F&F is too risky, GL getting your money back if you sent payment to a hacked account or you get struck by bad QC.
I’ve never had any problems on Head.fi other than some guy who tried to bait me with F&F bullshit via PM which I politely refused, I’ve bought 5 sets on classifieds so far.
Fair play - outside factors are a real thing, no doubt about it. I would just say in terms of trust, there’s no question about it, mags can be trusted.
I get that, but the man literally lends sets left and right and you still don’t trust him lol. Well, your loss 
Just trust this random anonymous person on the internet with your money, bro.
I mean we know each other, have done business with each other, and have become friends. We’ve earned the trust.
I can understand and respect someone who doesn’t have the relationship not feeling comfortable about it.
It’s all good
Nice!
I got red silent since I need it to be as quiet as possible and I love linears.
The extra caps always com with ducky, but Im using full matcha. Love the retro look. My next board will have xda style keycaps for sure, as that as been an old love of mine and still unsolved.
Not at all. Monarch2 is on my top 5 for a reason. The fit is horrendous due to size (I still can fit the - blessed ears I guess), the stock cable is heavy, the mid bass is polite and the stage depth isnt on par with the top 3 or even cheaper models.
But godamn if it has the best mids in the market, as far as I’ve heard. The layering, detail and separation of this segment is something remarkable. The sub and treble follow right after.
I have a personal trend to not talk about my favourite (expensive) sets. I don’t like to encourage people to spend that much. This is where a reviewer’s job gets tricky. You know it’s good, you what it can do, but you also believe in price to performance. If you isolate the last half of 2022 alone, you see insane value propositions for a couple dimes. Sets like Zeros, QKZ x HBB, Olina SE, Wan’er, Heyday, Yume2, Aful P5, Quarks DSP, (…) shook the market for a reason. You now can get:
Think about that for a second. Let it sink in and see how blessed the market is at the moment.
The underlying conclusion is that I think the reviewer’s position is changing. It has now shifted more into a guidance path until the mid-range segments, and by then you should have your tastes found, and just follow through. This is massively influenced by factors like everyone and their mother having a coupler, (almost) every tuning having a cheap IEM trying to copycat it and, most importantly, every customer now can gamble a couple of bucks per month without feeling bad.
One year and half ago, if you wanted to join the hobby and found random websites, especially reddit, you’d be proposed with some KZ > MD Aria > B2/Dusk depending on your budget, 90% of the times. Most questions I’d get when I started would be “Is X better than Y?” which I’d have to take some time and ask for preferences, libraries, etc. Nowadays I gues 10% of those questions and rather “I love X and I know Y is an upgrade. But is worth the extra 100$?”. Game changer.
Now that I’ve dispersed, to get back on MMk2 (and others like Meteor, SA6u, Top, etc), they were not neglected, or rather, every set on my collection was. I had to literally no time for audio in the past months, and it is what it is. Family is more important. BUT, that doesn’t mean they are forgotten. Some of them have already almost finished reviews and they will have their important distintion, much sooner than you think 
I do F&F all the time (f*ck PP taxes) and I can vouch for @MMag05 in a heartbeat, but you should be skeptical all the times. Be safe with your money, don’t be like me.
I’m also the guy who sends tribids and kilobucks across the globe for people to demo. More than 1y ago, lots of sets where thrown around Europe (thanks to customs) for people to demo. Sets that were paid by me, not samples. It’s lovely to see that trend to being picked up in the US, like @GooberBM was mentioning yesterday in another thread. They now share stuff so everyone can demo. I will also contribute to this cause by donating some sets to that gang, disguised as xmas gifts, so they can share between them and gain experience/save money/help the community.
Exactly!! It is not good to encourage spending a lot of money on IEMs. You have to be happy with what you have. For example, for my library TOTL is IE600 and S12, but for others these IEMs may be meh. And remember - for a metal library only DD or a good planar driver, nothing else will save you, even if you think about soundstages, layering, etc.!
/Still, more expensive IEMs that match your library are better!/ !! 
I get it for sure. You should always be skeptical and also choice what gives you piece of mind. With the amount of sets I’ve turned over I just can’t afford taking more of a loss from PayPal on taxes.
This year will be the first I file under these new laws. I’m going to see how it goes. Hopefully I can claim them all as losses since even though to PayPal it’s a profit to me they’re losses from what I paid. It might actually push me to file for a small business license. Then I’ll track every purchase of mine and file archive all receipts; from buying, shipping and selling. Hell I’ll even write off portions of my utilities, trips to the post office or a diner meeting. No way the business will pull a profit at that point. If it works out I’ll go back to G&S.
With that said though F&F in some small way helps to pass lower sales to you. I’ve sold some pretty big ticket items at crazy low prices with F&F that with G&S would have hit the buyers pocket hard if I adjusted the price to include G&S. I do understand that it relies on trust from me. Which I’ve tried to built in this community. In some way G&S also requires I have trust in the buyer. As they could always stiff me and say the item never made or was received broken and leaving me to deal with a huge loss. Especially where some of shipments were to expense to have the whole cost be covered by USPS insurance.
Well said, as usual! I still love my double-filtered Olina!
I’m down like 3kish in the hobby, 2 late!
Ok, last post from the Shanling M0 Pro series. And God protect me from any further posts on sources sound reproduction.
TL;DR - my ears are B-stock. Probably there is no difference to be found between ZX300 and M0 Pro for me. A/B tests for sources suck. I feel like an idiot, my wife looks at me like I have gone mad.
Longer story - after a discussion on sources in general with @Rikudou_Goku and him finding out that Sony DAPs are having full digital amplification method (very unique to be honest!) I convinced myself to do something for the world and not only for my pleasure in my free time and do the volume matched A/B testing of above mentioned sources.
General approach
The procedure was that I created a playlist consisting of the songs from throughout my library that I am very familiar with. I uploaded them to both - same files.
It contained songs of Bon Iver, Danger Mouse, Big Thief, Beck, Dr Dre, The Roots, The Flaming Lips, Black Country, New Road - 9 songs in total
All tests were conducted on the most resolving set I have - Unique melody MEST MK1.
Disclaimer:
It is not a blind test. I am probably biased against difference in sources. I am probably half deaf or my brain is not able to perceive sound properly 
Volume matching:
I used the last used volume level on M0 as a base value of “normal listening level”.
Uploaded pink noise .wav file to both devices. Played it on M0 pro and measured SPL through the sound analyser app on Android. The result - 73,5 dBA SPL was measured on 34/100 settings as my normal listening level.
I switched the source to ZX300A without moving the IEM in the coupler and adjusted the procedure to set the volume to get as close to 73,5 dBA as possible. Ended up at 66/120. In fact my last used volume on this device was much lower - at around 67 dBA which is interesting thing to think of.
Then I started to swap around ABing. Longer passages first, then short 10s fragments. Full songs in the end.
Conclusions:
I mean… If there are differences they are so miniscule for me that it would be crazy to tell that one of those sources is worth even 5$ more due to that only.
But if I consider any (really - ANY) real life usage scenario for me? Hell no I would be consciously missing anything choosing one over another. So here is the huge win for the Shanling M0 Pro in my opinion as it is much cheaper than Sony ever was and it has also plenty other perks that are marketed as main functions. And some people may look at such small device as utility first, sound second. And in my experience it is really not the case
I know a lot of people experience is much different to mine. And I don’t claim they are wrong (how could I?). I just lost and gave up on the search. So I need to filter out any messages on sources having huge impact not to trigger me 
Or maybe tubes would be different story…? 
Tuuuubes. Im getting a M0 btw
Do you have ZX300 still? Very curious to hear your take!
It’s about to get boxed as a xmas gift to a dear friend 
This is why I never move up in my sources; I have never heard a definitive difference between [clean, transparent] sources, and frankly, I don’t want to. My money is better spent on transducers and alcohol.
My only beef with the T3+ is they are right at the limits of what fits for my ears. I have been curious to see what the fit is like on the C3.
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