drftr
Headphoneus Supremus
I might accidently be out for lunch, bro!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
drftr
I might accidently be out for lunch, bro!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
Me on v16New 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.
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.Iem's are not race cars! New tech does not make old iem's obsolete. Acoustically correct is still acoustically correct.
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 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'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.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
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?634ears - Japanese quality craftsmanship from a one man brand, can feel the pride and love in his creations.
Never heard of this one, and their website is still work in progress... Can you tell us some more about Clan Audio?Clan Audio - Friend of mine from Scotland, excellent cables that provide sound quality to rival the more well known brands.
No, thats not the case. The new IEM is a continuation of the Mason line, obsoleting Le Jardin that released in May 2022.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...
one of my favorite placesLast 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.
I find the lack of an installation video....disturbing.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.
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.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
Setting aside pricing, how does a new release make any previous IEM from the same company "immediately" obsolete?But generally about this practice of offering several flagships one after the other at sharply rising prices while the old flagships immediately become obsolete.
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...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.
@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!!really enjoying the new album from The Smile this AM, big music release day overall.