Drama aside, after taking some time to compare the Butastur to some other IEMs like the Supernova, SA6 Ultra, TOP, EJ07M KL, and AuR Neon Pro - with all due respect, the Butastur is a fine IEM, but I would not dare to claim it as a kilobucks contender like you made them out to be - that would be more the 7th Acoustic Supernova or AUR Neon Pro.
Some issues I ran into with the Butastur that I hope you can address in the future:
The 1.5K is too boosted, masking the vocals and making them not fully extended while being shouty at the same time. I ran into sharp vocals on 9/10 of the tracks I’ve tested, especially with consonants. Comparing dynamics, the Butastur also doesn’t touch the Supernovs in-terms of smoothness and treble quality, which leads to the second issue: lack of air. It’s by no means dark, but if you’re painting it out to be an endgame contender, then you need some treble extension for better staging. Likewise, the treble is also uneven with peaks and dips - that combined with the vocal shout makes the Butastur harsh to listen to.
Low-end is “fine”, you can find sets with better bass texture and slam around the same price like the EJ07M, TOP, or even Hype 2, and in-terms of resolution it’s respectable falling around the EJ07M level, but again not kilobuck performance.
I bring this up because you mentioned yourself in your introduction pitch claiming to bring “kilobucks level of performance” down to a more “affordable” price, although $600 is by no means affordable, but if the Butastur did succeed then the price would’ve been justified, however, it did not. At best it plays with the EJ07M, which again is respectable, but not kilobucks level of respectable.
As @hawaiibadboy and @Kenyon have pointed out the main issue people have with this release is that you heavily mislead others into thinking the Butastur was built from the ground up, which it was not, as you and Jinny admitted yourselves, which would’ve been fine because many IEMs get retuned using similar components, but the problem here is the false marketing as well as you overhyping it and playing the “Robinhood” role, pretending to bring kilobucks performance when really it was just a retune. Now, I understand you don’t want to pay the advertisement fees over at head-fi, but please don’t bring this type of behaviour here.
@OK4128 So with all this taken into consideration I wouldn’t recommend this IEM personally as there are many better ones at its price point - personally I really like the AuR Neon Pro. I personally find the design and packaging of the Butastur just very very mid.