Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

DON'T BUY THE HYPE. I cannot believe these have a 5 star rating. I've tried about 30 IEM's over the past few months in an effort to find some for both my work and an incredibly demanding personal scenario. I've tried everything from the $20 KZ's to the nearly $300 Shures (trying not to go crazy on price in case I like them. I didn't even go near the $500-1500 stuff). These are flat out terrible. Here's what happened. MEE, your run of the mill 'chifi' as far as I can tell, had some success stealing some of the market away from the SE 215. So they thought to themselves "we need a set of IEM's to sell for $150 and $200" and proceeded to do just that. However, their development was the problem. They took a poorly tuned driver and armature set, about what you'd expect in a $30-50 dollar bud, and then threw in an extra cable, a decent case (finally - almost no chifi's do cases), a sample of Comply tips, an 1/8 to 1/4 adapter, a few cable clips and said, "Hey, we made it to $150 of value!". Because it seems that's what these generic companies think constitutes value, a bunch of run of the mill extras thrown in with a bland an poorly balanced IEM. So, the sound. I tested these across live mixing and monitoring applications and with a variety of media (music, gaming, shows, etc.) - keeping the media constant throughout all my testing (same stuff each time). These were bloated and messy in the mids and very dark sounding. They had a huge dip between 1k and 8k with a small spike about 5k, but then the 10k-14k was boosted pretty strong. What this translates too is that they sound very dark overall, but then certain items like cymbals come through crystal clear. Its a very weird tuning. Lows: boosted below 60 HZ (low dominant sound profile) Mids: like rolling hills, seemed like each octave of 200 (400, 800) had a bit more focus and energy with dips in between. The mids were all over the place, uneven, and sounded very poor. Highs: As mentioned, these sounded very dark except for content above 10K which sounded oddly clear. What's the issue here? Crossovers. Its the Achilles heel of all chifi IEM's. They throw a billion drivers or armatures in there and don't bother to tune anything - you are their R&D after all. That means every crossover (where one driver fades out while another fades in across the frequency spectrum) will be a weak point and either suffer tonal intelligibility or be boosted in volume. These were a total mess. And finally, the make or break for me - these could not be used critically at almost any frequency. You could to a tiny bit of critical work right at 500hz or 1k but THATS IT! They performed at a sub $40 level here. What I mean by this is test is that when using them to solo instruments (kick, bass, vocal, guitar, etc.) boosting or cutting a narrow frequency band and then sweeping the frequency up and down the range yielded no intelligible result. You could boost up to 10-15db at a given frequency without being able to hear what you were doing. I'm not saying the sound didn't change at all, but all you could hear was 'energy'. There was no tonal center or focus. You couldn't hear 300hz being boosted and sweeping up and down. This is absolutely essential for mixing and really anything critical. I'm not sure what causes headphones like any Shures above the 215 to be able to do this flawlessly and others not, but its a big deal. And I wanted to hate on the Shures going into my testing too. Besides being an audio guy I'm also a musician and do various other audio-related things. Here are my recommendations for alternatives if doing anything critical (mixing, eq, editing, transcribing, production, etc.) is important to you: The best: SE 315 - insanely good. I'm not sure why all the bad reviews, these are extremely hard to beat. Tad pricey. (also, use the black foam tips - silicone sounds like trash on the Shures) SE 425 - better for live IEM use, slightly less bass than 315, more mid push and detail, highs are fine but sound recessed due to mids - I didn't get to test them as IEM's from the musician standpoint but I'm guessing they'd be great. Expensive though. SE 215 LTD/SPE - the special edition. Its far more balanced than the regular 215 but the lows can get fatiguing. Its also bigger slightly so that may be an issue. I wouldn't even bother with the regular 215 against these (unless you play synth or accordion). Cheapo alternative - CCA C10. One of the only low-cost IEM's I recommend to people. Criticially they are a mess, but they are just good enough on enough fronts to be worth the cost - especially if you buy them from AliExpress for $23. Just don't buy these, its a huge waste of money from a company that doesn't respect the needs of professionals and just want's to literally sell anything to siphon off from the $150 market.