A Few Days with Blue Ever Blue BEB X1001

Blue Ever Blue, BEB for short — I’d never heard of this company’s earphones. I was just curious and bored, saw they were running a demo listening program on Hi-PDA, so I grabbed a pair to check out.

The model I got is the BEB X1001. The packaging feels a bit cheap — just a carrying case and the earphones inside, with spare rubber tips in the case.

Honestly, for earphones, packaging doesn’t tell you much. I’ve seen worse. What matters is the sound, so I couldn’t wait to plug the BEB into a Sony D100 and start listening.

Two minutes later I put them down and shook my head.

How to put it. Muddy, muffled, boomy. Those are the three words I can use for these earphones. I’ve never bought into the whole earphone burn-in thing, but considering these were sent out for demo purposes, surely they wouldn’t be this bad out of the box, so I figured I’d do what people say and plugged them into the D100 to burn in…

After nearly 48 hours, I listened again…

Same as before.

So I could only wear them for long stretches and listen to music to find their strengths. After about 3 days, I finally understood what these earphones are about.

First, the good points. The BEB X1001 does have some capability. The highs seem a bit clear, resolution is okay, everything that should be there is there, and sometimes if you listen closely you can pick out details that are hard to notice. The bass has huge impact — how much? Listen to hip hop and you’ll feel the kick drum hit you right in the chest; rhythmic songs build atmosphere easily. At the same time the soundstage is tiny. To get a sense of it, grab a transparent-sounding earphone, plug it into a Walkman, turn on EQ and set it to something like “Studio” or another environment effect — that’s roughly the feeling.

Because the soundstage is small, it has a unique sense of presence with small-theater live recordings. Duca’s live tracks come across very vividly, and watching movies with them feels close to being in a cinema. Simply put, these earphones offer slightly better capability than products in the same tier, at the cost of a small soundstage.

Now the downsides. A small soundstage makes things sound less open, but that’s not a big deal — not every earphone is judged by soundstage. The problem is that the BEB X1001, already with a small soundstage, tunes its bass up to an absurd degree.

How absurd? Like I said earlier, the BEB X1001 does have some capability. On the intro of an R&B song, before the bass comes in, both the instruments and the vocals have a bit of flavor. Then the bass hits — and boom, all that’s left in your ears is “duang duang duang” bass. You can’t hear anything else clearly. What hits you is bass and more bass. The huge, powerful bass masks every other detail and completely ruins the whole listening experience. I tried swapping to the shorter triple-flange tips the company provides to filter out some bass. With the bass reduced, the mids and highs came forward, but the small soundstage atmosphere the bass created was gone, and something felt missing. So I went back to the C tips and used the Walkman’s built-in EQ to cut the bass and reduce the head-throbbing, but with little effect.

Small soundstage plus massive bass makes the BEB X1001 miserable on large-scale orchestral works. Endless bass again, everything reduced to duang duang duang, even the singer’s voice gets buried, and you can barely make out any detail. Just terrible.

After 3 days with the BEB, it suddenly hit me — I’d heard this sound somewhere before. Thinking it over, I remembered a coworker’s urbeats earphones. So I borrowed them for a comparison. Put them on, hit play, oh fuck — same small soundstage, same heavy bass. Only Beats is Beats: the bass is even more violent than the BEB, absolutely pounding your head until you can’t take it. Even on tracks without bass, the urBeats are muddier and duller than the BEB, because it seems to have nothing but bass. By comparison the BEB at least has resolution and highs — it’s just that those two get easily drowned out by the massive bass.

In summary, the BEB has significant limitations with music. It suits small-theater live recordings, small ensembles with few details, movie soundtracks, and it’s not bad for watching stereo movies.

So how to rate the BEB? I can only say this is something imitating Beats’ products and tuning. The metal shell, the flat cable, the tuning direction — all have a strong Beats flavor. But Beats sells well because it’s flashy and famous. You, a BEB, even if your details are better than Beats and your highs more forward, don’t have the fame or the flash. With just that head-pounding bass, I don’t think you have what it takes to sell well in the market. Better to improve the tuning, cut the bass, widen the soundstage, and go for a forward-midrange route — then you could be a budget killer.

I could have returned the earphones, but my mom threw out the packaging, so I can’t. Maybe keeping them isn’t so bad. Listen to them now and then, feel the power of the Beats knockoff, and remind myself not to forget what real music is.