[Vision Ears]

Hello Head-fi.
Had a not so good experience with www.audio46.com recently in regards to my purchase of the Vision ears VE7.
Posting this here as a warning for anyone considering buying from them. (At the very least, purchasing this specific vision ears product from them)

Firstly, I had placed a pre-order for the VE7 on the 10th of May with Audio46.

This was shipped out on the 10th of June one month later, and I had this sent this to Precogvision so he could do a review for the VE7.
Unfortunately, if you follow Precogvisions thread, you will know that he received a defective VE7 unit with channel imbalance. So in the end I had to have that sent back to audio46, who said they would need to contact vision ears in regards to a replacement.

I received the response "Vision Ears has informed us they'll ship more VE7 in two weeks, so we'll likely get it in 3 weeks. They also said that with the measurements you provided, the VE7 would not have made it through final inspection, so they aren't sure what's wrong unless they check it in their lab"
They also provided the option for a refund, or exchange for a different IEM. But I had chosen to wait for the replacement from VE.

After a few back and forths over the following weeks, they notified me that they had finally received a new batch after waiting over a month for my replacement, but I quote "We've received a new batch of the VE7, but we've discovered that it has similar characteristics as your chart. We're going to issue you a full refund instead of an exchange."

Here is the full conversation for transparency:

However the problem is, the same day they sent that email to me they had sent an email promotion promoting the just received VE7s. If you also check their website they have a large banner promoting the VE7 on sale as well.

To add to this, they had listed an open box VE7 that same day:
https://audio46.com/products/vision-ears-ve-7-universal-signature-design-in-ear-monitors
https://audio46.com/products/vision-ears-ve-7-universal-signature-design-in-ear-monitors-open-box

My question. Are audio46 knowingly listing defective IEM's in the hopes that no one will be able to tell the difference after admitting this in the email to me?
Does Vision ears know about this?

The only possible explanations I can come up with this are:
1: Audio46 are knowingly selling channel imbalanced IEMs
2: They just don't want to honour the pre-order price ($1280)
3: Vision ears have sent out multiple channel imbalanced VE7's (Is there something wrong with the VE7 design?)

It's hard to imagine 3 being correct, and if the answer is 2, then why did they waste nearly 2 months of my time to finally say "Well yes, but actually no".
The annoying part is that the pre-orders were up for nearly a month at that price, so it's hard to imagine it was just a temporary price mistake.

I don't know what to say here. I just hope the answer isn't 1...

Hi guys,

as you may can imagine, we are shocked to hear what happened - this is definitely not how we want customers to be treated. So please take our apologies and be sure that we will investigate how this could happen and we will contact you by pm to fing a good solution for you.

All our models go through a very strict QC protocol during production and one final test is always done right before packing. So it must be a rare case and but please understand that at this point, we cannot tell why the unit was unbalanced. I will investigate and let you know in a pm. It's the first time we got this report, so there is definitely no general issue.

Cheers

Marcel

 

[gazzington]

My elysium has arrived. Playing them through my new m8. They are a different sound signature than I’m used to but with jazz (Herbie Hancock/Davis/Coltrane) they are mind blowing. Love them

 

[Rockwell75]

My elysium has arrived. Playing them through my new m8. They are a different sound signature than I’m used to but with jazz (Herbie Hancock/Davis/Coltrane) they are mind blowing. Love them

Looking forward to more thoughts on the M8 as well!

 

[Audio46]

We would like to clarify the situation with the most recent VE7 customer purchase.

First off, it’s rather disrespectful to post a confidential email exchange. So since we’ve been put on blast, we can reply back.

The situation is we tested the earphone when it was returned to us (by multiple audio engineers), and we couldn't find anything wrong with it. We waited until we got a new batch from VE, and tested a new unit; we noticed they had the same sound characteristics as the claimed “faulty” ones. We've found that customers who send us graphs tend to use it as proof even when the sound says otherwise, so we do not trust the accuracy of the graph. However, we reached out to VE about the graph just in case we were wrong and had to take further action.

In the email exchange, we did not want to argue with the customer, which is why our customer service rep was instructed to say what they said in order to avoid an exchange where it would end up returned again. There is nothing wrong with the new batch of VE7. We did not want to ship another unit to the customer and receive another open box when initially nothing was wrong with the first unit. We decided to issue a full refund and paid for return shipping even though the unit is not defective. We are known to aggressively discount products, and the price was not the factor for not shipping another unit, it is more dealing with a customer who will believe they got another defective unit since the new batch has the same sound characteristic as the first unit he shipped back, which had nothing wrong with it.

We had shipped 2 other units from the same batch to other customers on preorder, and we never had any complaints or returns so far. Audio46 carries over 80 audio brands, so if any brand is not on par in quality, we will not support it or market it to our customer base. Every return is tested if it is defective, and it is mailed back to the manufacturer for replacement if there’s any issue with it. Otherwise we list them back as open boxes; it is not a good business model to sell defective units because you end up paying for shipping, return shipping, transaction fee when issuing a refund, and, most of all, losing our customers’ loyalty. Our customers know we're better than that.

 

[Tiax]

The situation is we tested the earphone when it was returned to us (by multiple audio engineers), and we couldn't find anything wrong with it.

You should've been open with the customer and explained him everything.
Instead you made false claims in your private exchange (that all units you're selling are equally defective), and now when it was made public, you're blaming it all on him.

 

[Imusicman]

My elysium has arrived. Playing them through my new m8. They are a different sound signature than I’m used to but with jazz (Herbie Hancock/Davis/Coltrane) they are mind blowing. Love them

+1 I would like to hear some more impressions please. This is an IEM Ive always been curious about. Thanks

 

[mvvRAZ]

We would like to clarify the situation with the most recent VE7 customer purchase.

First off, it’s rather disrespectful to post a confidential email exchange. So since we’ve been put on blast, we can reply back.

The situation is we tested the earphone when it was returned to us (by multiple audio engineers), and we couldn't find anything wrong with it. We waited until we got a new batch from VE, and tested a new unit; we noticed they had the same sound characteristics as the claimed “faulty” ones. We've found that customers who send us graphs tend to use it as proof even when the sound says otherwise, so we do not trust the accuracy of the graph. However, we reached out to VE about the graph just in case we were wrong and had to take further action.

In the email exchange, we did not want to argue with the customer, which is why our customer service rep was instructed to say what they said in order to avoid an exchange where it would end up returned again. There is nothing wrong with the new batch of VE7. We did not want to ship another unit to the customer and receive another open box when initially nothing was wrong with the first unit. We decided to issue a full refund and paid for return shipping even though the unit is not defective. We are known to aggressively discount products, and the price was not the factor for not shipping another unit, it is more dealing with a customer who will believe they got another defective unit since the new batch has the same sound characteristic as the first unit he shipped back, which had nothing wrong with it.

We had shipped 2 other units from the same batch to other customers on preorder, and we never had any complaints or returns so far. Audio46 carries over 80 audio brands, so if any brand is not on par in quality, we will not support it or market it to our customer base. Every return is tested if it is defective, and it is mailed back to the manufacturer for replacement if there’s any issue with it. Otherwise we list them back as open boxes; it is not a good business model to sell defective units because you end up paying for shipping, return shipping, transaction fee when issuing a refund, and, most of all, losing our customers’ loyalty. Our customers know we're better than that.

911 I just witnessed a murder

 

[toaster]

This is a reletively small issue that seems to have been handled quite well (if slightly less than perfect,) from a46’s end.

this was likely not the type of situation where posting private communications was necessary to reach the desired outcome.

I visited audio46 a bunch of times when living in nyc and their customer service was always solid, and is once again, on display here.

 

[Precogvision]

Hello!

I'm the reviewer who measured the unit in question.

I always listen before I measure a given IEM. But with just thirty seconds of listening to this pair, I could tell something was off. The IEM sounded quite congested and noticeably darker on one side of the IEM with percussive hits; furthermore, the center image was unevenly distributed. Graphing it after was what confirmed my suspicions. You can see that there is almost a 10dB channel imbalance at one point in the highest frequencies.

It’s important to remember that the graph is neither intended to be a direct measure of the IEM in question’s sound quality, nor does it reflect the subjective listening experience. But it is a largely consistent, objective measure of a given IEM’s channel matching. Unlike with headphones, the coupler used to take the measurement for IEMs is an external one (meaning the IEM is inserted directly into the coupler), making it very difficult to mess up a measurement.

I’d also like to elaborate on the reason why the imbalance on this unit might not be picked up in subjective listening. Due to the high frequencies (10kHz+) with which the majority of the imbalance has occurred, if a given listener’s hearing does not token these high frequencies, the imbalance simply will not present itself in subjective listening. I noted this in my conversation with Kipz when I asked him if he wanted to contact the manufacturer about it; that he might not hear the imbalance entirely. There also needs to be a certain degree of channel imbalance for a listener to pick it up (for example, I personally cannot pick up 1-2dB of imbalance), but that’s not really relevant in this instance.

All that said, I want to stress that I am 100% open to the possibility of measurement error, bad tips, or the IEM simply not fitting in my ear correctly which led to these consistent subjective impressions and objective measurements.

 

[Deferenz]

My elysium has arrived. Playing them through my new m8. They are a different sound signature than I’m used to but with jazz (Herbie Hancock/Davis/Coltrane) they are mind blowing. Love them

I’m really curious about the Elysium. The only concern I had was over the bass as many people say it is a bit lite in that area. It would be gold to read your impressions on it.

 

[Rockwell75]

I’m really curious about the Elysium. The only concern I had was over the bass as many people say it is a bit lite in that area. It would be gold to read your impressions on it.

Ely is quite source & power sensitive but @gazzington has the Shanling M8 so he's in good hands. The bass lacks the density of a DD and is by no means the star of the show on Elysium-- the mids and treble are-- but I found it totally adequate and never found it wanting while I had it.

 

[SBranson]

I’m really curious about the Elysium. The only concern I had was over the bass as many people say it is a bit lite in that area. It would be gold to read your impressions on it.

This is a difficult thing to assess unless you know someone's library and what they want in terms of bass balance. Admittedly, I thought the bass a bit light at first. But after getting to know the sound, it seemed well in line with the general tuning. Even when I had the EE Bravado 2 as a secondary for a while, with it's epic w9+ bass, going back to the Elysium didn't feel like they were missing bass, just presenting it in a different way with a different overall tuning philosophy.
For mid centric music, the Elysium is a treat.

 

[gazzington]

I’m not finding them to be bass lacking. Obviously they have less bass than my lx but most stuff does
I find them to have a more normal amount bass. Exceptional with jazz and classical but also does really well with metal with its faster bass. Quite an all rounder so far. Take my opinion with a grain of salt though as I only got them yesterday. All my views so far are based on using a m8 too. Will try with a wm1z and cayin c9 soon

 

[SBranson]

I’m not finding them to be bass lacking. Obviously they have less bass than my lx but most stuff does
I find them to have a more normal amount bass. Exceptional with jazz and classical but also does really well with metal with its faster bass. Quite an all rounder so far. Take my opinion with a grain of salt though as I only got them yesterday. All my views so far are based on using a m8 too. Will try with a wm1z and cayin c9 soon

You're in for treat with the M8/C9 pairing. I found the Elysium responded extremely well to the C9..

 

[Damz87]

I’m a borderline basshead and I’ve never felt that Ely was lacking bass, especially paired with M8. Sure, it’s not going to match an LX or IER-Z1R for sub bass, but there’s more than enough to feel satisfied in bassy songs. Also the quality and texture of the bass is fantastic. It’s hard to believe it’s a single BA driving it, tbh.