Review: Creative Air

The famous deal-hunting site SMZDM has a few headphone holy grails: Creative IE3, Creative Air, Creative Live2, AKG Q450, and whatever else I can’t remember. Basically, every time there’s a JD.com audio coupon, these earphones get trotted out and recommended, until almost everyone has a pair—it’s practically a recurring segment.

As for the sound quality of these headphones, not many people actually talk about it seriously. Based on my own experience, I can only say some of them aren’t really for the masses. The typical one is the Creative IE3: its sound is too treble-heavy, the bass is just sad, and plenty of people who bought it hoping for thumping bass are probably disappointed. Another Creative product, the Creative Air, has been tagged as a “female vocal poison.” Oh great, female vocal poison again. After the last Phiaton, I thought I was done with female vocal poison, but people keep making the same mistakes. This time I got a 100-off-400 coupon, and my hand slipped and I bought the Creative Air, because the IE3 had already been taken by someone else.

I have to give JD.com credit here: they deliver even during Spring Festival, and efficiently too, though the courier guy told me after delivering this that any order placed today would have to wait until after the holiday.

Before talking about sound, I need to talk about the design of these earphones. As you might guess, it’s won some Red Dot Award or other—actually the Red Dot Award is oversaturated and worthless now. On the surface, this is just an ordinary earbud, but to keep it in place they give you a frame. This frame is very pretentious, made of some very solid metal—you notice that when you unpack it—and the design is clever too. For example, the metal lever connecting the earbud body to the frame can be adjusted in angle, the frame has a nice sheen, and the bends of the frame have been tuned so it can hook onto your ear.

But that doesn’t mean it’s comfortable to wear.

With normal earbuds, you just stick them in your ears. With the Creative Air, you first have to put on something like scaffolding, hook that frame onto your ears, and then insert the earbuds. Because of the frame, the earbud body can’t really go in properly—it just sort of hangs there half-assed. So when you’re wearing it and listening, you always get this uncomfortable feeling that the earbuds are some distance from your ears, but the sound is coming from inside your head.

It took me three straight days of wearing them before that weird feeling completely went away, and even then, after wearing them for a long time, my ears still hurt. In that respect, they’re worse than some in-ears that violate your ear canals.

Also worth mentioning: putting these on and taking them off is a bit of a hassle, and there’s a hint of open-back design, which is kind of bullshit. For example, outdoors you can’t hear the earphones, and indoors you can’t hear anything outside them. Outdoors they’re useless; indoors, if someone talks to you, you have to take that torture-device-like thing off your ears again and again, and after a few times the fragile plastic ear hooks will snap.

So clever design doesn’t necessarily mean sensible design. An open-back earbud with this scaffolding-like fit is ultimately inconvenient to use.

Now let’s talk about the sound.

At first I thought the Creative Air was just a weakened version of the Creative IE3, but that’s not actually the case—there’s a difference between dynamic and balanced armature drivers. The Creative Air’s sound is easier to accept than the IE3’s, provided you’ve adapted to the fit. For example, at first I couldn’t get used to the fit at all, always felt it wasn’t in properly and the sound was leaking everywhere, but later I realized that’s just how it sounds.

The overall sound of the Creative Air is very thin. How to put it—to put it nicely, it’s transparent; to put it bluntly, it’s floaty. To be specific, it lacks that thick bass feeling, giving the impression that all the bass is leaking out. Whether that’s actually true is hard to say. The soundstage is a bit strange: vocals appear inside your head, instruments are somewhat distant, and the bass isn’t absent, but it doesn’t create that room-like soundstage of in-ears—more like an open grassland or something.

Ah, after all that, what does it actually mean? Let’s use an analogy: the Creative Air gives you sound like you’re standing on a big playground surrounded by giant speakers, and when the speakers turn on, the sound doesn’t come from afar but appears directly inside your head, and you always feel there should be some heavy bass, but there never is.

I repeatedly tried to confirm whether the weird fit was giving me an illusion, but setting that aside, what I can confirm is that the Creative Air’s sound is softer than the IE3’s and tends to float away.

Many people say the Air is female vocal poison, but after further adaptation, I find the Air has limitations with female vocals. Piano female vocals don’t work because the Creative Air itself isn’t good at instruments. The piano tone in Yui Makino’s classic “Fuwafuwa” isn’t clear enough on the Air, and Yui Makino’s voice itself can’t quite hold it together—it lacks a bit of sweetness. Maybe it’s better than other bass-heavy earphones, but compared to that Phiaton model, it’s nowhere near…

Then I listened to a few Maiko Fujita songs. Compared to the Phiaton, the Creative Air has an obvious gap; “Nee” performs even worse, with some sounds just floating up into the sky.

But does that mean the Creative Air is bad at female vocals? No, it just needs a few conditions:

1. The female voice can’t be too thin; it needs some weight.
2. The accompaniment can’t be pure piano; preferably strings and drum-like rhythm.
3. The arrangement can’t be too quiet, the melody can’t be too straight—it needs some twisting turns.

So… are there suitable songs? Yes!

First recommendation: the OP2 of Clover Days, “Clover Heart’s -New days recording-” sung by Marie, where the layering suddenly comes through. This song needs that feeling of separating the violin and drum rhythm. Then I looked up Duca’s songs and found that both “Kansen 〜Ano Hi to, Kinou to, Kyou to, Ashita to〜” and the OP of Your Diary, “Clover,” perform quite well—at least they sound much better than on my other earphones.

The Creative Air comes with a few foam tips. I once tried putting them on to see if they’d reduce sound leakage, and found the sound suddenly became very muffled. Looking closely, well… these earphones have a leakage hole at the back, and the foam tips block it, which affects the tuning, so there’s no point.

So, how good is the Creative Air really? Honestly, I don’t know how to evaluate it. It’s essentially an earbud, but wearing it feels more like open-back headphones, and it’s more hassle to put on than headphones. The sound is thin, but on certain tracks it sounds pretty good. And it looks nice, the included carrying pouch is great, and the price isn’t high. Suitable for people who only listen to soothing, non-aggressive songs.

Anyway, if you’re really itching for these earphones, grab them when there’s a coupon and have some fun—at least for under 400 RMB.