As a total novice in the audiophile mysticism scene, I inevitably had to go consult a master. So I tracked down Wu Lao Er. Wu Lao Er is the ultimate veteran audiophile — he knows more mystical buzzwords than TFBoys has released singles. I asked Wu Lao Er if he could recommend any earphones, preferably comfortable ones, for lying in bed. “Xiaomi Circle Iron.” Wu Lao Er didn’t even hesitate. “Xiaomi Circle Iron, the ultimate endgame pair. Buy it and you’ll be as free of worldly desires as I am… oh right, what do you listen to?” “I don’t really listen to music. I’m mainly buying them to listen to eroge.” “Then you should want the Xiaomi Circle Iron even more!” Wu Lao Er’s voice went up. “The Xiaomi Circle Iron… the vocals are forward, the mouth shapes are big, sibilance is low, the soundstage is wide but controlled, the mids are fairly tight, leans warm, and there’s a whiff of rosin to it. Perfect for a vocals person like you.” “But my budget is only… 20 yuan.” “What the hell are you gonna buy with 20 yuan, you dumbass? You gotta add some money!”

It’s been almost two years since the Audio-Technica IM03 arrived… I actually really like these buds. At first I thought they sounded muffled, but later, whether they got burned in or something else happened, they ended up being the most “balanced across all three frequency bands” earphones I own. Treble is clear, mids are dense, and while the bass is a bit light, I personally lean toward a cleaner sound anyway — if I want bass, I’ve got the IE80. So these became my first choice whenever I’m in a bad mood. The IM03 I bought was a Japanese-market unit, no warranty. I used to worry it might suddenly die like my late, lamented TF10 — and that day finally came, though it wasn’t within any so-called warranty period.

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?

“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。”

Why did the K314P earbud climb to 1000 yuan? Back when I bought mine, it just sounded like a bright, airy earbud with a bit of a bass deficit. Though to be fair, I never listened that closely… I just figured: At this price, an earbud is only good for making some noise… Turns out the K314P made quite a name for itself with that noise. According to the various audio gurus, the K314P’s treble can match or even exceed the K3003—you know the K3003? The big hybrid flagship! And then it got discontinued… and nothing else reaches that treble height. So the price went up.

Back when I’d just started university, I bought my first pair of in-ear earphones — an Edifier model, I think. Once I pushed them in, I discovered a whole new world. Over time, “earphones” came to mean “in-ears” as an unwritten rule. After all, if a thing can’t even isolate sound, it just sounds bad, and the lows and highs are hard to get right too. But people are fickle. Lately I’ve been fascinated by flat-head earbuds, because I dug out an old Creative Air, and its surprisingly wide soundstage caught me off guard. That’s when I realized flat-heads can do things in-ears can’t. There aren’t many high-end flat-heads, and even if there are, they’re hard to track down. Luckily, Beyerdynamic Earbuds happened to put out an entry-level model, so I gave it a try — and it felt like discovering a new world again. How to put it… that slightly wider soundstage, bass that isn’t too cramped, paired with full mids, really gives you a different feeling when you listen in the dead of night. Of course, I said the dead of night, because the weak spot of flat-heads is that the isolation is terrible.

The first time I heard of Rene Liu wasn’t because of her songs. That was probably middle school. Star Chinese Channel was airing April Rhapsody, and Rene Liu played the rather tragic lead — but it was that role that stuck with me. I don’t know if I liked the frail woman she played or liked Rene Liu herself, but I think it was the former. At least later, when Pink Ladies came on, I took one look and ignored it. Luckily I later heard her songs. Most of them have the shadow of cover versions, but her distinctive voice still left that first impression: a frail woman, quietly singing those slightly sad stories.

I heard about noise-cancelling headphones a long time ago… on a Sony Walkman… Back then Sony’s Walkman came with noise cancelling as standard. According to my classmate, the tech works by using a mic to pick up the sound waves around you, then firing the inverse waves to cancel them out. Anyway, the effect was passable, though I clearly remember it wasn’t actually that great. Years later, I’ve found myself wanting noise-cancelling earphones again. No real mystery why: the office AC is too damn loud, my place faces the road and that’s loud too, and I seem to have developed a touch of nervous exhaustion. When it comes to noise-cancelling headphones, the only choice is naturally Bose, and I didn’t want big over-ears, so the QC20 was the only option.

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.

People call audio mysticism “mysticism” because there’s so much about it that’s uncertain and unprovable. Headphone forums love using precise instruments to stay objective, to determine whether a pair of headphones is truly Hi-Fi — after all, Hi-Fi originally meant high fidelity. High fidelity means reproducing a song exactly as it was originally recorded… So an audio device that boosts the bass, boosts the treble, boosts this and that is, in theory, violating the original vision of Hi-Fi. On this point, the various instrument tests on headphone forums really aren’t wrong in their direction. But there’s this concept called “listening impression.” That’s where the mysticism begins. An earbud might have tremendous playback capability on an audio oscilloscope, but that doesn’t beat a bunch of people listening and saying it “sounds bad.” One sentence — “sounds bad” — can drag a high-end earbud through the mud.