Anyone who’s seen me complain every day probably knows my mental state hasn’t been great lately. The kind where you can’t fall asleep at night and wake up early in the morning, so much so that when I should be sleeping I have to go on YouTube and find some uncle and auntie counting sheep before I can drift off. And at this critical moment, my bedside earphones, the Earpod, died… The K314P was actually the backup, but when I saw that the K314P I bought for 90 yuan had gone up to 1000 yuan, I decided to put it away for now and get something cheap instead. That’s when I came across the 39-yuan model in the Diving Expert series.

Blue Ever Blue, BEB for short — I’d never heard of this company’s earphones. I was just curious and bored, saw they were running a demo listening program on Hi-PDA, so I grabbed a pair to check out. The model I got is the BEB X1001. The packaging feels a bit cheap — just a carrying case and the earphones inside, with spare rubber tips in the case. Honestly, for earphones, packaging doesn’t tell you much. I’ve seen worse. What matters is the sound, so I couldn’t wait to plug the BEB into a Sony D100 and start listening. Two minutes later I put them down and shook my head. How to put it. Muddy, muffled, boomy. Those are the three words I can use for these earphones. I’ve never bought into the whole earphone burn-in thing, but considering these were sent out for demo purposes, surely they wouldn’t be this bad out of the box, so I figured I’d do what people say and plugged them into the D100 to burn in… After nearly 48 hours, I listened again…

Back when I bought my first pair of balanced-armature IEMs, the UE TF10, I had this weird sense of superiority. Because everywhere online said BAs were the new tech, wiping the floor with dynamic drivers in every way — superior resolution, badass multi-driver setups, vocals so poisonous it hurt, etc., etc. Looking back now, BAs aren’t all that. Not that those strengths are bad, I’m just saying that when I listen to music with BAs, something always feels missing. Sure, the Focal (Phonak) female vocals were poisonous, sure the ER4P’s treble was transparent, sure the UE900 had strong instrumental expression — but it never quite had that flavor. A while back I was eating with a friend. The restaurant had a small stage, and a resident singer was up there performing “Love Like a Tide.” After that song, I think I understood what BAs lack. What’s missing is that sense of atmosphere, like sitting in a tiny bar and feeling the music reverberate through the space. BAs are too cold and clinical — that’s when the dynamic driver needs to step up. The Sennheiser IE 80 is probably a pretty good dynamic.

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.

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.

I’m the kind of guy who feels like something’s missing without BGM, so I need music with me in all sorts of situations — whether I’m alone for a long stretch or just trying to wall myself off for a while. Anyway, this habit started back in middle school when I began listening to the radio. In high school I got my first MP3 player, a Walkman perfume-bottle model. I honestly can’t say exactly when I started inexplicably chasing sound quality. Anyway, once I had a job and money, I accumulated a bunch of slightly more audiophile-ish gear — players, sound cards, headphones, earphones. So this time I’ll talk about the three IEMs I’ve actually been listening to: TF10, ER4P, and Creative IE3. I really hate using baffling vocabulary when describing sound quality — half those terms I can’t even feel the meaning of myself. So, as the title says: no mysticism, just impressions. Source: Sony F807, all music in FLAC.