Review: Zombie ECCI PR3002

A few months back I sold my iPod Classic locally here in Zhengzhou.

The guy who came to buy it was an audio nut too. While we did the deal we listened to each other’s earphones and talked a lot. I really liked his old jazz, and he preferred my Phonak vocal-focused pair.

Somewhere in the conversation we got onto how people around us don’t get why we buy earphones. I said most people listen to my Audio-Technica im03 and ask why the hell this thing is so bad, the bass is completely gutless, and he said the same: for a lot of people, if the bass sounds good the earphone sounds good, which is exactly why that garbage Hi-PDA earphone got so many people saying it was great a while back.

“Good listening habits matter. Bass isn’t everything.” I totally agreed with that line.

Good listening habits, plainly put, means you’ve started to notice how nice the mids and highs are, and maybe even started to dislike bass. I remember when I first bought the Sony “torpedo” Walkman, I was a bass lover. But at some point I stopped liking boom-tick-boom and started preferring vocals — after all, it’s a person doing the singing.

But there’s no helping it. Most people without good listening habits all hold the same view: only boom-tick-boom is the best.

Another fact you have to admit is that this group is huge. Audiophiles are a minority, so plenty of manufacturers, catering to the people willing to pay, won’t give up on bass, and may even lean into it.

So in the low-end market, the earphones we see rarely drop the bass. Sure, there are a few going the opposite way, like the Creative Air and Creative IE3, but that approach of utterly abandoning bass is way too extreme. Maybe what we need is a genuinely balanced earphone. An entry-level one with a bit of everything across all three frequencies, an all-rounder — for most people whose wallets aren’t exactly fat, that’s already a satisfying solution.

So I’m glad to see the Zombie ECCI PR3002 take that correct path.

I’d only heard people say Zombie ECCI’s Mark II was decent, but I’d never tried it. This time around I got a lot out of it. The first thing that moved me was its fairly normal tuning. Honestly, at this price I rarely hear tuning this proper. Either it’s heavy bass or it’s floaty highs — something like the PR3002 with no bias across the three frequencies is far too rare.

The Zombie ECCI PR3002’s box is tiny, pitiful next to the Macaw GT100S. Inside there’s just a pouch, and inside the pouch is the earphone. The build quality isn’t what you’d call premium either — cheap plastic, L and R letters so tiny you can barely tell left from right, and you can only tell them apart quickly by feeling the bumps underneath. Then there’s that big lump of a Y-splitter in the middle, all of which makes the thing feel like it isn’t worth much.

But earphones speak through sound, so I had to give them a listen first.

Every earphone maker tells you to burn in your earphones, but you know I never give a damn about any of that… After putting them on I clicked a song I personally like, Hanatan’s Kotoba Tsunagi.

Kotoba Tsunagi is honestly a hard song to pull off well. The only rendition I’ve been satisfied with is Grado’s; the arrangement is just too complex. The Zombie ECCI PR3002 has a bit of bass, the mids sit slightly forward but not quite in-your-ear, and the highs float a little, though not excessively. Overall this effect gives you a “not little bass, prominent highs, mids and highs both surging out” kind of feeling. On this song it comes across as… not really distinctive, still pretty comfortable, apart from the highs floating a bit.

So I clicked the second song, a Chinese R&B track:

Hermit Crab is a typical R&B song, sung by a man. Under the Zombie ECCI PR3002 it feels very instrumental, and its strong resolution makes you feel close to the singer. But the floating-highs trait becomes a typical flaw here — Liu Zhongyi’s voice isn’t that sharp, yet it gets rendered into a shrill one. Thanks to a tiny bit of soundstage effect, though, the voice comes across as a little sweet…

Sweet… okay, he’s a guy, but a sweet voice is still fun to listen to.

And because of this earphone’s “sweetening treatment” of male high notes, I clicked another song:

This is a rap dance track from MC Hotdog, and again something interesting happened: Hotdog’s magnetic voice also got sharpened, and this trait gets more obvious with high-output gear. Still good on resolution and instrumentality, though.

By this point I had a vague idea: this earphone probably renders female vocals better than male ones. So I clicked a female vocal song:

Sitting Down Here comes out with a lot of flavor on the ECCI PR3002 — the female voice is close, the highs don’t float thanks to the vocal range, and the bass isn’t excessive. Times like these you have to sigh: earphones are picky about songs too.

After a round of listening I had a handle on the ECCI PR3002’s character. In a word: balanced with a pop lean, highs a touch floaty but not over the top. That’s the ECCI PR3002’s style. For this pair, I figure it’ll handle most pop songs fine; male vocals may come out a bit sharp, but not unpleasant (maybe long burn-in would improve it). As for ACG fans, since most of the songs are female vocals, it should suit them well too.

Looking back, the Zombie ECCI PR3002 is one of the few earphones I’ve seen under 400 yuan with balanced-leaning tuning. Not that it’s absolutely balanced — just that it doesn’t lean too hard in any one direction. Tuning like this matters, you know. It should help beginners figure out faster what highs are, what vocals are, and what genuinely sufficient bass is. Maybe someone buys this pair by accident and gradually comes to understand their own needs, sinking deeper and deeper into the audio rabbit hole.

So good listening habits are half the entry ticket, and the Zombie ECCI PR3002 is a pretty good place for an audiophile beginner to start.