[mgsu]

Hah yea, wanted to give myself more than the 5 or so minutes I had been listening when I posted the picture to get an actual impression first before posting some impressions.

Ill start with fit. Really good so far. Seems to be as close to custom as possible. The real test though will be when I take them to work with me next week and see how they over a full work day, with longer individual sessions and likely a lot of taking them off and putting them back on again. Theres always one spot on my left ear that develops discomfort before anywhere else... and that may still be the case here. Too early to tell.

Also looks like these follow a lot of other campfires and are very low sensitivity (high sensitivity? I can never remember, its been a while). One of the few pairs I hear some hiss with the mojo2. Its not bad, but its there. And volume is definitely down lower than with others.

I also like the purple color. I was a little concerned as some of the pictures make it seem more like a hot pink. Its not that.

So, for some actual sound impressions... First thing though I have been kind of out of the game for a bit so I feel kind of rusty, and am having some trouble trying to put what I hear to words. But I will try to respond a bit to at least some of the things I mentioned from that review yesterday.

Starting with bass, I definitely dont get any deep rumble into my chest or anything, nor would I really describe the bass as anything I havent experience before. Its good. I am finding it quite satisfying. Is it the best I have ever heard in an IEM? Probably not. Is it earth shatteringly deep? No. I also am not finding it bloated or bleeding into the mids, but there does seem to be at least a hefty amount of midbass, so others may disagree there.

The other thing that was brought up was that there may be some sharpness in the treble. Im not really getting that at all. Treble is there and I think its decently extended, but it feels slightly softer edged than I think was expecting based on that review. I feel like Im getting more of a "ch" sound from cymbals rather than super sharp "ts". But that is a positive thing for me as sharp treble is something I am not usually a huge fan of.

Mids I have never been able to really describe all that well. But they dont sit too far back for me. And they feel full enough to satisfy me.

Truthfully, overall, it feels like a pretty safe tuning. A little bit of a warm tilt, maybe slightly v shaped. But nothing crazy. Maybe even a little boring... but boring in a good way where I am kinda just listening to the music, and not the IEMs.

I also reserve the right to change my mind or go back on anything I may have said here as I listen to them more.

Thank you for sharing your impressions!

To me, five paragraphs of rough impressions are more worth than five pages of a bloated review!

 

[Rockwell75]

I'm pretty sure I read before how Bonneville is a typical Campfire Audio product with awesome this and extra that, but now it's just a 'more universally appealing' IEM? Something seems off.

I think it might be your memory that is off. I have from day 1 described it as an IEM that embodies many elements of CFA's house sound but without many of the quirks that have thrown some off of their more eclectic IEMs. In other words it's a more universally appealing incarnation of classic CFA sound.

 

[mashuto]

Thank you for your impressions. Have you cable-rolled yet at all?

No, and not planning to. Without getting into it I'll just say I'm not a big believer in cables and as such I only buy cables for ergonomics first and looks second. All that to say I don't have any cables to roll that would be of interest to anyone anyways.

 

[theveterans]

I think it might be your memory that is off. I have from day 1 described it as an IEM that embodies many elements of CFA's house sound but without many of the quirks that have thrown some off of their more eclectic IEMs. In other words it's a more universally appealing incarnation of classic CFA sound.

Agreed! Definitely a true successor to the Andromeda OG / 2020 (Not the Emerald Sea IMHO)

 

[phiemon]

Bonneville, Singularity, Diva 2023 or IE900 for max 1500USD? Maybe FirAudio E12 for a little more? A "little" Xe6 would be fantastic!

Priorities: technicalities (soundstage, macro-dynamics, resolution) > bass (quantity and quality) > unobtrusive upper-mids/lower-treble. Music reference: electronic in various forms.

 

[darveniza]

Usually I leave my reading on this thread for long flights as it's one of the busiest threads and not just for quick reading. Have not posted for a while as I have been really focused on the TWS world as it's evolving quickly and the technology is finally catching up and companies are starting to invest in this sector of audio.

No doubt I love my IEM's with multiples in rotation I have remained coming back to the CFA supermoon and FA Mezzo LE.

Not usually a fan of CFA tuning but the Supermoon have a particular tuning that keeps everything in check and does not tend to try to exaggerate any particular region. I know some within the thread have talked about being a bit hot on the upper spectrum, as I don't have young ears have not experienced this. Also I have found the flat cable approach much easier for me to deal with while traveling.

My go to for discovery type playlists is the FA Audio Mezze LE as it's the most versatile IEM. Even if I want to change my flavors, the switch system is the best implementation to date, zero gimmick, it's just works.

Great forum and continue to learn more from others here with their comments.

 

[Rockwell75]

Usually I leave my reading on this thread for long flights as it's one of the busiest threads and not just for quick reading. Have not posted for a while as I have been really focused on the TWS world as it's evolving quickly and the technology is finally catching up and companies are starting to invest in this sector of audio.

No doubt I love my IEM's with multiples in rotation I have remained coming back to the CFA supermoon and FA Mezzo LE.

Not usually a fan of CFA tuning but the Supermoon have a particular tuning that keeps everything in check and does not tend to try to exaggerate any particular region. I know some within the thread have talked about being a bit hot on the upper spectrum, as I don't have young ears have not experienced this. Also I have found the flat cable approach much easier for me to deal with while traveling.

My go to for discovery type playlists is the FA Audio Mezze LE as it's the most versatile IEM. Even if I want to change my flavors, the switch system is the best implementation to date, zero gimmick, it's just works.

Great forum and continue to learn more from others here with their comments.

What do you use for a source? Supermoon in my experience really benefits from a warm leaning or analogue source to take the edge off. The CL DAC in my SR35 and also my LP6 are great matches for it and one of the factors in the SM remaining among my very favorite IEMs.

 

[Thermist]

So I wanted to check back in with some results/ruminations about by mini source-odyssey.

I was quite smitten with the RS8 for many months, as you may know. And then I got the itch.

The culprit was the Cayin RU7. It opened my eyes as to what a dongle could achieve - to such an extent that I began to wonder if I needed a full-sized DAP at all, especially given my more mobile-oriented listening time. Anyway, I fell completely in love with the RU7-Dunu Falcon Ultra combo for travel situations, played out of my iPhone. I can get a tight seal and it has excellent bass with the gold nozzles, which works quite well in the car or bus or train or plane. As mentioned before, the bass lift helps mitigate the ambient noise of those transportation modes. The depth and layering of the combo is outstanding.

But, as much as the RU7 itself, I realized I had fallen in love with the Cayin house-sound, or at least the 1-bit version of it, so I bought an N7 and put it through its paces both as a stand-alone streamer and as a tethered USB/Dac.

I was quite under-impressed with it vis-a-vis the RU7. Which is more praise for the dongle than a diss of the DAP.

The N7 seemed to bring much the same level of warmth and detail to the picture, maybe a bit more dynamism, a slightly blacker background, but its staging and depth actually seemed less. So whereas I had originally thought that if the N7 was "good enough," I would sell the RS8 and pocket the difference for some new IEMs, I was now wondering if the RU7 might be enough for both mobile and desk listening and I could pocket a much larger difference and put all that toward a TOTL iem.

All this comparative listening was done with the Noble Ronin, by the way, perhaps not the best match for the 1-bit sound, but it's what I have on me and it's my favorite IEM of all. I went back and forth between the N7 and RU7 until I decided that there was not enough of a difference to justify keeping the N7.

Then I thought about the L&P W4 and some of the praise it's been getting, along with my new-found respect for dongles, so I ordered one and went through the same comps with N7 and RU7. But again, I decided that the RU7 was my favorite, espeically at its price. The W4 just didn't have that fuller, richer timbre, centered on the mid-bass, that I had come to love on the RU7. It was a tad cleaner. But I am not a clean guy.

Then I happened to read something about the Hiby Music Pro app in the N30LE thread and that it allowed for Qobuz streaming, not just Tidal, and that the sound through the app was better than using the Qobuz app alone. This led me to investigate. I realized I had an older version of Hiby Music Pro on my N7 and promptly upgraded. Then, with some difficulty, I found how to stream Qobuz through the app. It's a tiny bit buggy, but it did sound better. Yet the biggest advantage of this by far was that I could now use the Hiby app-embedded verions of their plug-ins and MSEB, which I had come to love on the RS8. More specifically, the Sound Field and Spatialize plug-ins.

Whoa!

Playing around with these two plug-ins utterly transformed what I heard from the N7. The imaging and depth were suddenly outstanding and I felt greater dynamics, a clearer, fuller midrange (though still quite warm) and just enough treble sparkle added to balance out the overall darkness of the 1-bit sound. This worked on local files through the app as well.

So I changed my mind yet again and decided the N7 was a keeper for this reason alone. Qobuz is what I listen to most of the time. I could never get the N7 to sound great using HQPlayer and Roon but now I didn't have to. It could be a stand-alone, and it wasn't anywhere near as heavy as the RS8, so I might actually haul it around.

So now the plan was, I would sell the W4 and the RS8 and use that cash for a very good set of IEMs.

I was getting excited about this direction, actively reading up on more technical, reference, V-shaped IEMs to complement my Ronins, when I thought about the Hiby plug-ins and MSEB and remembered how good they had sounded on the RS8. All this time, the RS8 had reamined boxed up and for sale.

So I pulled a Scuby.

I decided to fire up the RS8 one more time, as a sort of farewell verification that I had made the right choice.

Wrong move.

I got Qobuz set up through the Hiby Music app (which I had never done before on the RS8) and I was able to go beyond the app-specific versions of the plug-ins and MSEB and use the global versions that come with the DAP.

And my socks were knocked off.

The only way I can make any sense of it is that I had not listened to Qubuz through HMP on the RS8 before, I had not properly played around with Soundfield and Mastermind and Dynamics plug-ins, and my ears had grown used to the 1-bit sound on the Cayin devices, forgetting the R2R sound of the RS8.

But that forgetting, it seems, was important.

What greeted my ears was a massively more powerful and dynamic low-end, wider and deeper, yet more textured and coming out of a dark chasm of silence. Then a clear, forward midrange with great note weight yet sharper transients; a wider soundfield with more precise imaging (which you can really crank up with the Dynamics plug-in) and width/depth/layering that gave me goosebumps, as if I were inside a perfectly treated listening room with full-sized speakers activating all the air around me. And I could continue to tweak the sound as I saw fit.

It was night and day compared to the N7. In addition, the RS8 works extremely well as a DAC/amp, where I can use HQPlayer to upsample to the highest PCM rate before the RS8 does its magic. The result is so far beyond anything I have heard throughout this odyssey that I cannot fathom anything sounding better.

So my N7 is for sale along with my W4 and my lovely RU7 is my travel companion, nothing more.

The RS8 just secured its spot as my go-to source.

Anyway, i just wanted to share this journey with the 'Cooler. I thought many of you could identify with it, especially with the back-and-forth and rediscovery aspects of it. Also wanted to praise Hiby for what they have done with the RS8 - its incredible combination of that smooth, analogue R2R tonality with the near-infinate maleability of the signal through the plug-ins and MSEB. Hard to imagine it not giving me many more years of joy to come.

So I wanted to check back in with some results/ruminations about by mini source-odyssey.

I was quite smitten with the RS8 for many months, as you may know. And then I got the itch.

The culprit was the Cayin RU7. It opened my eyes as to what a dongle could achieve - to such an extent that I began to wonder if I needed a full-sized DAP at all, especially given my more mobile-oriented listening time. Anyway, I fell completely in love with the RU7-Dunu Falcon Ultra combo for travel situations, played out of my iPhone. I can get a tight seal and it has excellent bass with the gold nozzles, which works quite well in the car or bus or train or plane. As mentioned before, the bass lift helps mitigate the ambient noise of those transportation modes. The depth and layering of the combo is outstanding.

But, as much as the RU7 itself, I realized I had fallen in love with the Cayin house-sound, or at least the 1-bit version of it, so I bought an N7 and put it through its paces both as a stand-alone streamer and as a tethered USB/Dac.

I was quite under-impressed with it vis-a-vis the RU7. Which is more praise for the dongle than a diss of the DAP.

The N7 seemed to bring much the same level of warmth and detail to the picture, maybe a bit more dynamism, a slightly blacker background, but its staging and depth actually seemed less. So whereas I had originally thought that if the N7 was "good enough," I would sell the RS8 and pocket the difference for some new IEMs, I was now wondering if the RU7 might be enough for both mobile and desk listening and I could pocket a much larger difference and put all that toward a TOTL iem.

All this comparative listening was done with the Noble Ronin, by the way, perhaps not the best match for the 1-bit sound, but it's what I have on me and it's my favorite IEM of all. I went back and forth between the N7 and RU7 until I decided that there was not enough of a difference to justify keeping the N7.

Then I thought about the L&P W4 and some of the praise it's been getting, along with my new-found respect for dongles, so I ordered one and went through the same comps with N7 and RU7. But again, I decided that the RU7 was my favorite, espeically at its price. The W4 just didn't have that fuller, richer timbre, centered on the mid-bass, that I had come to love on the RU7. It was a tad cleaner. But I am not a clean guy.

Then I happened to read something about the Hiby Music Pro app in the N30LE thread and that it allowed for Qobuz streaming, not just Tidal, and that the sound through the app was better than using the Qobuz app alone. This led me to investigate. I realized I had an older version of Hiby Music Pro on my N7 and promptly upgraded. Then, with some difficulty, I found how to stream Qobuz through the app. It's a tiny bit buggy, but it did sound better. Yet the biggest advantage of this by far was that I could now use the Hiby app-embedded verions of their plug-ins and MSEB, which I had come to love on the RS8. More specifically, the Sound Field and Spatialize plug-ins.

Whoa!

Playing around with these two plug-ins utterly transformed what I heard from the N7. The imaging and depth were suddenly outstanding and I felt greater dynamics, a clearer, fuller midrange (though still quite warm) and just enough treble sparkle added to balance out the overall darkness of the 1-bit sound. This worked on local files through the app as well.

So I changed my mind yet again and decided the N7 was a keeper for this reason alone. Qobuz is what I listen to most of the time. I could never get the N7 to sound great using HQPlayer and Roon but now I didn't have to. It could be a stand-alone, and it wasn't anywhere near as heavy as the RS8, so I might actually haul it around.

So now the plan was, I would sell the W4 and the RS8 and use that cash for a very good set of IEMs.

I was getting excited about this direction, actively reading up on more technical, reference, V-shaped IEMs to complement my Ronins, when I thought about the Hiby plug-ins and MSEB and remembered how good they had sounded on the RS8. All this time, the RS8 had reamined boxed up and for sale.

So I pulled a Scuby.

I decided to fire up the RS8 one more time, as a sort of farewell verification that I had made the right choice.

Wrong move.

I got Qobuz set up through the Hiby Music app (which I had never done before on the RS8) and I was able to go beyond the app-specific versions of the plug-ins and MSEB and use the global versions that come with the DAP.

And my socks were knocked off.

The only way I can make any sense of it is that I had not listened to Qubuz through HMP on the RS8 before, I had not properly played around with Soundfield and Mastermind and Dynamics plug-ins, and my ears had grown used to the 1-bit sound on the Cayin devices, forgetting the R2R sound of the RS8.

But that forgetting, it seems, was important.

What greeted my ears was a massively more powerful and dynamic low-end, wider and deeper, yet more textured and coming out of a dark chasm of silence. Then a clear, forward midrange with great note weight yet sharper transients; a wider soundfield with more precise imaging (which you can really crank up with the Dynamics plug-in) and width/depth/layering that gave me goosebumps, as if I were inside a perfectly treated listening room with full-sized speakers activating all the air around me. And I could continue to tweak the sound as I saw fit.

It was night and day compared to the N7. In addition, the RS8 works extremely well as a DAC/amp, where I can use HQPlayer to upsample to the highest PCM rate before the RS8 does its magic. The result is so far beyond anything I have heard throughout this odyssey that I cannot fathom anything sounding better.

So my N7 is for sale along with my W4 and my lovely RU7 is my travel companion, nothing more.

The RS8 just secured its spot as my go-to source.

Anyway, i just wanted to share this journey with the 'Cooler. I thought many of you could identify with it, especially with the back-and-forth and rediscovery aspects of it. Also wanted to praise Hiby for what they have done with the RS8 - its incredible combination of that smooth, analogue R2R tonality with the near-infinate maleability of the signal through the plug-ins and MSEB. Hard to imagine it not giving me many more years of joy to come.

 

[Thermist]

Hi, Sorry, I screwed up while trying to quote fejnomit. I have a Cayin N7, and am eager to enjoy the benefits fejnomit reports using the Hiby app with Qobuz.

I’ve got Hiby streaming from my Qobuz account but can’t download anything for off-line listening. Since I do almost all my listening on a bicycle, this is a problem…

Have I just logged on with too many instances of Qobuz, or do I have to sign up for a Hiby account, or does the Hiby app simply lack this capability at present?

Thank you for your guidance coolers!

 

[hAbIrAbI]

Isn't downloading from streaming apps generally limited to the native apps?

 

[Imusicman]

My top 3 eye candy
1) Erlk LE
2) VE VE8 Signature edition
3) Final X Dita SHICHIKU

 

[kaeswiss]

Hi, Sorry, I screwed up while trying to quote fejnomit. I have a Cayin N7, and am eager to enjoy the benefits fejnomit reports using the Hiby app with Qobuz.

I’ve got Hiby streaming from my Qobuz account but can’t download anything for off-line listening. Since I do almost all my listening on a bicycle, this is a problem…

Have I just logged on with too many instances of Qobuz, or do I have to sign up for a Hiby account, or does the Hiby app simply lack this capability at present?

Thank you for your guidance coolers!

It's likely DRM-related. Since you're using the service as a subscription to stream music, you can't download the tracks unless you're using the Qobuz app. If they allowed you to download using a third party app that then you can pretty much download their entire library and cancel your subscription.

 

[Thermist]

It's likely DRM-related. Since you're using the service as a subscription to stream music, you can't download the tracks unless you're using the Qobuz app. If they allowed you to download using a third party app that then you can pretty much download their entire library and cancel your subscription.

Makes sense. Thank you for explaining kaeswiss!

 

[fejnomit]

Hi, Sorry, I screwed up while trying to quote fejnomit. I have a Cayin N7, and am eager to enjoy the benefits fejnomit reports using the Hiby app with Qobuz.

I’ve got Hiby streaming from my Qobuz account but can’t download anything for off-line listening. Since I do almost all my listening on a bicycle, this is a problem…

Have I just logged on with too many instances of Qobuz, or do I have to sign up for a Hiby account, or does the Hiby app simply lack this capability at present?

Thank you for your guidance coolers!

Isn't downloading from streaming apps generally limited to the native apps?

It's likely DRM-related. Since you're using the service as a subscription to stream music, you can't download the tracks unless you're using the Qobuz app. If they allowed you to download using a third party app that then you can pretty much download their entire library and cancel your subscription.

Correct. You can only download using the actual Qobuz app. But I find those files sound great too.

 

[Tex Irie]

Usually I leave my reading on this thread for long flights as it's one of the busiest threads and not just for quick reading. Have not posted for a while as I have been really focused on the TWS world as it's evolving quickly and the technology is finally catching up and companies are starting to invest in this sector of audio.

No doubt I love my IEM's with multiples in rotation I have remained coming back to the CFA supermoon and FA Mezzo LE.

Not usually a fan of CFA tuning but the Supermoon have a particular tuning that keeps everything in check and does not tend to try to exaggerate any particular region. I know some within the thread have talked about being a bit hot on the upper spectrum, as I don't have young ears have not experienced this. Also I have found the flat cable approach much easier for me to deal with while traveling.

My go to for discovery type playlists is the FA Audio Mezze LE as it's the most versatile IEM. Even if I want to change my flavors, the switch system is the best implementation to date, zero gimmick, it's just works.

Great forum and continue to learn more from others here with their comments.

+1 for the Mezzo LE. It's also aesthetically beautiful.