Bad Guy Good Audio Rankings and stuff (under construction) (Part 1)

Tempotec Sonata HD PRO and its newer balanced version Tempotec Sonata BHD

Earman Sparrow is another one that comes to mind, might also be worth checking :+1:

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+1 For the Lotoo Paw S1. This thing has impressed me over the past week. I just got my full setup put together last night. I ended up ordering a super short right angle USB C cable from Woo Audio and then I used some command strips (the kind of velcro with all teeth, no fuzzy side) to attach the S1 to the back of my phone. Feels solid and sounds oh so sweet! I’ve got my music loaded on a micro SD card in my phone and I use the USB Audio Player Pro app to send bit perfect audio to the DAC. I think this setup is going to be hard to beat for the price.

@hawaiibadboy There seems to be a QC problem on the blon bl-01 regarding unit variation.

The first comment on my review on it confirmed it:


I got long time viewers sending me thank you messages and some posting under the vids that love the shit outta them.
Wait until you get 100 comments under your review and consider

  • What the dude was listening to (a phone? etc…)
    *Maybe a song from him to help
    *Personal tastes ?

Unit variance perhaps? Likely for a set that sold 3,000 units (11/11). U12t, EE Legend X and most sets from anyone not named Etymotic are going to have that with a big sample size.

Full Disclosure: I don’t know anyone at BLON in fact not sure if they are a Wooeasy sub brand or what?

A guy loves the TAPE PRO
Another guy DOES NOT love the Tape PRO but loves the BLON 01

There is no info to get from 1 or 100 comments that says more than people like different stuff

Now physical flaws is a QC issue to me.

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I’ll try it :slight_smile: Lotoo soured me on the bonkers priced LPGT but maybe that item is a winner :slight_smile:

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I haven’t heard any of the high end Lotoo stuff because I am not playing at that price point. The S1 puts a smile on my face though. I prefer it to the Dragonfly Red and the iFi Hip Dac. It drives my full size headphones easily and it sounds nice with my BL-01. I’m thinking maybe the S1 got some trickle down effect from its big brothers. I have a set of JVC HA FDX1 coming in the mail so I will be testing it with those because I’m hoping that will be my go to portable rig.

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There is no backing material behind the driver.
The KBear is not a aerosol spray coat or a foil over PET.

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if the coating is applied on both sides, then there’s no way of telling except if it’s cut through the middle and a light spectrometer is applied for analysis. Even if it’s on one side, there’s no way of telling without a low power microscope. KBEAR state 6 microns (they pull out all the stops and state it in terms of 6000 nanometers in order to make the figure look more impressive, which is funny) of thickness for the diaphragm. But, that’s a pretty average coating thickness in terms of a PVD process, and not the thickness of an entire diaphragm. More importantly, from visual inspection, that diaphragm looks nothing like 6 microns, which would be incredibly thin. There’s something there taking up all that thickness, aka a polymer. Taken together, diaphragms can get up to 30 microns thick, polymer plus coating, easily. So their stating 6 µm is kind of a giveaway that they’re blowing smoke up you know where. A pure Be diaphragm would not get anywhere close to that thinness. It’s a minimum 25 µm and up to 500 µm thick.

Check out Materion’s data sheets: https://materion.com/-/media/files/electrofusion/a_truextent_info/eqf3021_acousticberyllium.pdf

They’ve developed methods for making the foil thinner than that, but it’s not a huge difference.

Even if this mysterious Japanese supplier is getting its own source of Be from Mozambique or whereever, I can hardly believe it can make a 6 micron foil. I almost have to hold in laughter.

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Of 945 IEM I have reviewed BElieve is the 2nd KBear (0.21%) of my library.
I don’t care about companies feelings or their fans
I opened it expecting to find a scam and i had a video planned.

I did NOT find what I expected and a video will not occur.

what do you mean?

Who typed that word “apology”?

Tiny brass ring secured the diaphragm.
Gently tried to remove voice coil and entire diaphragm collapsed like a deflated balloon into a blob and settled around the remains of voice coil.

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Nice swag :+1: @brux

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Yeah that cable is dope. Soft flexible, can connect to all my amp/dac love it

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