I listen to a lot of genres including Rock and Metal, and bought the Clairvoyance. The graph looked a little better for my taste. I've always noticed with lesser priced earphones (these are my first over $400 ones), that if you bump the bass up, the earphones react worse than if you bump up, say mids or highs. So, since the bass to CL bass was more to my taste, I bought those. However, once I received them, I realized that they are not for music but for technicality. Though they had better response in bass, there just wasn't enough juice 100-500Hz to spit out that fat, chunky sound. It's like listening to tiny (albeit high quality) guitar amp than a similar quality huge stacked one. Another mess was a small freq band scooped out from the highs, such that there was the last upper range shimmer but no sparkle... like when hi-hats play, you hear "tssssp" instead of "tsshhp". This went away when I eq-ed the CL mid-upper range to that of MN, and made the transition smoother. Eq-ing it down a little from 125-200Hz also made the instrument separation better and increased the depth and width. So I believer Monarch should be better in those technicalities .However, IMO, both of these are for technicalities alone, in which Monarch would be better, but neither show that fat, chunky sound... and if you eq them to that... the technicalities reduce dramatically.
One advantage I have is that I have the Diana and the cable from that made a world of difference to the Clairvoyance. It covered the potholes and made the sound smoother and richer. Now, I'm happier with them... more so than to eq them to sound more like Monarch. These were the only cables that did that from the few that I had, and they mostly wont work for Monarch since if I eq them to sound more like Monarch, they damage the sound than make it better. All said, I think Monarch would be a better choice of the two, no matter what kind of music one listens to; but neither is the right fit for music in it's natural tonality. The people considering these should be looking to find space, soundstage, imaging, instrument separation etc. at the cost of a natural tonality of the instruments. (I've explained more in my review of Clairvoyance here).
Also, people who already own the clairvoyance and Diana, have to try using the Diana cable with Clairvoyance; I think complement each other such that, I feel that's how Clairvoyance should've sounded out of the box in the first place. The cable seems to give a new life to the earphones, and songs like Pour some sugar... sound huge, with a huge amount of space, almost like listening to them live and good tonality and smoothness to the sound; similar experience with DT, ACDC, IM etc., though not as good as the one with some Def Leppard, due to perhaps the huge arena type reverb used on the tracks.
The Tea can't match its bass, for sure. I put most of my IEM collection up for sale recently, and FH3 was the one I took off the list! I like your IEM list!
