So I’m putting away the garden tools just as the USPS truck pulls in and asks for a signature.
In any other case I would have knocked the pipe bowl out where it was at and rushed inside, but this was a new tobacco my brother just bought for me as an early birthday present (Tewksberry Hobbit’s Weed Match from 4Noggins). So I did finish up, and then I rushed it.
Once in, I knew I had precious little time before my daughter woke up, and I had to shower before then. After opening the box I was so happy to see the set already had foams fitted - I can struggle pretty badly with putting foams on buds, so that saved me about 5 minutes!
But then things didn’t go to plan. I connected the Serratus to the R3 Pro’s balanced port using a 4.4mm to 2.5mm adapter off of Amazon. But a few seconds into the first song the volume started ramping up, and up… I had to quickly take the buds out of my ears as I saw it go steadily to 100%. The volume button felt a little mushy, and attempts to lower the volume only led to it ramping right up again. Then sometimes it would get stuck crashing all the way down to zero. There was nothing stuck under the button the last time I used it and it had just been left on my desk? Leveraging a thin knife blade in the edges of the volume button and running it around, I was able to regain clickiness and a proper response. But then it wouldn’t play any of the music, saying there was no media! If I told it to scan for sources it said there was no card mounted even after taking the MicroSD out and putting it back in.
Thankfully I had the idea of at least using it as BT receiver from my phone so it wouldn’t matter if it had local playback messed up. And that worked!
But at this point I only had time to dot between songs listening to 10 seconds of each at a time!
The bedtime routine’s been gone through now, and my wife is in another room so I can listen to not-so-isolated music. I’ll get some listening done now… might even be able to give it a “can not so isolated earbuds work during dishwashing” in a few minutes!
I think the reason it’s not knocking me sideways is because the Grand Archer is already very good, as my most recent point of reference for earbuds - I made sure to bring the GA home for this week so I can compare buds to buds.
So far I’m finding when the volume is high is when the Serratus excel most. I am finding vocals intimate while anything that’s not meant to be intimate is correctly distanced/staged. It can have a lot going on and everything sounds clear. It has good warmth and very good bass, doesn’t sound scooped out anywhere. Timbre is true to reputation. Wouldn’t be fair to say more for now as the impressions are very young.
Sorry if any of that’s incoherent, pretty tired, I need to stand up / move around the house.
