CCA CRA Review
hype
/hʌɪp/
noun
Extravagant or intensive publicity or promotion.
“The CCA CRA was hyped as an IEM that outperforms significantly more expensive earphones.”
Man does it feel difficult writing this review. I am not quite sure why. Maybe I’m subconsciously scared of the blowback for trashing the community’s latest darling? Maybe I’m wondering how to word this to not read like blind hate?
Or maybe the reason is much more prosaic - I hated listening tho these so much that I don’t want to recount that experience.
Whatever the case is…
Sigh…
We gotta talk about the CRA.
The Other Things
I’m going to keep this part brief - anyone who wants to know more about the build quality, design and accessories should watch my video review of the CRA, here I’m going to focus mostly on the sound.
CCA CRA is a brand new IEM from everyone’s favourite chi-fi brand, KZ.
It uses a single Dynamic Driver enclosed in a typical KZ-style shell with no pseudo-custom elements. This universal fit, coupled with the small size, means that no one should have problems fitting it or getting a good seal, but it is not going to be supremely comfortable for anyone either. It’s an average fit.
When it comes to looks, the CRA delivers. It utilises a two-tone look achieved with a combination of resin and polished plastic, giving me strong Cyberpunk vibes. Not bad.
The earphone sports a QDC connector for connecting cables, and I can’t stress how much better this system is than your standard 2-Pin plug. I really wish other companies like Moondrop or Tanchjim would adopt this connector instead of sticking with regular 2-Pin.
As for the cable that connects to these pins, it’s simple and functional - just two wires glued together until the y-split. It’s quite stiff to the touch and quite kinky unless you heat-treat it, but it gets the job done. I much prefer it to the old KZ cables.
I wish I could say the same about the included tips. They seal much better than KZ’s older Starline tips, but they make my ears itch about an hour or so of use - it seems like I am the only person with this problem so far, though, so your mileage may vary.
Sound Signature
The CRA is unapologetically V-Shaped.
Compared to the Crackhead Target, which is how a good V-Shaped set should be tuned in my opinion, you can see a frankly ridiculous boost in the sub-bass - 5dB above the target, which already features a 10dB bass boost. Combine that with a huge contrast between the lower and upper midrange and very bright treble - that 5kHz peak is definitely real - and you get a parody of a V-shaped signature, something that would feel at home in a pair of Raycons.
What that means in practice is that vocals sound thin, midrange is extremely recessed, the sub-bass dominates all the other sounds, and the treble is just on the edge of being too sharp - keep in mind, that’s on the edge for me, and I am very tolerant of sharp treble, so if you are more sensitive to sharpness than me, you will find them intolerable.
If that signature sounds like fun to you, more power to you. My friend and fellow reviewer @RikudouGoku loves it, for example. But personally, I found it extremely boring - I listen to music for the melody and the instruments, not just the wub-wub of the sub-bass. Listening to my review playlist on these and A/B testing with other sets in a similar price range felt like a chore.
One of the few genres I enjoyed on these was metal. In Kingslayer by Bring Me The Horizon I couldn’t stop tapping my feet to the rhytm, and I loved the presentation of electric guitars in DiE4u by that same band. In Am I Evil? by Metallica, the electric guitar and kick-drum took priority over all the other instruments, but that is not necessarily a bad thing in a metal song.
However, not even all of metal sounds great.** **In Paranoid by Megadeth, the bass felt disjointed, the plucks of guitar strings were ridiculously overemphasised, the cymbals were very sharp, and the vocal, while decently forward, very thin. A terrible offender was A Place For My Head by Linkin Park, where yes, the electric guitars sounded amazing, but both the vocalists sounded distant and lifeless.
The CRA can work for pop music with female vocals, like Cyn’s Drinks or KDA’s Drum Go Dum. The lack of mid-bass makes for a "clean” presentation in these songs, but in my opinion, the same feature makes these songs lack a certain kind of musicality.
Electronic music is the last genre that works well on the CRA. Everything else is a no-go.
You would think a V-Shaped set would do well at rap, but when I tested the CRA with my favourite rap songs like No Name by NF and E-Girls Are Ruining My Life by Corpse, even though the bass was skull-shaking and the snares drove the rhytm nicely, the vocals were stupidly recessed… Which, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t the vocals the main part of a rap song?
And don’t even try instrumental music. I played Harvest Dawn from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion soundtrack and I burst out laughing. This amount of bloat really reminds me of Raycons or old-school Beats.
Speaking of bloat…
Bass
It is not a secret that I prefer a neutral sound, but that does not mean I hate bass. When I reviewed KZ’s own DQ6, I raved about the bass response, despite it having a huge bass boost. I just thought this is important to mention before the following paragraph.
The bass on the CRA is not only too much, it’s also poorly executed. The sub-bass dominates the music and crowds out the mid-bass, leading to weird effects like in Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby by Cigarettes After Sex, where the bass guitar in the intro is certainly strong and hits you… But doesn’t have that "warm blanket” effect that it would on most bass boosted sets. Even worse is Nirvana’s Something In The Way from their MTV Unplugged concert, where you certainly feel the cello coming in at 0:44… But you can’t hear it at all.
Tuning aside, the quality of the bass is quite good, especially for the price range. Both the bass guitar in Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby and the bass synth in E-Girls Are Ruining My Life are nicely textured. In the under-$40 price range the quality of the bass beats everything except the DQ6, which is a huge outlier in that regard itself.
Mids
If music were a soup, the bass would be the salt, the mids is the stock and vegetables, and the treble is the spices. You don’t want to have a soup with no salt or spices, you need at least some of them to make it tasty. Everyone has a different taste for how much salt and spice they prefer, but one thing is certain, you don’t want to overdo them.
Well, the CRA is like a tomato soup made from a great, flavourful stock and fresh, tasty Spanish tomatoes, that someone then added three ladles of himalayan salt to and then put in a whole jar of rotten coriander.
It makes you sick, despite most of the ingredients being great.
And the mids on the CRA really are of great quality. There’s so much detail here. When I volume matched and A/B tested the CRA versus the $110 Moondrop Starfield… Yup. The CRA retrieved MORE detail from the music.
In Something In The Way, you can hear subtle details in Kurt Cobain’s strumming of the acoustic guitar. In Blowin’ In The Wind by Bob Dylan there’s so much complexity to the Harmonica’s sound that you really can get lost in it. In DiE4u by Bring Me The Horizon, you can hear the electric guitar’s strings being plucked at 2:59. This is is real detail, too, not just fake detai courtesy of a boosted treble response, because the Heart Mirror (an IEM known for having good technical performance for the price already) does not show it despite a very similar treble level.
I can’t stress enough how great the CRA is at retrieving details in the midrange. It is not only great for the price. It is great period, matching sets like Tanchjim’s Hana 2021, a $180 IEM known for good detail retrieval.
Which is a god damn shame, because of how recessed and veiled the entire midrange, is. One of my favourite songs recently is Civil War by Guns N’ Roses and listening to it on the CRA just makes me sad. It resolves all the instruments really well, but it all just sounds off regardless.
Treble
Let’s start with the good.
It extends well.
Okay, that’s it. Remember that rotten cilantro analogy?
A soup with too much salt would be edible, if disgusting. A soup with too much salt and a bunch of rotten cilantro, well, it will make you sick. And so does the treble here.
I have no idea who thought this kind of treble boost was a good idea, but dude should get a Darwin award along with his job termination. The treble here is atrocious. I have probably the most blessed ears when it comes to treble tolerance, because I never found the aforementioned Heart Mirror, nor most cheap KZs even, particularly sharp. Even still, the CRA was toeing the line for me many times. If you have any less treble tolerance than I do, avoid at all costs.
In April Showers by Aimer, you have strings playing in the background. On most sets, I would say they are beautiful. On the CRA, they are annoying. So is the harmonica in Blowin’ In The Wind. So are the strings and cymbals in Supremacy by Muse. So are 3/4 of the songs on my playlist. Extremely annoying. When we discussed my video review on Discord with other people who bought it after the initial wave of hype, some even described it as painful.
When it comes to the technical performance in the treble, cymbals and hi-hats in songs like Teenagers by My Chemical Romance or the aforementioned Am I Evil? by Metallica are extremely detailed, but their timbre is so fucked they sound like paper.
Technical Performance
This is the one part that CRA does well.
As I mentioned earlier, detail retrieval and treble extension are strong parts of this set. So is the resolution - the CRA manages to separate all the instruments in busy songs like Civil War and DiE4u, to a legitimately impressive extent. Despite all the soup talk earlier, you don’t have to worry about your music blending into one. With all the “CRA is worth $300” hype talk, the detail retrieval and resolution are the only parts of this IEM that could belong in that price bracket.
Coming back to the sub-30 dollar market, though. After it separates them, it feels as if the CRA does not know where to place the instruments, because the imaging is really weird sometimes. It separates from left to right really well, but front to back placement is almost non-existent. Combine that with a weirdly claustrophobic soundstage - the sounds feel like they’re placed on the inside walls of your skull, being neither spacious, nor intimate - and you start to remember how much you paid for this set.
Some songs that show off the poor imaging particularly well are Letter by Yosi Horikawa, where the placement of objects is solid, but the presentation feels very 2D, and Villain by K/DA, where listening to the part between 2:17 and 2:45 on a good set gives you goosebumps, as if you’re being seduced by a succubus. On the CRA, thanks to 2D imaging and recessed midrange, no such effect.
Comparisons
VS Blon BL03
Both the Blon and the CCA are V-Shaped sets, however the 03 does the tuning much better. First of all, the bass-boost isn’t as isolated to the sub-bass. You also have some more upper mids, as well as a treble that’s still elevated, but not as much as on the CRA.
In practice, this makes the Blon set sound much more organic, natural, musical, and over-all pleasant, not to mention you are able to turn the volume up louder without it becoming unpleasant, which means that you can take in more of the mids. Even volume-matched, though, the mids on the Blons have a much fuller body to them, rather than sounding like ghastly illusions from another plane of existence.
In Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby the bass guitar is much warmer and more full on the Blons, vocal competes with the synths for space instead of conceding it, and the percussion in the background has actual timbre.
The CRA only wins where you would expect it to win - it resolves more detail in the midrange and bass. This is especially aparent between 1:35 and 1:47 in Drinks by Cyn.
VS KZ DQ6
In the past, I’ve described the DQ6 with foam tips (graph shows a mod that sounds quite close, but not quite the same) as a better Blon BL03 with less treble. It follows within reason, then, that since the Blon destroys the CRA, so will the DQ6.
And indeed it does, throwing a few punches that the Blon would not. The DQ6 brings the midrange much more forward. It has more detail in the bass (though less in the mids and treble) than the CRA. And it has insane soundstage and imaging that the CRA could only dream of.
Conclusion
It’s hard to rate the CRA. On the one hand, I really want to commend KZ for innovating with their driver tech to get this amount of detail retrieval and resolution at such a ridiculously low price. I also want to commend them for learning from their collaboration with @Crinacle and using proper dampening materials to tune their infamous peaks down.
On the other hand, they made the decision to boost the shit out of the bass and treble instead of just reusing the tuning Crin did for them on the ZEX Pro.
On the third hand (I have four, shut up), I know that I am not necessarily the target audience of this tuning as someone who does not like a ton of bass and gets most of his music enjoyment from exploring the intricacies of the midrange.
On the fourth hand (told you) the technical capabilities of this driver are BEGGING for a more refined tuning, and this IEM just sounds… Bad.
So I decided to split the difference. I could place it in E Tier, because that’s how bad the tuning is to my ears. I could place it in B Tier, because that’s where the detail retrieval belongs. And in the end, I will place it in C+ Tier. C Tier is where the good earphones belong, and this one certainly has something special that, for the right person (someone who likes big bass AND loves to EQ), makes it more than just good.
At the price it really doesn’t have an equal. Even the Blon 03 and KZ DQ6/DQ6S are twice the price of the CRA. Sure, that just means you’d have to deny yourselves three Starbucks coffees to save $15, but the point stands. So I will award it two value stars as well.
It feels wrong to rate the CRA so highly despite it being one of the most boring, most annoying and straight up worst experiences I have had listening to music lately. Thankfully, if you caught one of my last two streams, you know that I created a new, very subjective rating system, based only on how much I actually enjoyed listening to an earphone. The scale starts at -10 (absolute dumpster fire), and goes through 0 (where the REALLY good stuff sits) all the way up to 3 (absolute perfection). This scale shouldn’t really matter to you unless you have literally the same taste I have, but it matters to me. I call it the Scale of Suck. And on that scale, the CCA CRA scores a very prestigious -8.
Fuck the CRA.
Tier: C+
Tonality: D-
Technical Performance: B-
Value: * * / 3
Scale of Suck: -8
