They havent changed much since like 2019…
Had the same happen to me a few times.
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Well, there are also the headphone and iem threads on /g/.
Those are like dunking your head in a clogged toilet. Always an adventure.
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/hpg/ and /iemg/ are hiveminds of the worst non-productive memery imaginable. Abandon all hope ye who enter.
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Yeah, kids grow so fast its crazy. It’s not a meme or just generic B.S. like
“The Terrible two’s”
That never happened with Kai.
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Is this a TFZ co brand? or you mean typical 2017 lets make it look nice after just droppinga rando driver in a shell and not put much thought into tuning (pre 711 coupler explosion era?)
It IS TFZ. Meant that they just rebranded to try to camouflage themselves and yet they barely did much to their tuning…they will just end up forgotten again at this rate.
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Thanks for letting me know.
My video will touch on this
It’s not going to be a positive video.
Speaking of not positive vibes…
I gave FlipEars my personal address March 25th.
Seems like a nice guy (So do Fatfreq’s team…foreshadowing 
)
One of my pet peeves is companies casually asking for personal info then ghosting.
He hasn’t replied to my mail a couple days ago following up on the March 25 mail when I gave my deets.
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Already reserved mine 
7th Acoustic Asteria.
Looks
Branded drivers
Mature tuning
5-10 meaningless acronyms 
No simp squad
No tour group glazers pumping up on a pre release sample
No need to ignore the graph✅
Great customer service
Color way is gorgeous
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Second day of training with the Mrs for her first week in our gym. I’m not burning the calories I usually do but even with light weights, she’s testing muscles which it doesn’t feel like I’ve even hit before 
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My Wife got her Apple Watch 
yesterday
We are living a similar life….the healthy one✅
Glad we bumped into each other in this forum moderated by a former Gym monster who still looks like a beast
Absolutely love this place. Keep pushing… Summer is going to be brutal and rewarding 
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I had to pause for a moment before I realized the red ‘Xs’ aren’t actually meant to be cons of the set. That is definitely one on my ‘to demo’ list.
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Yes, dude
BTW, got S15 in over the weekend to audition. Man, I get why you rate it so high. Loving it so far. Sounds great on XM10. I’ll be curious to hear it with even more juice when I run it off one of my desktop amps this week.
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Here is something random:
I was reading through a feedback thread on HeadFi with a Fiio representative.
This was a response from Fiio’s representative on their lack of decent midfi iem’s:
- The IEM market is very troublesome. Nowadays, a large number of new brands have emerged in China. To be honest, due to the existence of solution companies and the popularity of 3D printing and CNC machining technologies, the threshold for doing IEM has become very low. Coupled with the limitations of product technology (space, etc.), I think now IEM is more of a marketing and appearance gimmick.
I can honestly respect an answer like this. For me this is basically Fiio saying that they don’t think it’s worth competing in the iem market and they’re right. Most of their hardware is pretty decent and they are willing to take risks by putting gimmicky stuff on the market. If only they would get their soft- and firmware on par with their hardware…
Edit:
I’m starting to like this guy. He’s not bullshitting around like so many others do.
Overall, I think the IEM market is being destroyed by new models. Overnight, you will find dozens of new brands, most of which are just using the same solution for a different shell. In fact, the number of high-level acoustic engineers is very small. I have been in this industry for decades, and the number of formal acoustic college students trained in China every year is very, very rare. Even fewer of these people work in headphone manufacturing and design after graduation.
Therefore, one trend is the increasingly fierce price competition in the low-end market. Another trend is to sell at high prices based on appearance and unrestrained marketing.
Previously, we tended to create different styles of sounds for people with different tastes, but now we may need to reconsider whether this strategy is correct. Perhaps sticking to a fixed style would be a good thing.
However, no matter what, R & D resources are always limited. Currently, FeiAo’s large earphones have achieved good performance, and our R & D resources also need to be tilted towards large earphones. Because developing a large earphone requires tens of times more investment than IEM, and we have enough space to adopt our own acoustic technology, so we should not have the energy to focus on the IEM market so quickly.
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FiiO seems to be quite open about the rationale behind their decisions. They also explained their take on the DAP market some time ago, which sounded honest enough. His comment concering the scarcity of properly trained acoustic engineers also explains why there are so many ‘wonkily’ tuned products out there. In that sense, I can understand why one would call IEMs gimmicky. One the other hand, it does offer those with skills the opportunity to do something unique (like Mike B with the Anomaly) and move things forward in a different way.
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I spoke with him a while back regarding “custom Drivers”
I have spoken with several owners of both large and boutique brands.
The benefit is cost.
The Con is a higher RMA rate by a significant margin
Even if you hand check, the failure rate is higher post sale than Brand based BA.
The failure rate is up to 5x higher so you lose some of the financial benefit of going with clone/“Custom”
Some companies FiiO is talking about are stuffing clone drivers in sets over 2000 USD
“Unrestrained marketing.”
You understand what is saying right?
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oh man i thought i was tripping when i saw this xD
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thats great man!
it’s not often you see companies openly discussing the challenges and rationale behind their product decisions. That bit about the lack of trained acoustic engineers really sheds light on the flood of oddly tuned IEMs on the market. It puts things into perspective: it’s not always about laziness or bad intent, but sometimes just a lack of expertise
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The fact that they still use the clone/custom stuff, even with those failure rates, means the cost difference must be substantial. Add the 2000 USD price tag for those sets and it becomes obscene how they fool the market (or, perhaps, let the market fool itself with all the manufactured hype etc).
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Yeah, they are quite cheap.
I brought it up since the FiiO guy was mentioned being candid. He’s been candid with me in the past.
“Unrestrained marketing.” is …being polite 
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Speaking of that. Those rebranded TFZ iems seems to fall under that category it seems. They are suddenly popping up everywhere with the usual suspects touting them as the best thing since sliced bread.
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