has anyone compared the w10 & nob back to back?; it has been claimed that the tuning is different? feeling conned; no confidence in the market.
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Why do you need to compare the two when AS said they used W10s and sold them as “Butastur lite” himself?
At that point, he has no credibility to believe they’re different sets, outside of maybe nudging the tuning a little, for me
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and off he goes into the sunset…
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When a larcenous worm picks a username named after a pack of cigarettes…American Spirit…give me a fuckin break…bells and whistles should have instantly gone off. In this world there are the initiated and the uninitiated and some people on this board are willing to believe anything…even things too good to be true
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I think he actually stated they were designed from the ground up and emphasized the point that this was due to his want to bring the audiophile experience to the masses at a reasonable price point - consequently IIRC he stated that in comparison to W10 (only when confronted about them), Butastur was tuned to a wildly different target, uses a novel crossover system, has a unique venting system and uses different drivers - pretty much implying it to be a totally different IEM just hand manufactured by the same DIYesque small shop maker. In reality I am not sure if anyone should hold out that reviewers turned co-collaborators, in the main do more than just nudge a tuning from a pack of premade options regardless of what magic they like to claim they have applied to manufacturing decisions, technology utilized or unheard TOTL tuning options suddenly unearthed.
Yes, anyone who is a reviewer or has been around the hobby for awhile - will already have skepticism around IEM marketing - but a lot of people who found out about these may not have that body of audio experience (or life/conviction mistrust) and so if they took him on his word (as they theoretically should - as they were given no reason to doubt him) / you can see how they would feel aggrieved (paying more, buying into the hype & story, etc…). Moreover, once trust has been eroded, people will begin to question everything - and now that @hawaiibadboy has not gotten a response in months or had his set replaced as publicly promised by @AmericanSpirit_JP - it is natural that people worry that the same could happen to them and want to find a way to justify the purchase they have made at the cost they paid - no one enjoys that type of dissonance.
Ultimately, existing owners of the set need to judge it on its SQ to them / personally having purchased a used version of this set, I still find it delivers on good SQ qualities for its intended tuning signature and also has some novel features such as the terribly named venting system. Whilst personally it was not the marketing story behind the IEM that attracted me to try it (I equally find it to be on the Dunu SA6 Mk2 level (though different tuning/genre specificity) so hardly reinventing the price point even if performance is still top notch) - I do equally feel aggrieved at what has transpired and regardless of what I think of the IEM, I would now never recommend it or publicly sing it’s praises - it seems that @AmericanSpirit_JP has irrevocably tarnished his reputation - but as we all know in audio, short of him committing bank heist level fraud or physical torture on his customers - he will still get some blind supporters within his twitter echo chamber/BGGA & HFGF haters - and he and everyone will move on once the newbies in the hobby don’t remember the controversy and start to re-sing his praises. Many a reviewer, even in this forum - not to mention the cesspool that Head-fi can sometimes be, have had awful controversies which should have on paper ended them - yet they still move forward / some have legitimate/justifiable excuses for unexplained absences or forms of shitty behaviour, some are contrite and learn from their mistakes and become better reviewers in the long run however others run off in obscurity or try to reinvent themselves after the short term gain but inevitably they will do it again. We will see what happens in this instance…
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Each part of what you’re saying is true, which is what makes the totality of it murky and complicated.
- You can completely be in the “only the product and SQ matter in the end” camp. I wouldn’t take that part away from anyone who has Butastur and loves it. I just won’t say anything further positive about it. That’s in line with the peace I have to make with IMR
- AS should be called out, though, because with the power of hindsight, it’s a lot harder to give him any benefit of the doubt:
Giving him the benefit of the doubt would leave it where they took an existing model, changed components and tuning, and produced a new and improved model.
The cynical take is his own words are they repurposed W10s with different tunings until they hit Butastur. And also sold the Not-Butastur repurposed W10s. But which is it: Jinny updated W10 with BRAS or W10 is prototypes that were precursor to Butastur?
- At the end of the day, it’s not even about the hustle: it was a good story that cut through the hobby and got attention. Well played.
It’s the lack of customer care when it was even a little inconvenient and the disappearing like a snake oil salesman that makes people scrutinize the entire operation and feel like they were scammed
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Ohh absolutely he should be called out for the marketing untruths - as should everyone when it is material and substantial. I am sure you have seen the new IMR scandal (well to be fair there have been a lot in the last couple of months from the fake destroyed headphones from a deleted user as a proof of existence or Royal Mail losing all of the IMR preorder shipments whilst not losing any existing stock orders or Bob not responding to emails or refund requests for weeks/months to even the multiple models taking over 2 years with no deliveries) around the $30 Chinese IEM being rebranded and sold for over $300… sadly these guys never seem to learn - yet they miraculously still get people giving them the benefit of the doubt and singing their praises - cough cough Jon “Bob” Parker.
Saying about the unique features such as the venting, launching the Butastur, then suddenly “discovering” that your product partner has utilized your unique tech elsewhere on a cheaper model that he jacked the price up on then has since stopped selling… is beyond damning. I also do not think that selling prototypes is a good look - it’s an R&D expense not a way to make money off your errors - this is not KZ level throw shit at a wall and see what sticks - and the price point should alert any manufacturer that such methods will not fly.
I agree there are too many red flags 
here - not replacing faulty IEMs under guarantee is not only shady but illegal. I am just interested to see the fallout and weirdly I don’t think he will just disappear as I just can’t see how he would have made enough profit from this to warrant destroying his reputation - especially as people did get the IEMs. Let’s hope this is not the start of a pattern of behaviour as I do seem to remember him saying that NO would be looking at other future releases.
@GooberBM 
with you - 
between us to call this shit out when it’s brought up in the future 
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It would be great if this stuff didn’t happen, but a lot of people here directly enabled them to do this by riding him hard and just eating up all the stuff they were pushing (interesting to see some have done a 180 from love to hate now). This will keep happening if people keep eating this shit up, I don’t know how most didn’t see so many red flags from the immediate beginning, but guess it depends on the level of the experience in the hobby, and how much the campaign is feeding you what you want to hear. It’s nice to see people collectively agree that something like this shouldn’t happen again, but I also think it’s partly on the community to call this shit from the start and not just jump on anything. Talking after the fact is one thing, but actually not letting it start again is another, seems like this sort of drama happens in the hobby all the time with the same sort of responses afterwards, but when the next one comes around people forget the past and history repeats
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I knew something was fishy with AS from the moment he stopped posting on head-fi because he didn’t want to pay the sponsor fee to promote his IEM. Saw that a lot of his head-fi fans jumped over here to bash head-fi but still remained on head-fi to post their reviews or impressions there to get clicks, views, and eyes on their work.
Didn’t bother to call them out but I really wanted to. Figured I’d just sit back and watch how all of this was going to unfold. No point in starting more drama and paint a target on my back, getting AS’s fans to attack me, when AS didn’t outright do anything wrong at the time.
It’s just funny watching people fawn over AS and sing his and the Butastur’s praises the first month or two. Then to see him and his fans dip out right away when HBB mentioned how his set had a messed up faceplate.
You’d think he’d at least try to make it right with HBB, seeing as how HBB has such a loud voice in this community, and has the ability to either sink or drive up sales of audiophile products. If AS/Jinny/Penon wasn’t willing to make HBB happy, what hope is there for anyone else that might’ve had a problem with their unit? It also shows that this was a fly-by-night operation and that he lied to everyone from the get-go, not giving a shit about this supposed new brand and IEM he hyped to the moon. Guy is a con artist and a pretty good one at that tbh.
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The whole anti headfi narrative really helped him here. There’s a lot here that are fairly critical or against headfi (sometimes understandably so, other times I don’t get the criticism), but his sob story was pretty clearly designed to give him credibility within the community by attaching himself to basically a hotbutton topic on the side of the “people”. Truthfully, in my take from what I remember about it, he’s the one that didn’t follow the headfi rules, so that’s on him, I don’t think headfi did anything wrong. But that’s probably another discussion. But that alone pulled multiple prominent people here up to bat for him without really putting any scrutiny on him because it was just what they wanted to hear, I guess any excuse to go after headfi is something some will take.
His next step was really pushing the power to the people narrative, using the headfi sob story to talk about how allegedly corrupt the hobby is and that everyone is trying to take them down because they’re just so amazing and it would simply destroy everything else. Because clearly they’re just so great in that they’ve done something nobody else has been able to do in this already competitive market. Man and people like that here too, a lot here are really eager to jump on the next so called giant killer when they almost never exist, and many just refuse to understand that the idea of “you get what you pay for” holds true in this hobby as it does in most any other case. Pretty much shooting for the chifi dream, and too many people here ate that up. A basically mfg rep doing direct reviews and comparisons against other products is a huge red flag in my mind, and there’s a reason why the mass majority of established mfg don’t do it, because it’s disingenuous/dishonest and a scummy marketing tactic that’s just in poor taste. Let the actual consumers or people who don’t have stake in the damn company decide that rather than review your own fucking product. If you’re going to claim this beats all these specific legitimate higher end iems, at least let your product do the talking rather than your marketing team. I understand many companies pull this card saying it’s the best on the market or best in the segment, and that’s fine, but they typically don’t say more than that and don’t try to legitimize that claim with reviews that come inside the company. And it’s just ironic that they were pushing the anti established hobby route and how most of the hobby is a scam and it’s only for the rich to have fun with and all that, but they were trying to manipulate people into buying their product much harder than any higher end company I’ve ever seen lol. I guess that’s the whole “hey fellow kids we hate the corporations too, now buy our product”
Also seems pretty trendy to say your shit is inspired by nature or something, have some sort of mascot for your product, that’s there too. I’d also like to point out that while this is just speculation, it really felt like the IEM was almost pushed in the same way of “japanese craftsmanship” approach, where they try and obscure the country it’s coming out of (I mean a name like AmericanSpiritJP and all the random posts about Japanese shit) and how he’s from Japan and inspired by some Japanese stuff in design or whatever. And they also emphasize that it’s made by one master craftsman and whatever. He did clearly say (later on) that this is coming out of China, and there’s nothing wrong with something coming out of China, but at the same time that put a bad taste in my mouth as that’s just a common marketing tactic. Just makes it seem more boutique/premium/handcrafted then it is to some, since generally the average consumer tends to trust something more if it’s coming from Japan rather than China (even if that’s an unfair way to think, you can’t deny that some have that inherent bias, and some like to capitalize on that if they can)
As you mention, then he brings in the headfi shills that only post in the thread about how glowing the iem is, which kept going on and on and would pop in only to promote when things got slow or when they wanted to distract someone from something. It was really interesting to see that only the most positive praise came from them and not really any of the typical forum members you see on here.
After the initial publish hype, I felt that his activity was really suspect as he would tend to backtrack what he’d say and shape what he was saying to best suit the specific conversation and put them in the best light, and also would give conflicting advice whenever someone had an issue and would just point elsewhere. Really just every comment that was made seemed pretty either planned or designed for taking people for a ride, either by giving someone what they wanted to hear about how great the iem and pushing “corrupt hobby” narrative, changing his take on things when people actually asked questions (like for example how he would go back and forth saying that they could be driven by anything and weren’t source picky to saying that you needed this specific source or hinting that someone’s source was inadequate, well which is it??), the sort of soft coverups and downplaying of issues and pulling in other shills to take care of it. The cable rolling thing was also confusing too with how he used that to really distract people, almost wild goose chase there. Nonsensical comparisons with things he hadn’t even experienced also didn’t help (like the car analogies for example)
And so on, there’s really a lot to go over, but truthfully I didn’t follow the thread that closely as I wasn’t interested from the get go. This was all just before someone actually started to raise the red flags and HBB’s unit.
It’s really complicated to try and inform people that something might be off when so many were already pulled in by the stuff he was doing, becomes an uphill battle, you’re just going to get dogpiled by people who have been convinced that the company is the victim and you’re just attacking someone entirely innocent who’s “acting in the best interest of the hobby” and whatnot. People want to believe, he was giving them everything they wanted to hear, and people will not take kindly to someone introducing doubt into whatever they’re being fed daily by the iem marketing project. And that’s just something I feel like I had no place to comment in lol, I don’t keep up with the average chifi stuff in the slightest, especially the marketing side of things, I actually wasn’t sure if this is just now the norm or this is still something that’s an outlier lol. Had no interest nor stake in the iem, and figured if there’s so many members here jumping on so hard, I must be missing something. But that’s really how all of this is designed to work isn’t it lol, legitimize the iem through heavy pandering rather than the actual product? Have people support and defend you on merits of representing a concept/dream of the hobby, preaching the ideals of popular members of the platform, and so on, rather than defend you based on your actual product.
I know nothing about IEM aside of what was preached and never heard it, could be as amazing as they say for all I know, but I can’t really get the sour taste out of my mouth from everything that’s gone on in that thread, really just looks on the outside like a setup for a borderline scam at worst, or just a way to grease a community up for an average product at best. In the end doesn’t seem like a scam, but it does seem like it’s just another option in the price point and not much extra, wouldn’t know until I tried it myself of course. And it seems like greasing up for an average product is what ended up happening lol. It’s interesting to read how it ended up just being a reshell/rebrand and how some got shafted on poor qc/broken products, so I guess it’s good that it wasn’t a total scam, but I guess that’s how it goes. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Might be a bit of a cynical take, but really it was somewhat sad/disheartening to see the community get so caught up in this at least from the perspective of an outsider that thought this clearly looked really suspicious from the beginning
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You make my point for me; if they’re tuned differently; hence back to back comparisons. If you have done this, let us know? If not, why bother putting an answer here.
“people forget the past and history repeats”…absofuckinlootly
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He fucking said nothing eally then dipped for a month.
If you folks fall for that con again it’s on ya’ll
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Hahahahha ya I saw the comment I was like is this guy fr?? 
Guys don’t fall for that shit
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His comment by itself opens up a whole other can of worms…
#1 why are you selling an unfinished prototype product
#2 why are you selling that prototype without any disclaimers, and
#3 if you’re going to sell a prototype wouldn’t you want your audience to know because you can still market that as a sentimental piece, kind of like “look you can own one of the very first concepts and ideas we worked on”, and I’m sure some people would’ve bought it as a collection piece, so why wouldn’t you link that in your post with the other things you’re trying to sell? It makes no sense business wise either because it’s positive awareness for your product… Unless of course, it’s not a prototype, and you just made some excuse up after someone called you out reusing components from another IEM.
Now there aren’t any hard evidence for or against this argument, but it’s very odd and illogical especially his reaction, which as @GooberBM mentioned makes him look like a snake oil salesman lol. If it is a prototype unit the ethical thing to do is to let people know regardless.
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Sorry for the slow response, I have much more important things going around than hobby right now…`
More important ???I have a Child and a wife and my kid just puked on me…life is tough…WORK IT OUT OR STOP SELLING SHIT
See you guys around in a month or so!
If you hustle another set …@Ohmboy…you should lock that thread and shut him down
P.S.
Had a spare minute to audition 64 audio U12t at Fujiya Avic of Nakano Tokyo, and many others at E-earphone Akihabara main tower for TOTLs including UE Premier Pro , Visions Ears, Noble Audio, and all those $5k USD class ones.
You are too busy to get me my set, to reply to nervous customers and explain your bullshit which takes minutes on your phone…but taking your ass to show some expensive stuff was doable???
Conman… been on that tour and it’s a nice day out. Enjoy life…spare the bullshit and tone deaf response of kinda addressing nothing then saying your busy ( not toooo busy obviously)
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Yeah, the more I’m in the hobby the worse I feel about my time in it. I did review his collab on head fi and fell for his BS. I sold it pretty quick, I found it closer to the Aful 5 with less bass than an actual good set. I sold it for like 375… I even bought the tips and cable he recommended. To be honest the Nicehack Blacksoul is a hell of a cable as it feels good and has well made connectors. It’s a funny hobby. Here’s to an awesome 2024.
Sorry about your kid Chris. My eldest was sick for days, now the little one and I both have it. It sucks. Nothing like having your kids be sick and not being able to do anything about it.
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I learned a lesson when I was 5 years old…bought a set of toy soldiers for 2 bux from the back of a comic book…father said are you sure you want to do this and if you do, don’t expect what you think your gonna get…Pop you don’t know what you’re talking about…well Pop was right and I learned at that very young age not to fall for anything that just doesn’t feel right…perception above all else
This matter is one of those
I love you
The check is in the mail
and I promise not to nut in your mouth…nuff said
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Chap - come off it - you can’t change your mind with every scene based flavour of the month topic / you gave the set a glowing 5 star review with an S both for technicalities and tuning saying it was better than the SA6 Mk2, Meteor, and approaching Monarch Mk3 levels and now you say it is comparable to P5… 
We can all not be impressed with the situation surrounding this IEM but that doesn’t change our hearing… As a reviewer people look to you for buying recommendations and so expect consistency and fair perormance comparisons against an IEM’s direct competition…
So what was it /
The set was never good SQ wise and you were shilling it on a review for clicks…?
OR
The set is good SQ wise as per your review and now you wanna change your tune and downplay your review take as you don’t like the AS association…?
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Trust but verify
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