Yea, that's the thing. VE usually tunes their IEMs for customs. Universal counterpart of it will end up sounding brighter than the custom version. A couple of my friends who tried the Elysium demo as part of the VE tour, reported back that it was on the bright side. So I am hesitant to pull the trigger without demoing it first.
That's the sense I had with the universal VE8 I had for a bit...there was a spike about the 8k mark which resulted in a bit of sibilants, and which was consistent with reports I'd heard from others regarding the universal demo.