A while back I bought a Meizu EP51 Bluetooth earphone, and a few days ago it broke. It broke out of nowhere. I got home from a run and the right earbud just kept hissing noise, the thing stopped responding, then it got hot, then it was dead. I’m guessing some part of the waterproofing wasn’t done right. But I bought the mainland China version, so I figured I’d take it to the local Meizu place for repair. Their attitude was actually fine, it’s just that you have to wait in line.

So here’s what happened. A few days ago I went for a run, it started raining out of nowhere, and the next day I got home and found the bass gone from the right unit of my IE80… Thank god I bought the domestic version! Sent it in for repair. After that I started seriously thinking about whether I should get a waterproof pair of sports earbuds. I mean, you’re not really chasing sound quality when you work out. After looking around, the best recent option seemed to be the Meizu EP51, so I grabbed one on Taobao for 150.

The FiiO EM3 is FiiO’s new pair of flat-head earbuds. Honestly, my goodwill toward FiiO has been climbing steadily lately. The accessories are minimal — just the buds themselves and a few foam covers. That’s it. Since it’s positioned under 100 yuan, this earbud’s strengths and weaknesses are equally obvious.

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.”

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…

These days there’s a standard term for the bag you carry around every day — EDC, short for Every Day Carry or whatever. Point is, it’s the stuff you haul around daily. By that definition I’ve got an EDC bag too, usually with a work ThinkPad and some accessories inside, plus a portable pair of headphones so I can plug into the laptop. The first pick was the AKG K420, until a family member took it. Then I switched to the JVC SR500. Honestly the JVC isn’t as good as the K420 — portability alone is a problem. Folded up it feels loose and floppy, and the sound has no real highlight; the highs aren’t transparent enough. So after a year and a half of service, the JVC SR500 finally broke! (Why do I say “finally”?) Thus the hunt for a successor began. Requirements: 1) portable; 2) decent sound; 3) comfortable; 4) under 200 yuan; 5) closed-back. So I bought the Edifier H690.

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.

The first time I worked up the nerve to spend over 1000 on earphones, I bought the UE TF10. I figured I’d already picked up an F807 and decided to listen to FLAC, so I ought to pair it with something decent. That TF10 stayed with me for a long, long time. I got to know its sound so well I couldn’t know it any better: strong instrument rendition, powerful resolution, rhythmic bass, and… vocals buried under the bass and instruments, plus a fit that was a struggle to jam in no matter what. Two years later, one side of my TF10 finally developed a problem, so I had to let it go. It was a US-market unit, and there were no new TF10s on the market anymore… I could only switch to the ER4P, though sometimes I couldn’t help missing that aggressive TF10 sound. Compared to the ER4P it wasn’t transparent at all, but it was genuinely great for rock. Later I picked up a cheap TF10 unit on eBay, put it on, and just shook my head. That cheap, it was probably foreign e-waste. The resolution was there, but the sound was far too muffled… So how does the TF10’s successor, the UE900, perform?

When it comes to buying earphones to listen to music, I’ve never considered myself an audiophile — just some poor bastard afflicted by OCD. In elementary school, I downloaded a song called 《爱就一个字》 from 商都信息港 at 33.6Kbps. It was only 3MB, 128Kbps if I recall correctly, and at the time I thought the sound quality was absolutely mind-blowing. Then in high school I bought Sony’s “perfume bottle” player and downloaded albums from Ukoo.net. 192kbps VBR was already considered good quality back then. I couldn’t really tell the difference, but one time I downloaded a 128Kbps song, gave it a listen, and something felt off. So I figured I’d buy a better pair of earphones. I saved up and got the Sennheiser MX500. Put them on and instantly felt I’d wasted my money: “This is no different from my old 10-yuan earphones!” I saw people online saying these had “good bass extension,” didn’t quite get what that meant, so I asked my classmate Lu Da. His answer: “Ah, that? It’s just the sub-bass effect, man. When it hits it’s not boom-boom-boom, it’s more like there’s a bit of echo and springiness to it — pong pong pong.” I sort of half-understood. Then one day one of the MX500’s drivers died, and I had to grab a stock earphone that came with a PDA. Maybe it was slightly better than the 10-yuan ones I’d used before. Put it on, turned on the music, and immediately something felt wrong. “How does this sound so different from my MX500?” And that’s how the tragedy began.

There’s very little written about the HAVI B3 Pro 1, at least here in China. All I could find were a handful of impressions on the overseas Head-Fi, and they don’t exactly agree with each other — one guy even reported a quality issue. Domestically there’s even less; what I did find reads like sponsored fluff. HAVI itself doesn’t seem to care much and looks more interested in expanding overseas. Anyway, I bought one, and after listening I was pleasantly surprised. Quick write-up: There’s only one seller for the HAVI B3 Pro 1 on eBay, and it’s the official one. The owner was very friendly and even shipped it express. The packaging is nice and the build quality is solid — the back has a glass facet. Sure, it’s a bit of a knockoff of the Sennheiser IE80, but at least it doesn’t look ugly. According to the official site it’s a dual-dynamic design. I’ve heard plenty about multi-BA setups, but this is my first time with dual dynamic drivers.