A Few Days with Beyerdynamic DTX101 iE / Sony XBA10 / iKlear

I don’t have any grand ambitions in life, so you’ll find I tend to spend all my money in one area and nothing at all in others. Still, keeping a record of what I buy and writing a bit about it has its upsides:

First, it reminds me: “Look at you, you idiot, wasting money again!” Second, it lets other people know: “Look at this idiot named Li wasting money again.”

Yes, long story short, this idiot has been wasting money again. Let’s talk impressions.

Beyerdynamic DTX101 iE

This one was a pure impulse buy after I saw it on SMZDM. A former flagship that could once go head-to-head with the Sennheiser IE80 had dropped to 269 yuan with free shipping. That kind of price collapse made me marvel at the value, and a quick Google turned up plenty of reviews calling it a match for the IE80. My arm twitched, and buying it felt like getting a UE900 for 299 — that same rush of satisfaction. So I hesitated a moment, then pulled the trigger on the red one.

The packaging turned out decent, but the accessories are miserly: a few silicone tips and one genuinely ugly cloth pouch. The earpieces themselves aren’t much to look at either — cheap no matter how you slice it. My ears aren’t especially sharp; I can only pick out headphones with an obvious character. So all I can say about the DTX101 is that it falls short of the AKG K374 on bass — it lacks punch — but vocals, female vocals especially, are comfortable to listen to. That’s the honest truth. I can’t tell you anything about treble or midrange signatures. It just sounds pleasant. That’s all.

Is it worth it? I’d say it beats the Creative IE3, sits about level with the AKG K374, and does a bit better if you don’t like thumping bass. Looks aside, it’s worth buying.

Sony XBA10

Another impulse buy. Fine, I had a 299-100 headphone coupon for JD, and I remembered I still had 80 yuan in JD vouchers, so I stacked them. Reviews of Sony’s XBA10 aren’t kind, but considering it ships with ten Columbia tips — the tips alone are worth the money — I bought it anyway.

What for? I’d run out of excuses, okay? Fine, I’ll use it with the Surface Pro 3 to play galgames.

It arrived in surprisingly fancy packaging — for something around a hundred yuan, the box is absurdly flashy. Unpacking those Columbia tips was deeply satisfying. Honestly I had no real desire to listen to it; plenty of people say it’s treble-heavy with no bass, and so on…

After much dithering I took it out and gave it a listen. How to put this…

A pile of shit? A puddle of filth?

Bass is terrible — there isn’t any. But unlike other headphones, its treble is terrible too: the tuning is thin and sharp and piercing. And the midrange? Also bad, pushed way back, just no good…

With all three ranges ruined, it sounds worse than an EarPod. Even funnier, when I plugged it into the tablet to play galgames, the voice acting was piercing to the ear, and using it for ASMR sleep videos was so unsettling I couldn’t sleep at all.

Put it this way: I paid 110 yuan for ten Columbia tips and got a pair of overpass earbuds thrown in.

iKlear cleaning kit

My Surface Pro 3 had gotten greasy and nothing would wipe it clean, so I thought I’d buy something proper for cleaning. That led me to the cursed zhihu, where someone recommended iKlear and said you’d never regret it despite the price.

I won’t say how expensive. It hurts. Though I did knock a bit off with my last JD voucher.

It comes with several large cleaning cloths. I don’t know anything about the chamois-leather instructions, but the cloth really is good. So good that I suspect what I paid for was the cloth, not the cleaning fluid.

I wiped the Surface Pro 3, my ThinkPad X230, the Lumia 630, the iPod Classic, and the U2412m monitor at home, and the results were obvious on all of them. The anti-dust effect is real — my bedroom is a dust disaster zone, and not finding much dust on the screen after a day and a half is a minor miracle. The anti-fingerprint claim is less impressive, though: the Surface Pro 3 and Lumia 630 still smudged…

One last thing: that cloth is great, and easy to clean too — rinse it with water and it’s spotless.

Even so, I wouldn’t tell you to spend that much on this unless you’ve got a voucher or you really want to spend money to relieve your loneliness.