A Few Days with RHA CL750

Once again, my hands got itchy. This one was for use at the office, so obviously I couldn’t buy anything too nice, and the budget couldn’t be too high either.

So I found this on Taobao. It claims to be an RHA CL750, some kind of “factory surplus stock,” but the price is obviously suspicious — only 150 yuan.

Whatever. Real or fake, reviews botted or not, it was cheap and had a metal body, so I bought it.

It’s been about two months since it arrived. Some thoughts:

• The sound is passable — not the cheap bass-heavy kind. Mids seem okay. At any rate, it’s listenable.
• The build quality is surprisingly good. I even suspect it might be genuine.
• Fit is fine too. The included tips seem to be that new type of whatever-they’re-called tips, the mostly white rubber ones. I forget the name.
• The cable is very long, so you can plug it into a desktop.
• Because the housing is metal, it gives you a mild electric-tingle feeling when worn. That’s hard to put up with. Basically you can only plug it into a phone or MP3 player without the tingle — laptop or desktop and your ear rims get all tingly.
• The earphone has channel imbalance, leaning to the right. EQ makes it obvious. I asked the seller and got brushed off — something like “we’ve already finished processing these, no exchanges, and with the epidemic I can’t ship anything anyway.”
• But the weird thing is, if you add an amp or something and push more power, the imbalance disappears. I don’t know if it’s because these earphones really do have “especially high impedance.”
• Whether the impedance is high I can’t say, but it’s definitely not low — at least I got no background hiss plugging it into several devices.

All in all, if you treat this as an earphone for “plugging into a desktop all the time,” then aside from the occasional tingle on your ear rims, it’s tolerable.

For an audiophile like Duan Ye, I imagine that tingle would send him to heaven even faster — and remind him of his Nut phone.