It is true all BA sets have generally worse timbre than pure DD sets. They generally also sound less natural in the bass to me, such as having less bass decay/movement of air, and sometimes worse subbass extension than DD. Even the most expensive all BA IEM I've heard (QDC Anole VX) has not as good timbre as some cheaper DD sets.
I'm just going to stand on my soapbox for a minute here. I enjoy reading your comments,
@baskingshark, so I don't mean to be disagreeable toward you specifically.
The idea that BAs have worse timbre than DDs has reached the level of dogma, as far as I can tell. I'm not as experienced with gear as the frequent posters here, but based on my own experience, I don't buy it. BAs and DDs both tend to have problems with tonal accuracy. They just have different problems, and apparently, more people prefer the compromises of DDs. My favorite set now is the TRN BA5. The now-classic example of good timbre is the BL-03. I like that one, too, and it used to be my favorite in my stable. But its defects gradually wore me out, and to me, that has a lot to do with their tonal accuracy. As a classical music listener, if I'm listening to a string quartet and the cello sounds bloated and dominating, that's not tonally accurate. If I'm listening to a string bass soli passage in a symphony and I can barely make out the individual pitches because low frequency reproduction is too slow, that's not tonally accurate. If I can't hear resonances from the performance space, that's not tonally accurate. If response is too slow for me to hear the friction of a bow as it's drawn across a string, that's not tonally accurate. For issues like these, I think my BA5 is significantly better than my BL-03. The BL-03 makes some lovely sounds, but they aren't always realistic sounds. When I read about DD timbre being better, the meaning I get is that someone prefers the distortions of a DD set over the distortions of a BA set, just like someone might prefer tubes to solid state.
My first Chi-Fi IEM was a KZ ZS10 Pro, and I thought it's tonal accuracy was really bad, so I am not trying to over-generalize here. I guess that's part of my point. This is just my opinion and you might be right to generalize, but I think we should hesitate before repeating this particular generalization. I think another point worth making is that there is not a clear distinction between tonal accuracy and technical proficiency. A deficiency in one can be interpreted as a deficiency in the other in a lot of cases, I would imagine.
On a side note, I resist using the word "timbre," which as far as I can tell BGGAR popularized, because I'm a former musician and timbre is something I understand as relating to an individual instrument or musician. Saying a speaker or IEM has a good timbre isn't as crazy as saying an IEM has good pitch, but it's almost as strange to me. Can you say what an orchestra's timbre is like? No, because an orchestra has infinite colors at its disposal. So it makes even less sense to say an IEM has a timbre. An IEM reproduces the timbre of an instrument, perhaps, but it doesn't have timbre like a trumpet or a violin. I realize people use it as a shorthand and this is a pedantic point, but an IEM should reproduce tonal colors/quality accurately. It can't have a timbre. Maybe this just reflects a bias because I've been using the word "timbre" in a different way my whole life, so feel free to correct me.
OK, I feel better! Thanks for reading if you made it this far!
