[drftr]

At that amount, I will personally come over to your house and perform the very best of Taylor Swift on-demand while wearing appropriate attire.
Pic related

I might accidently be out for lunch, bro!

drftr

 

[Sebastien Chiu]

A peek at sone new client work for @EffectAudio's 24 and 24c.

 

[Scubadevils]

New fridge shelf installed - now time for a much needed beer after a tough week at work! Taking the RS8 for a spin with Perpetua for the first time… can’t beat Friday night music.

 

[osocan]

New fridge shelf installed - now time for a much needed beer after a tough week at work! Taking the RS8 for a spin with Perpetua for the first time… can’t beat Friday night music.

Me on v16

 

[goatkidbaahcity]

Iem's are not race cars! New tech does not make old iem's obsolete. Acoustically correct is still acoustically correct.

Very much this. More money, more tech, more newer does not necessarily mean more better. When I got to hear Mentor back-to-back with Amber Pearl, I thought they were both great but I preferred Mentor. When I heard EXT back-to-back with VE10, I thought they were both great but preferred EXT. Shanling M8 still holds it down as my DAP of choice. etc etc.

This hobby is not urgent and it is not a necessity. If the new stuff is overpriced it simply will not sell. Its not a captured market - there are a million companies making great iems now and more everyday. If a few companies want to raise their prices through the roof, others will walk in the front door and undercut them unless those sky high prices were reflecting the reality of the product's quality in the first place. If UM feels that they have made something worth that much $ and the market agrees, then congrats to them on some really incredible R&D. If they are being greedy then the sets will sit, people will move on, lessons will be learned. The only ones who should be stressed are UM - as a consumer this is more a curiosity than something I would feel any type of way about - it doesnt cost me a single cent for them to ask 8k or 80k for the set.

The only ones who lose out on this are those who either compulsively purchase every new set of flagships, and are currently holding back sobs while entering their credit card info, or those who purchased other UM sets expecting their hobbyist consumer electronics to be an "investment" and are now upset they wont get the "return" they expected. I cannot help the first group, the second I would recommend a sit down with a financial advisor to discuss your current investment strategies - and possible alternatives.

Those that have no interest at that price, do not compulsively purchase the newest electronics to "flex" on others, do not use the head-fi marketplace as an alternative for an index fund, or who just plain purchased their kickass UM sets with the intention of actually listening to them (the shock, the horror) without a predetermined intention to eventually move them on for the next newest thing ("best set ever, never thought I would sell these but after 3 months its time to let them go, unexpected expenses you know?") have not woken up in a meaningfully different audio world than existed the day before.

TLDR: Purchase things because you actually like them, want to own them, and can afford to keep them and all will be copacetic.

 

[PixelSquish]

wait, UM came out with an 8K pair of IEM? I mean that's just funny to me really. Does that thing clean the house and pay my bills too? I mean the audacity is insane and I think we should be able to call it out. It's insulting and I just lost a lot of respect for that brand. I mean I know other brands also push the limits, but I mean jesus h christ, this too ridiculous.

ok sorry to pepper with more comparison questions but I'm getting real close. This is a shot in the dark, anyone with the recently acquired VE10 happen to have a Volur to compare to? Or this is probably more common, someone who has the Volur and the RN6 have any thoughts?

 

[gLer]

Hey guys, my full FIR Audio e12 review is now online here. Enjoy!

​

 

[CodenameBK201]

I didn't buy and never planned to buy UM as this company just rubs me the wrong way with their business practices. I have no thought on the new product's pricing (really, who is even surprised?) as people will still buy it anyway so why say no to money.

But that naming is something else, far more formidable than Le Jardin....imagine saying I use the Nuit Étoilée. What is next, Mason FS Gateau au Chocolat?

I don't have any skin in the UM game, but fwiw, I did demo their stuff at CanJam and I just wasn't wowed. Trifecta, love it or hate it, was doing something different, Noble's stuff had that signature awesome build quality and that clean house sound, EE was doing their subbass thing, and UM...sort of sounded like a paler flavor of that. I remember trying Mest Mk3 and feeling like I had to struggle to hear that bone conduction driver.

I found it cool that FiR had the guts to release Rn6 at just above 3k where others including my favourite Noble thought flagships had to be over 4k. I don't see said (and other) flagships outdo Rn6 on more than one metric. This gives me confidence that we can have it all for 3k and that the rest is paid for novelty.

EDIT: Just imagine how they would crush the market if they had the guts to introduce an improved successor to Rn6 at 2.5k...

drftr

I'll pretty much forever be a Fir stan because their treble extension is just oof, so good, but yeah. The approach of "we took this thing a bunch of people liked, made improvements to it, then released it at a slightly more accessible price point" is a customer-first mentality to me. I dunno. I'm looking at the constantly increasing cost of disposable goods/toys in general (Todd McFarlane, if you're secretly a Head-Fi member, speak up now), and the whole thing feels like a boiling the frog scenario. On the flip side, cheap IEMs and dongles have gotten so stupidly good by now that the argument could just as easily be made that good audio is more accessible than ever. I just went in on indiegogo for those cowboy bebop wireless IEMs from Aviot. At 210 shipped for BA, DD, planar and true wireless, that sort of seems insane to me compared to even a decade ago.

 

[Zachik]

634ears - Japanese quality craftsmanship from a one man brand, can feel the pride and love in his creations.

Been eager to audition his stuff, but obviously not available to audition anywhere... Hopefully someone attending CanJam NYC has a pair and could bring it along?
I was drawn to his unique design, but worried it would not fit me right. That concerns me more than not liking the sound signature, TBH.

Clan Audio - Friend of mine from Scotland, excellent cables that provide sound quality to rival the more well known brands.

Never heard of this one, and their website is still work in progress... Can you tell us some more about Clan Audio?

 

[Damz87]

Certainly not, but regardless of how it or Mason FS sounds, your AP has factual become technologically obsolete as of today. Mason FS has the latest technologies that your AP does not, whether you like it or not. Personally, I wouldn't like it and would be quite p***** off.

Ok I'll stop now, I don't feel like it anymore...

No, thats not the case. The new IEM is a continuation of the Mason line, obsoleting Le Jardin that released in May 2022.

Amber Pearl was a collaboration with Cayin for N30LE, it has a different driver configuration to the Mason line and is tuned specifically to synergise with the Cayin DAP. AFAIK, it was never intended to be its own product or to be the flagship for UM because it was never meant to be sold separately from the DAP. A few units were sold by retailers who obviously had customers that wanted to buy either the DAP or IEM individually. Anyway, my point is that AP and Mason shouldn’t be viewed as the same line and AP is certainly not obsolete now that there’s a new Mason on the horizon.

 

[haci]

Last days in beautiful Guatemala.
Just the noise of waves on Lake Atitlan at sunrise, birds waking up, walks in local markets with native music. No headphones.
Just the pleasure to discover a great country with very nice people.

one of my favorite places

 

[feverfive]

New fridge shelf installed - now time for a much needed beer after a tough week at work! Taking the RS8 for a spin with Perpetua for the first time… can’t beat Friday night music.

I find the lack of an installation video....disturbing.

Hahaha, enjoy your evening of music!

 

[aaf evo]

FiR Electron 10, looks like CIEM only for now (?)

https://www.firaudio.com/store/electron-10-ciem

 

[goatkidbaahcity]

Ooooh! 1299 for a custom and its got the cool short canal tech from the Bellos stuff. That has my attention.

 

[Neweymatt]

To summarise:

- Improved "unique house sound that offers an impressive soundstage and lifelike timbres through bone conduction technology"
- New "revolutionary BC-Turbo Micro Voltage Booster [that] heralds a new era of sonic possibilities"
- New FreqShift BCD
- New First Time Shielding Pro

And all this for the modest price of 8500 USD. If I had bought Amber Pearl, which was released only a few months ago for the equally modest price of 8000 USD as a minor upgrade compared to Mentor (4500 USD, note: 3500 USD price difference for a minor upgrade), I would be extremely pissed off right now. UM is obviously deliberately holding back new, apparently groundbreaking technologies so that it can release another, even better and more expensive IEM shortly afterwards. And I bet (!!) that the new version of Mentor will be released next month for the price of 6999 or 7499 USD. And between Mason FS and Mentor, we all know which one has had more success in the past (spoiler: Mentor). So the question here is whether it wouldn't be worth waiting. Apart from that, I personally can no longer justify UM's marketing strategy. These price jumps are for me no longer rational and I am no longer willing to support UM. As much as I love my Mentor - it's still my favorite of the current TOTL - I've now resolved to stop buying UM's products as long as UM pursues such a mocking strategy. It is quite clear that UM wants to push it until it finally breaks. The moment has now come for me. I will boycott it and sell my Mentor in protest (I know, no one surely cares): see my classified.

My principles are worth more to me than any IEMs. UM may produce such great IEMs (of course this is debatable), but there are plenty of alternatives on the market that are equivalent or better. I would also invite others to stop buying UM's products. This trend must be stopped, it is in the interest of all of us.

@UniqueMelody

Ehhhm, well not to have a go at you or anything, but this is definitely not a new approach from UM, they've been on this manic release cadence for years. I recall when I first started lurking on HeadFi that MEST was all the rage. Coming up on 4 years later there's 4 versions now if you count Indigo, and I think it's a very safe bet there will be another in 2024. It's just what they do, and clearly there is a market for it.

But generally about this practice of offering several flagships one after the other at sharply rising prices while the old flagships immediately become obsolete.

Setting aside pricing, how does a new release make any previous IEM from the same company "immediately" obsolete?

I dunno, maybe I take a very different approach here, but once I find something that I like, that I really really like, I just try to enjoy it for as long as I can. Like anything in life, especially technology, new stuff gets released all the time that may or may not be better than the old stuff.

With regards to the new UM megacap IEM releases, I now feel a bit like I have to buy a new UM flagship to enjoy my N30 Amber Pearl for its power while the UM Amber Pearl IEM which I have actually plays extraordinarily well with my AK DAPs instead. It can do with very little power and sound amazing. In a nutshell, spending never ends which is what a company like UM needs in order to stay profitable. So what should irritate me personally I think is the fact that Amber Pearl IEM doesn't pair well with the corresponding DAP which it released with while I now need to splurge another $8K for one that would presumably blast on the N30.

Where does "have to buy" and "need to splurge" come into it? Does your AP really sound worse today than it did yesterday? I mean, if you got the dough, go for it! And maybe sell that AP to me...

This is the thing about UM, you never have to pay anything close to full retail for their stuff if you are just a little bit patient. The second-hand market should always see fairly steep discounts from ppl ditching yesterday's model for today's new shiny..

really enjoying the new album from The Smile this AM, big music release day overall.

@Scuba Devils will probably come back in 2 months telling us all about this fantastic new album from *wait for it* TWO former members of Radiohead!!