[AmericanSpirit]

Here's my official review of the KBEAR Storm.

Yeah it's a Storm of a wacky hot mess of tuning!

Looks CHEAP feels CHEAP and is cheap. KZ made the same looking IEM but better

And that's the huge problem at $18 it is 200% outclassed by other IEM's

Don't waste your money on this IEM.

Truthear Hola is out. same price but waaaayyy better tuning , better no not better leaps and bounds better build quality, Better cable , better Case ( Actually includes a nice one.)

END OF REVIEW.

Yea HOLA left all other IEMs including Moondrop’s Chu in the category of old sub$20 seg. Tonality wise Salnotes Zero still has better tuning but fully executed proper 11mm LCP driver basically knocks out all other 6mm LCP type or other 10mm conventional dynamic driver equipped IEMs in terms of technicalities.

 

[AmericanSpirit]

I wonder how many vocal naysayers it will take to slow the Truthear hype train?

Like Quarks DSP, we may have qdc tuned flat upper mid tuned HOLA DSP someday.

Or Tea /Legacy 5 like more tamed monitor flat (no diffusion) ones too.

However I not too sure if Truthear is going after qdc tuning after seeing this
Truthear Twitter followed by

Crin: yea Crin helped for Zero understandable

Shenzhenaudio: Main distribution channel of Truthear, understandble

Moondrop: !?

Truthear follows 3 individuals
Crin: yea Crin helped for Zero understandable
Shenzhenaudio: Main distribution channel of Truthear, understandble
Moondrop: !?

 

[AmericanSpirit]

It won’t stop it. It is a good, safe, easy to like tuning, with a great build quality in this bracket, so in a vacuum it’s going to deserve praise. But if you’ve bought Chu or Zero, or Wan’er, C2 or C3, or Cadenza, or a KZ/CCA like EDA, CXS, or FLA, or HBB, what is the point of this? What are doing here?

Both parts are true: Hola is a fine $20 set, but it is completely pointless, and 3+ months behind the trends

My understanding is not pointless, those are economic principles of fair competition taking place.

They are offering the competitive set for the certain tuning, with good drivers of the time, the pace of offering good tuning x good drivers is really intense thesedays, which leads to fair competition and results a advancement of cost to performance as well as variety of differentiated product line ups. beneficiaries will be future audio enthusiast. We benefit from that in 12month too, rather than seeing slow paced stagflations which we had back then when UE/Westone/Sony/AudioTechnica/JVC /AKG /Senn were the key players. Very slow cost-to-performance back then. $200 IEM in 12 month sounded very similar.

 

[baskingshark]

It won’t stop it. It is a good, safe, easy to like tuning, with a great build quality in this bracket, so in a vacuum it’s going to deserve praise. But if you’ve bought Chu or Zero, or Wan’er, C2 or C3, or Cadenza, or a KZ/CCA like EDA, CXS, or FLA, or HBB, what is the point of this? What are doing here?

Both parts are true: Hola is a fine $20 set, but it is completely pointless, and 3+ months behind the trends

I think you have actually seen the light.

I learned this the hard way, that buying multiple ultra budget IEMs will end up costing the same as a midFI or TOTL IEM one day, and the majority of these sidegrades end up unused in a drawer. Where i am, it is very hard to find buyers for budget CHIFI, I still have a drawer of 15 KZ pokemons that cannot be sold LOL, and these buggers depreciate faster than Crypto in view of a "PRO" version being released weeks later. Every week there are claims for a new hypetrain/giant killer, but how many of these are still talked about 2 weeks post release?

Well, are these ultra budget gear useless then? My 2 cents is that they are very good for beginners joining the hobby, perhaps as gifts, or for those wanting to search and sample their ideal sound signature. But once you know what tuning you want, it is best to just upgrade to MidFI and call it a day. The MidFI segment probably gives the sweet spot for sound, cause upgrading from MidFI -> TOTL gives mega diminishing returns (eg 10 - 20% improvement for 10x more cost). Staying in budget-land purgatory might actually end up costing more than one or two MidFI set in the long run, these MidFI sets also retain their value if you need to sell them.

Who knows, maybe there may even come a day when the budget CHIFI bubble will burst, when consumers get fed up of the continual sidegrade weekly releases.

 

[InvisibleInk]

Yeah, it's been an interesting year for this but it does seem that as soon as a different tuning comes out it will get as much love as it gets critics saying "something wrong with the tuning". This is entirely reasonable and to be expected because people's hearing differs. But for companies who pay too much attention to more critical responses only, there is a risk that their products will start to trend towards an average that appeals widely but is unexciting. But, of course, I am stating nothing new; it simply seemed relevant to the KB Ear Storm (which I have not heard).

Pokemon fans gonna keep collecting.

I have put the brakes on IEMs since getting the ISN H30. That thing is still blowing my mind. I put the brakes on earbuds since getting the EB2S. I know better stuff has been released since, but I've decided to keep my powder dry for a while and just keep enjoying these two for the time being.

 

[AmericanSpirit]

Pokemon fans gonna keep collecting.

I have put the brakes on IEMs since getting the ISN H30. That thing is still blowing my mind. I put the brakes on earbuds since getting the EB2S. I know better stuff has been released since, but I've decided to keep my powder dry for a while and just keep enjoying these two for the time being.

Pretty similar to new seasonal McDonald’s limited burger line ups. We are not eating 3 star Michelin restaurants meal everyday, we sometime love those junk food sby some reason

Commercially, McDonald’s food is not 10/10. A mere 4/10 or 5/10 actually scores Billions of supports from mankind, that’s KZ is targeting. Become McDonalds for IEM world, which obviously the position is being held by Apple & Sony currently and apple / sony can make 6 or 7/10 for the limited budget.

 

[DynamicEars]

It won’t stop it. It is a good, safe, easy to like tuning, with a great build quality in this bracket, so in a vacuum it’s going to deserve praise. But if you’ve bought Chu or Zero, or Wan’er, C2 or C3, or Cadenza, or a KZ/CCA like EDA, CXS, or FLA, or HBB, what is the point of this? What are doing here?

Both parts are true: Hola is a fine $20 set, but it is completely pointless, and 3+ months behind the trends

You got your point right, but as someone who already near end of my journey (of buying things), I skipped all those Chu, Zero, Waner, C4, Cadenza, QKZxHBB etc just because they are looking pretty good but not close to perfect my target, when the Hola appear, the graph is slightly better to me to all of those IEM (with better bass shelf which is very important factor to me as bass quality freak, non shouty upper mids (that harman always too shouty for me, my ideal pinna is around +7 / +8db, which is actually confusing me when crin's pinna target is similar but his collab IEM result always put high mids higher than his own target), and not too deep dip at around 6khz (which lot of chifi put these area too safe, losing lot of details, yes a lot), and last the extension of high frequencies around 14-16khz.
Hola have those all for me, that's why I called as S class tuning, and the price simply ridiculous at $19 which make no brainer to grab it for me, and the driver also have a selling point 11mm LCP that moves better air (theoretically, than smaller DDs) rather than usual 10mm.
Still haven't receive mine, but I have faith, if they are overdampened, with bad dampers, I will mod em later.

 

[FreeWheelinAudioLuv2]

Vision Ears or Venture Electronics?

Venture Electronics. $1,300.

 

[ToneDeafMonk]

Perfectly said.

You got your point right, but as someone who already near end of my journey (of buying things), I skipped all those Chu, Zero, Waner, C4, Cadenza, QKZxHBB etc just because they are looking pretty good but not close to perfect my target, when the Hola appear, the graph is slightly better to me to all of those IEM (with better bass shelf which is very important factor to me as bass quality freak, non shouty upper mids (that harman always too shouty for me, my ideal pinna is around +7 / +8db, which is actually confusing me when crin's pinna target is similar but his collab IEM result always put high mids higher than his own target), and not too deep dip at around 6khz (which lot of chifi put these area too safe, losing lot of details, yes a lot), and last the extension of high frequencies around 14-16khz.
Hola have those all for me, that's why I called as S class tuning, and the price simply ridiculous at $19 which make no brainer to grab it for me, and the driver also have a selling point 11mm LCP that moves better air (theoretically, than smaller DDs) rather than usual 10mm.
Still haven't receive mine, but I have faith, if they are overdampened, with bad dampers, I will mod em later.

I have both the Hola and Cadenza the Hola sounds great but the Cadenza's Berrilium bass is like the Hola but hits with more slam and texture. Both are great. The presentation of the sound stage is also where your going to hear a difference with the Cadenza bieng wider and higher gives more effect to bring out a greater dynamics in the song and adds more emotion to the playback.( Micro Dynamics)

 

[AmericanSpirit]

You got your point right, but as someone who already near end of my journey (of buying things), I skipped all those Chu, Zero, Waner, C4, Cadenza, QKZxHBB etc just because they are looking pretty good but not close to perfect my target, when the Hola appear, the graph is slightly better to me to all of those IEM (with better bass shelf which is very important factor to me as bass quality freak, non shouty upper mids (that harman always too shouty for me, my ideal pinna is around +7 / +8db, which is actually confusing me when crin's pinna target is similar but his collab IEM result always put high mids higher than his own target), and not too deep dip at around 6khz (which lot of chifi put these area too safe, losing lot of details, yes a lot), and last the extension of high frequencies around 14-16khz.
Hola have those all for me, that's why I called as S class tuning, and the price simply ridiculous at $19 which make no brainer to grab it for me, and the driver also have a selling point 11mm LCP that moves better air (theoretically, than smaller DDs) rather than usual 10mm.
Still haven't receive mine, but I have faith, if they are overdampened, with bad dampers, I will mod em later.

When compared to Aria OG, HOLA has better implementation in dampening.

I’ve clocked 10hours of burn-in on HOLA last night now the initial phase of driver burn-in shall be done.

Just tried with an acoustic jazz trio track, I still see the 30hz somewhat slow tail of the transient and thought that might be the artifact of stock ear tips’s black silicone material. Switched to H570 and wow….!!!

HOLA is more capable than I initially expected, maybe even better than my modded Aria OG. H570 has great synergy with HOLA as well. The “Air Pressure Balance“ per what Tanchijim called their ear tips APB, is very ideal for HOLA & H570. It gives space for bass transient response to reacts very naturally which ultimately leads to very high grid conformity of sound image and it’s momentum delivery.

I’m not even changing the stock cables at this moment and running HOLA with single end mode, not sure what HOLA would present with balanced output after 30 hours.

It’s already “more than great” line in my expectation level.

An entry level IEM definition may need to be overwritten. At current pace of truthear’s improvement (from very basic level ear tips for ZERO/HEXA, to more modern fluid dynamics based design), they may come up with H570 like echo camber resonance control silicone material in the next issues.

 

[Surf Monkey]

I have and love the Obsidian the two may graph similarly but that's where it stops. They sound miles apart the OH10 hits with authority and has special sauce because of the copper shell. The highs are extended but no siblance for me and I am trebble sensitive the Storm not so much. We all hear differently but I would not want to buy a Storm and think it going to do anything like the OH10.

I am happy if someone gets aural pleasure from the Storm and it turns thier crank!

The OH10 is a special set. It has everything you mention plus lush and tight bass.

 

[ToneDeafMonk]

When compared to Aria OG, HOLA has better implementation in dampening.

I’ve clocked 10hours of burn-in on HOLA last night now the initial phase of driver burn-in shall be done.

Just tried with an acoustic jazz trio track, I still see the 30hz somewhat slow tail of the transient and thought that might be the artifact of stock ear tips’s black silicone material. Switched to H570 and wow….!!!

HOLA is more capable than I initially expected, maybe even better than my modded Aria OG. H570 has great synergy with HOLA as well. The “Air Pressure Balance“ per what Tanchijim called their ear tips APB, is very ideal for HOLA & H570. It gives space for bass transient response to reacts very naturally which ultimately leads to very high grid conformity of sound image and it’s momentum delivery.

I’m not even changing the stock cables at this moment and running HOLA with single end mode, not sure what HOLA would present with balanced output after 30 hours.

It’s already “more than great” line in my expectation level.

An entry level IEM definition may need to be overwritten. At current pace of truthear’s improvement (from very basic level ear tips for ZERO/HEXA, to more modern fluid dynamics based design), they may come up with H570 like echo camber resonance control silicone material in the next issues.

Mine are permanently attached to a SPC cable and DUNU S&S tips sound really good on them for me. The Hola is surprisingly capable.

 

[Sunstealer]

Please give HEXA a good 30 hour burn in if you feel bass range isn’t sounding “right” or the edge of bass notes are muffled and off-tuned.

I do noted HEXA’s bass driver had some minor imaging cap limit at the beginning of use, and eventually faded away. Even with that HEXA is very disruptive.

Now HEXA is limit-less in bass range technical expression for tracks like this
https://tidal.com/track/85376066
if you can’t access tidal
YTM

AM or Apple Music

Cheers. I always burn-in. Serial took 200 hours. I'm giving the FAN at least 30.

Love your work, btw. Always insightful.

 

[WAON303]

Pretty similar to new seasonal McDonald’s limited burger line ups. We are not eating 3 star Michelin restaurants meal everyday, we sometime love those junk food sby some reason

Commercially, McDonald’s food is not 10/10. A mere 4/10 or 5/10 actually scores Billions of supports from mankind, that’s KZ is targeting. Become McDonalds for IEM world, which obviously the position is being held by Apple & Sony currently and apple / sony can make 6 or 7/10 for the limited budget.

KZ IEMs are like tadpoles, only a small percent of KZ eggs become frogs.

 

[s2kphile]

Venture Electronics

Vision Ears or Venture Electronics?