The FiiO X7 is a player I’ve grown to like more the longer I use it, but I still have to say it has one fatal flaw: the stock AM1 amp module is just crippled. On some tracks the X7 has a spiky, gritty treble, but when I run the X7’s LO output into my car stereo those treble spikes disappear. Think about it long enough and the only explanation is that crippled amp. Maybe FiiO did it on purpose, but at least they did release the official mid-tier AM2 amp, and swapping modules is easy — all you need is one hex screw.

Buying these earphones was an impulse purchase. I was helping my mother buy a Xiaomi Mi Band, and I figured I’d add some Xiaomi batteries to the order. My hand slipped, and I bought a pack of AAA batteries instead. I only noticed the mistake when the package arrived. Not that AAA batteries are useless to me. Thanks to that mistaken pack, the crappy TV in my room no longer needs me to hunt for buttons on the unit itself, because its remote’s batteries died long ago, and they’re AAA. So I thought about ordering the Xiaomi rainbow batteries again, this time AA. But batteries are so cheap that shipping is never free, and shipping alone costs more than a battery, which is a bad deal. I figured I’d add something to hit the free-shipping threshold, and that’s when I saw the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid earphones. I hadn’t looked into what the market thought of the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid. I’d only heard bits and pieces, and naturally none of it was good. “For that money, go eat a nice meal.” “It’s just garbage.” “I pulled them off after 30 seconds.” “No sound quality whatsoever.” “Boomy, can’t hear the vocals at all.” Anyone with even a passing knowledge of earphones would say the same. I was inclined to believe they were trash too, because at this price, unless it’s a specialist manufacturer, they’re all the same: boosted bass and nothing else. But these are hybrid drivers, and I’d never heard a hybrid before. And… I needed something to pad the order. The power banks were out of stock! So somehow I bought the Xiaomi 99 yuan hybrid. Or you could say I bought batteries and threw in a 99 yuan hybrid to hit the shipping threshold. So the question is, how do they actually perform? I hate keeping people in suspense—as the title says, “they’re not as bad as expected.”

So, I broke my sleep earphones again. My sleep earphones basically serve two purposes: plugging into the Surface Pro, and plugging into other tablets to listen to voice tracks. At first I used Earpods, then Princess talked me into buying an Audio-Technica CX550. Then I lost that pair, and after some searching I found out the strongest sleep earphones are the K314p. A year after I got them I learned they’d actually gone up in price, which scared me into putting them up on a shelf. To have a replacement I bought a bunch of Diving Expert models, but the quality was honestly terrible, so I had to pick up Beyerdynamic’s new DP100, which broke soon after too. Then I bought M&G’s K314P reissue, and as you’d expect, the cable snapped before long. So out of sheer desperation I bought this Edifier H293P Killer Earphone, 99 yuan. You can probably understand my helplessness by now. My requirements for sleep earphones are simple: Nothing with heavy bass. I use them for Galgame and voice tracks, I don’t want boom-boom-thump. Comfortable to wear. This should be the basic requirement for sleep earphones. Durable. This one matters a lot, since I’ve broken every pair before. So how does the Edifier H293P Killer Earphone perform?

The Philips SHP 9500 has been absurdly popular lately. That Smzdm thing kept pushing it until it was everywhere — it’s cheap, and the word of mouth is good. I wasn’t impressed at first. The price bracket is what it is, and yeah, people hype it as “this used to cost X back in the day,” but in the end it’s still a budget can, isn’t it. Then one day — I forget which bastard on G+ egged me on — I somehow ended up placing an order. Newegg international, no less. After ordering I completely forgot about it, and only remembered a month later. Turns out I’d registered on Newegg too early and the phone number on file was an old one, so the delivery address got flagged as undeliverable and the package was in limbo. After a whole runaround I found out Newegg doesn’t have its own logistics and had handed it to Tiantian Express, so more phone calls, and only then did I finally get the thing in my hands…

“So… you like music?” When I told the blind-date woman—God knows which number by now—about the only hobby I can actually bring up, I finally got something slightly more positive than the usual “oh.” “Yeah, a lot.” As I said it, my head was full of the line from an eroge: “はい、大好きです。”

A long time ago I didn’t like Chinese DAPs. They were ugly and the battery life was bad. Later the battery life at least improved a bit, getting into double digits at least, but they were still ugly. So now we’ve reached the point where Chinese DAPs finally look not-terrible and have passable battery life, but the gap in software experience is still a real wound. This is a fundamental gap. While world-class portable players give you all sorts of comfortable control experiences, our Chinese DAPs are still way behind on the basic function of “searching for songs.” All we can do is pull out “but our sound quality is better” to console ourselves, but the number of audiophiles willing to give up usability is small after all, and long-term self-numbing inside a small circle only leaves you further stuck in place. Fortunately, a manufacturer is finally willing to break through, and that’s FiiO.

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.

If I had to name the first time music truly got to me, it’d be my senior year of college. Back then my daily IEMs were the Audio-Technica CKM55, and I was listening to an Alan song. The rhythmic drumbeat paired with her sweet, slightly melancholy voice hit me with a wave of sadness. I remember thinking: how is this singer’s voice so clear, so sweet — it’s like the sound itself carries emotion, and I got infected by it. Later, the CKM55 that had been with me for so long had its cable snap, and then I found out the thing was discontinued. I’ve gone through plenty of earphones since, and it’s rare to find a pair that separates bass from vocals while keeping the highs clear. More importantly, that feeling of passion was gone. Even with booming bass, sweet mids, and crystal highs, there’s always something missing — that one bit of passion. I’m no good at the mystical side of this hobby. That “passion” is probably expressible in a frequency response curve, but how exactly you tune for it, I couldn’t tell you. Luckily, the Grado SR225 headphones gave me what I wanted.

Audiophile mysticism is mysticism because so much of it can only be felt, not explained, and often can’t even be put into words. The vocabulary grows with the years. Back when I was in high school, most of it was “bass extends moderately, highs are transparent, mids are sweet, good resolution.” Now it’s “wide soundstage, bass loose vs. tight, mids forward vs. too far back.” I don’t know about the rest, but “extends” is a word I haven’t seen in ages. Another trait of the mysticism is that it can’t be expressed precisely and has no unified standard. Plenty of gurus like to measure frequency response curves with pro gear, but nobody tells you what curve counts as “female-vocal poison,” what curve counts as a “wide soundstage,” what curve counts as “pop tuning.” And the funniest part: even if you produce the curve, someone will tell you music isn’t for looking at, it’s for listening to, and how it sounds is what matters… I don’t get it. I really don’t. There are also plenty of weird terms in this mysticism that can’t be explained, or you can’t even say what they mean. Recently I heard two of them: “musicality” and “monitor style.” Someone said the Sony D100 recorder isn’t suited for listening to music, and gave a reason. “Sure, this thing crushes the ZX1 in every way, but the sound is too cold, too dry, too monitor-flat, too compressed, no musicality. It’s not as smooth as the ZX1 and PHA-2.” I didn’t know sound could be heard as “smooth,” or that sound has a taste… and that it fails on taste even while crushing everything else on every count… So what exactly is musicality? What is monitor style? And how is the D100 as a music player, for a device that’s a voice recorder? After reading a pile of guru talk I got nothing usable out of it, so I had to listen for myself.

Honestly, I’d heard of Vsonic’s earphones but never actually heard them. The reason is pretty childish: their boss spends every day bragging on Weibo, which came off a bit chuuni, so I couldn’t be bothered. But things always turn around. For instance, someone recently gave me a VSD1S.