Yeah I'm not a 'mids rule' guy, but Kr5 had really poor mids. Like really poor. And neither its bass or treble made up for them. Don't kill me...
lol. We like what we like (shrug) I feel like its justification post time though. Avert your eyes friends.
Kr5 has its upper mid-lower treble pushed down purposefully and, for me is great,
if you listen to material that benefits from that tuning choice. It's the darkness on full display. Tames those blast beat drums. Makes you work for it like Xe6, just in a different frequency location.
Middle mids and bass are more alive and depth ridden than Xe6, and then it dips out at ~2k, while Xe6 bumps up at 2k. The kr5 dip at 5k is another bonus for me as I tend to dislike spikes in that area that are so common for teasing out detail in vocal/pop music but ruining metal drum overtones.
And you get used to it as it opens up just like Xe6's lower mid-mid bass hump after some time. Guitars and drums sounded better and more lifelike to me. And those are my staples. Only some electro sounded good. It was pretty obvious some frequencies were almost absent. With most electro, I preferred Fourte.
I wouldn't say its perfect for everything (its a specialist), but it was head and shoulders over Xe6 for the vast majority. I don't listen to too much bright or thinly recorded pop music (which is the thing I thought Xe6 was really good with and is pretty unmatched) Vocals were good but stuck in a muck of neutron star dense lower midrange. That density also shrunk the stage down to mid-fi size for my head.
Any recording that already had decent bass in it was just comically overdone. But also kind of wonderful in its own way, keeping it all its own lane (super rare to achieve)
Who doesn't want the bands bass player to have the staring role in playing quarter notes over everything. If I mixed like Xe6 sounds for rock music that isn't out of the gate thin, I'd get fired.
I am speaking on tuning only. The tech on display for both monitors is off the hook great. Xe6 has the best EST's I've ever heard, but its probably because it has the least amount of them. Ayeo!
My impressions are all tour units with stock everything and no Atom swapping. So you custom folks and tinkerers definitely have other stuff going on I have not heard.
And Ne4 was just not in the conversation after day 2 of listening. I found it very bland and for the most part, a kr5 without any nerve. Restrained everything. If I heard it on its own without the other 2 close by I may have had a different impression though.
it was like Sony were ahead of time with their IEM’s from that era. IER-M9 feels a bit like the spiritual successor to EX800ST. Balanced, warm with good technicalities. Have you tried the tape mod? Turns it into a full-on basshead iem. I personally preferred it without the mod as it’s already quite bassy.
