While I was in Amazon delivery hell, I kept picking up cheap sets and once the last two get here today, I’ll start working through a (now) six-way battle:
7Hz Zero
Moondrop CHU
KBear Rosefinch
CCA CRA and Lyra
Blon Z200
The only one I haven’t heard at all is the Blon. The rest have been in my ears, and I have some really interesting thoughts to share, soon
Such as? I’m looking for different flavours of DD I have Olina, Mele, FiiO Fd5, Acoustune HS1670SS, TinHifi T3 plus, numerous IMR ACOUSTICS DDs and HBB KAI
If you can do @Rikudou_Goku 's changes to make it a Vernus or snag a Vernus instead, I say yes. Wonderfully warm and impactful, yet not overbearing IMO. I have never heard the stock Falcon Pro, but the consensus seems to be that the Vernus fixed the balance to make it more enjoyable.
If you want something different, cheap, and an absolutely absurd amount of bass for those “IDGAF” days, KBear Rosefinch is something worth trying out.
A side note: don’t switch straight from Rosefinch to CHU. My brain doesn’t know how to react, and kinda hates me right now for going from one end of the spectrum all the way the other way!
Let’s see how sonically transparent these are - the largest size metal screens I have. The edge of the nozzle is very thin, but so far the self-adhesive has these firm and flush, and reversible at a moment’s notice.
In other news regarding the Fans. I absolutely love them. But I do get some upper mids (and maybe some treble) glare. It’s only on occasion, and the same section of tuning is probably the secret sauce on tracks where it’s not too much. I’ll try the 400 screens when they come (ordered for missing S12 a la Michael Bruce), probably too dense for this use case so maybe take out the centers like an earbud “donut foam”. But I expect lowering the upper mids/treble peaks by a couple dab is all that’s needed.
I’m still confused by the Globe graph. It’s like a Fan that had all the upper mids and treble removed. Yet both times that I tried it, far apart at that, I couldn’t shift volume where it needed to be to counter therecessed mids specifically because upper frequencies got too spicy. Mystery. It graphs essentially L shaped but didn’t sound that way to me.