Impressions: Moondrop Nice Buds & Old Fashioned

I’ve never really had anything against Moondrop as a brand. I bought a pair of their ~300 RMB earphones a while back and they were fine — build quality and sound both held up. Their “anime marketing” is just a product-promotion路线, and it’s clearly worked. With the audio market getting more and more cutthroat, you have to differentiate to survive, even if that means leaning into a “trendy” style.

So you see all these streetwear brands charging a premium for design and brand recognition. Moondrop charging a premium by rubbing up against ACG culture seems fine to me too — and their low-end stuff doesn’t even carry much of a premium. Instead, while keeping basic quality intact, they give you some “fashion” elements. At least they’re the best-looking option in the budget tier, right? You wear earphones out in public, so beyond sound quality, treating them as an accessory is a perfectly good approach. As for the industry “veterans” who trash Moondrop’s high-end products — in this mystical audiophile domain, high-end products are basically an IQ-tax genre anyway. Once you’re in IQ-tax territory, buying a Moondrop at least looks better on you than a HiFiMan.

Recently Moondrop released two products I quite like: the Nice Buds and the Old Fashioned. Both are budget-focused with a retro flavor — one’s an earbud, one’s an over-ear.

I might as well talk about these two together, since they share the same style: translucent shells, minimal packaging, cheap price, sound that gets the job done, and most importantly — comfort.

I know a lot of people buying their first earphones care about sound quality. These two aren’t “punch above their class and destroy everything” good — they’re about what you’d expect for the price. You can listen to all kinds of music on them, especially pop. Classical listeners probably won’t look twice at these, and folk… do folk listeners buy stuff this cheap? What you won’t get is some “quirky tuning” — like gutting the bass for the sake of treble, or smearing everything into mush for the sake of vocals. No awkward “this only sounds good with certain genres” situation. The tuning is fairly neutral, so it works for all pop music, which is plenty for a normal beginner. Besides, we’ve been in the Home Studio era for ages — electronic and hip-hop built on computer production and sampling have long dominated pop. Don’t give me that Hi-Fi talk; these earphones are enough.

The ideal audience here is young broke students, plus the fit is extremely comfortable. I really dislike flat-head earbuds — they always fall out and leak sound. The leaking can’t be fixed, sure, but the Nice Buds are one of the few pairs I’ve worn that stay put. The included foam covers feel like they have a bit of design thought in them; I’ve used them for two months and they’re still firmly on the buds. Back in the day with Sennheiser MX500-type stuff, I’d have lost who knows how many sets by now.

The Old Fashioned looks even better, and it has a rare detachable cable design — someone’s even put out a balanced cable for it. Unnecessary, if you ask me. Most importantly, the Old Fashioned looks good and costs just 99 RMB (sometimes less). Maybe it’s the economic downturn and trading down, but a lot of audio makers have recently refocused on the low end, putting out new products built around “retro” and “cheap”: the former to lure old-timers into buying a toy, the latter to meet the basic needs of people on a tight budget. Two birds, one stone. So if you want a good-looking pair of earphones that’s good enough, these two already cover it.

Back to where I started: a lot of people hate Moondrop’s anime marketing, but in reality every major brand is scrambling to copy it. Take the old “Yuandao” — anime characters are plastered over basically all their products, and uglier and cheaper-looking than Moondrop’s. A while back I saw FiiO putting out products similar to Moondrop’s, just with some differentiation — like FiiO’s retro little on-ears at 199 with Bluetooth, neatly sidestepping Moondrop’s lane. That’s when I noticed FiiO had apparently spun off a sub-brand called “Snowsky,” aimed at the youth market with an anime bent. I thought about it — “Snowsky”… isn’t that basically aimed straight at “Moondrop”?

My impression of FiiO has always been that they’re pragmatic, like to pile on the hardware, and don’t do overly fluffy marketing. If they’re willing to deliberately launch a brand to follow along, even mimicking the product line, then that just proves Moondrop is right.