in the price? Thanks in advance.

My UM Miracles out of my Nexus S with VoodooSound, (and probably even out of my ipad although I'd have to do a direct a/b) pretty much compete or beat my desktop setup with T1s, or the Audio Technica AD2K that I had.  At some of the recent meets with some super high end equipment driving my T1s ($1300 list) they would come out ahead of my Miracles out of the
 Nexus S, however, on the same equipment the Miracles were equally good but in a different way.   As another comparison, the Miracles running on the DAP are better sounding than my D10Cobra driving my ESW10jpn (so about comparable price)
 
So yeah, I'd say that for $1k the customs are likely your best bang for the buck and you can listen to them anywhere.  However, you better choose the right customs and get a sig that you like!

 

[Sarthak117]

Ah, thats good to know. I was originally set on a pair of customs, but after seeing so many great review on headphones like the RS-1, the Magnums, HD 650s, Thunderpants, etc. that I could form a setup with in that price range, I began to doubt my original plans.

 

[Staal]

Even CIEMs benefit alot from amplifiers, even if it's just a "tiny portable" one.
 
An aftermarket cable and a pico slim really lifted my JH16s in terms of overall SQ and made them more 3D sounding. Unamped JH16 with stock cables sounds quite 2-dimensional, like the soundstage is quite limited.
 
However, back to your point, yes, they certainly cannot compete. But you'd want to get an amp, even for CIEMs.

 

[ronrad]

Quote:

Even CIEMs benefit alot from amplifiers, even if it's just a "tiny portable" one.
 
An aftermarket cable and a pico slim really lifted my JH16s in terms of overall SQ and made them more 3D sounding. Unamped JH16 with stock cables sounds quite 2-dimensional, like the soundstage is quite limited.
 
However, back to your point, yes, they certainly cannot compete. But you'd want to get an amp, even for CIEMs.

Don't get me wrong, my Miracles still benefit from the higher end sources.  However, they don't degrade with poor sources anywhere near as much as my T1s for example.  The point being that in my opinion for fixed dollars of around 1k I get the most from just having the Miracles.