QuincyPigBoyKZ Castor Pro are almost good. This bass though… what the hell? What should I try next?
pilferjinxIf you look for crinacle and his collaborations you can’t go too wrong. He likes balanced/treble focused tunings that are close to harman values. Some people criticize that they’re a bit boring and clinical, but honestly, in my experience they’re not that bad. There’s all sorts of options based on budgets.
ÜbercomplicatedI would agree except that the recent Crinacle Divine and Diablo are crazy, IMHO; I couldn’t even bring myself to listen to a full song with them, and they’re rather overpriced. This video gives a decent impression of them: youtu.be/mi6TGuNB5kA
But I generally agree, the Crinacle collaborations have been very good generally. And CrinEar has been a huge success, especially the CrinEar Daybreak.
The truth about the Crinacle Divine & Diablo
I haven’t tried any KZ IEMs personally, but your description doesn’t surprise me. The Chu II, I have tried though, and I gotta say, they are not that great IMHO.
Vocals have unnatural timbre and are too forward, bass is unclear and untextured while obscuring the midrange leading to reduced clarity. Clarity and sound stage do improve slightly when driving from a proper DAC/amp stage instead of a high impedance output (e.g., laptop or PC headphone jack), but even so, I was disappointed. The metal build quality is great though, and they’re super small for IEMs, so I use them for falling asleep to ambient music now.
Given that you listen to quite tonally complex music, I would make clarity a priority. Check out these two IEMs, they might be of interest: graph.hangout.audio/iem/5128/?share=JM-1_Target%2…
I also highly recommend using squig.link as a resource, and getting a feel for what kind of frequency response you like. Remember that the actual frequency response will be different for you because of your unique ear canal, hrtf, etc.
Also see this Super Review video on recent releases: youtu.be/GTNXnIzZ6G0
Good luck on your IEM journey! It’s a wonderful hobby :)
