The New One

Plenty of new IEM get introduced every month but most of them really ain't worth mentioning here. But here is 'one' that does rise my interest - FutureSonics has just introduced a new universal IEM called the Spectrum Series G10. For those who don't know the company - the company's founder is the person who is officially recognized as the one who invented in ear monitor. I really love their last universal model, the Atrio M5 with MG7 driver, and hopefully the new G10 won't disappoint either. Price is about US$220.

New IEM, New Wave.

Korean isn't just big in the music world these days, but also seems to make way in the headphone world as well. Wavelet Design, an Korean company that is originally in the audio testing equipment business, has released a new IEM called 'Opus1', utilizing a new type of balanced armature (BA) transducer design called 'dynamic BA'. A typical BA has a sandwich design with the magmatic field being parallel to the voice coil, but the dynamic BA has a magmatic field that is perpendicular to the voice coil, which is closer in design to a dynamic transducer (*hence the name). Being in the audio testing business, Wavelet Design has confident enough that they have released a full set of measurement to showcase their new IEM's performance. Release date is set at the end of this month and the estimated price is around US$140 or so in Korea, but the Japanese price seems to have jumped almost double of that.

ALO Audio, the U.S. company best known for its portable amp, DAC and cable, is coming out an IEM brand of its own, called the 'Campfire Audio'. Three initial models will be launched under the new brand and they are: single 8.5mm dynamic 'Lyra', single BA 'Orion', and quad BA 'Jupiter' (as shown on picture above, from left). Price has not being announced yet, but expected them to be released sometime in June.

All New Two in One

RHA is releasing a new IEM, the T20, with a brand new type of dynamic transducer, appropriately named the 'DualCoil' driver. Most dynamic driver has one diaphragm driven by one voice coil. Even the Dual-Dynamic-Matrix driver we have first seen on Radius a few years ago still uses two diaphragms with two independent voice coil to form a single drivers assembly. RHA's DualCoil driver however utilizes just one diaphragm, but driven by two voice coil simultaneously, one for upper frequency and one for lower frequency.

Kudos to RHA for being a new innovation to the IEM world.

Roundup updated

The Earbuds Roundup ranking has been updated. Go and have a look.

Classic Reborn

JAYS has announced the relaunch of the company's previous flagship, the dual balanced armature based q-JAYS, but with a bit extra. For those who are too young to remember, q-JAYS was born in an era where multi-driver IEM were rather rare and q-JAYS was immediately held as one of the best sounding IEM around. It was supposed to be replaced by the quad-driver x-JAYS though the project was dropped after the 2009 financial crisis. Then q-JAYS was phased out more or less around the same time frame... and for all these years, JAYS has never really made any IEM that is worth to take the flagship title.

Though the new flagship is stilled called q-JAYS, with dual BA driver and similarly styled design, there are a few noticeable difference upfront. The first will be the user removable cable with what seems like a specially modified screw-in MMCX connector. I am not a fan of MMCX in general but a screwed in and secured MMCX should at least be less fragile. The second is the steel body, as oppose to the original plastic construction. Last but not least is the USD$450 price tag, which is quite a lot to ask these days for a dual driver, given a very good three driver hybrid can probably be had for $150 less. I can only hope q-JAYS will impress us again - even more so, will we see a comeback of x-JAYS as well? I am crossing my fingers now.

Natural Stereo Sound

Hong Kong based custom IEM and portable amp maker LEAR is looking for some kind of crowdfunding help to bring their new IEM to the market. It is simply called the 'NSS earphone', where NSS stands for Natural Stereo Sound, a technique LEAR developed for stereo sound enhancement. Judging from the picture, I'll have guessed it used a second transducer feeding an delayed sound of the opposite channel, which should gives you a crossfeed-circuit-like effect, but all done in the analog domain.

Check it out here.

[UPDATE] The crowdfunding price will is US$160 and the final retail price will be US$220+.

Unbreakable, sort of.

Ever break an IEM or two? Maybe more? An indiegogo crowdfunding project started by GOgroove is asking for your support to their new 'extremely durable earbuds backed by a LIFETIME warranty', called the AudiOHM RNFs. Well, maybe it is not exactly unbreakable but should at least be a very tough cookie. For US$30 a pair however, I guess it will worth a try.

Cutting Edge

CES2015 is just around the corner and we already seeing some cutting edge tech being introduced to the custom IEM world by a 3D scanning specialist company called United Sciences. Though it is still a tech demo intended for the industry at the moment, I can already see this being adopted by major custom IEM makers in the future. For once, the fitting is not (entirely) depend on the quality of the ear mold or the skill of the technician.

December Update

I was pleasantly surprised by Zero Audio's DX200 'Carbo Tenore' when I finally got one and now the company has a new dual driver for us. The new ZH-DWX10, or simply known as 'Duoza', kind of has an odd design with an elongated housing. With current exchange rate, it should be around US$100 or so.

A new company called Zorloo released what they called a 'digital earphone' for Android smartphone. The 'Z:ero' is an IEM with a tiny USB DAC (*a Wolfson no less) and headphone amp built into the remote control, and as you would expect, connect to (and powered by) the smartphone via USB instead of 3.5mm headphone jack. The concept is definitely interesting (and somewhat similar to Apple's idea of headphone with Lightning connector), but might be flawed - as it will probably drain your smartphone battery as long as it is connected and you will have to throw the DAC / amp away when you run into cable problem (which is likely to happen to any IEM sometime down the line). Though given the projected price at only US$30, these issue might not be that big of a deal.

Last but not least, JH Audio introduces two new model to the Siren series: Layla and Angie. I'll let Jude do the talking:

New Wood

JVC is releasing a new woody called HA-FX1100 as the upgrade model over their current woody flagship, the FX850. They looks pretty much identical on the outside as well as the overall construction, except perhaps the use of a darker wood on FX1100's wooden casing and 6N OFC cable (as oppose to SPOFC on FX850). One thing that will be noticeable is the price - compared to the FX850 with its street price around US$300 or so, the new FX1100 is priced around US$500. That's quite a price jump. Not sure what kind of magic JVC is putting into the new model, but it will have to be really good.

Changing Lane

Also showing off in the 2014 Tokyo Fujiya Avic Headphone Festival is ibasso still-in-development IEM called 'Oriolus'. Detail is sketchy for now though it is reported to be a triple-BA + single dynamic hybrid design. No price or release date yet as rumors point out that ibasso isn't fully happy with the current prototype.

Sony Custom

The big news over the last two days in the IEM world is that Sony has decided to do custom IEM. The sub-brand will call 'Just ear' and at at least for now, three different standard models / tunings ('monitor', 'club sound' and 'listening') will be available where there is also mentioning of user customizable tuning for additional fee. Price is set around USD$2000 to $2500 for standard tuning and another USD$500 for customized sound. Not sure whether Sony will bring it out of Japan or not, the release date is set before the end of the year.

It is great that Sony decided to push further into the IEM world, and the build quality seems to be great. However, consider that the company has yet to even make an universal IEM that can compete in the top-of-the-line level (*I have heard as high as XBA-H2/3 and they are not that much of a looker IMO), I would certainly doubt Sony's ability to tune a TOTL custom with premier price tag. There is just not enough to inspire confidence.

More, continues...

 

More news from Japan - JVC is introducing a new line of micro dynamic transducer based on titanium diaphragm and we will see them on the new Twin System based FXT100 and FXT200. Judging from the model number, they should be upgrade over the aging FXT90. FXT200 also comes with a limited edition (picture above) with gold color housing and silver plated OFC cable, and a bit more pricy as well. The regular version should run you about USD$100 and USD$150 respectively. Add about USD$20 for the limited edition.

Beside the upgrade FXT models, the new driver will also be featured in the new single driver based FXH line with three model: FXH10, 20 and 30, for about USD$45, 52 and 70 each.

The UK company Rock Jaw is introducing a new model called Kommand. It is one BA and one dynamic based hybrid with ear-clip and user-tunable nozzle system. Price should be under USD$200.

As a Chinese company, Fidue might not be that well known as a consumer brand on the international market. But they are known among head-fi community for making really high quality universal IEM. Their new model is called A71 with dual dynamic design and incidentally, one of them is a titanium driver as well. Price will be just around USD$100.

More News from Japan

With the arrival of the 2014 autumn Tokyo Headphone Festival, DUNU is announcing two more IEM models - the dynamic transducer based Titan 1 with titanium diaphragm and DN-2000J, a re-tuned and shrink down version of the original DN-2000, which seems to be more of a special model for the Japanese market. No price was mentioned. Also on the announcement is the Alpha 1 - an hybrid one BA + one dynamic earbud - yes, earbud, not IEM, and likely the first of its kind.

News fron Japan

Audio Technica just had a press release in Japan introducing new models. Among them, the new CKB series, which are mainly budget priced single balanced armature transducer based IEM: ATH-CKB70 (top - USD$85 est.) and ATH-CKB50 (bottom - USD$42 est.). As typically Japanese, they also introduces a few more red color "limited edition" of older models, which really just no worth looking unless you just happen to need IEM in that particular color.

We mentioned that Sony had introducing the XBA-Z5 as their new flagship in IFA2014, but it seems they are not quite done yet - the XBA-100 (picture above), which I assume is an updated model on the existing XBA-10, will feature a single BA driver with  new tech developed for Z5's driver and priced around USD$100. Sony also upgrades all the XBA-H series with the new driver technology and now they are called the XBA-A series. They will be priced pretty close (but slightly more expensive) to the current XBA-H series.

Back to Zero

Brainwavz has released a new model called S0, as a step-down of the current S5. It will be priced at half the price as well, at US$50.

3-in-1

EarSonics is releasing a new universal IEM model called the Velvet under its 'premium signature' series. It has a switch on the earpiece allowing the listener to tune for three different sound signatures. No much detail at this point but do prepare to pay USD$800 for a pair.

IFA2014 Part 2

Sony has announced a lot of stuffs in IFA this year. Among them, the new XBA-Z5. It has a dual-BA + 1 dynamic configuration similar to the XBA-H3, but comes with newly developed transducers. To be honest, I am quite disappointed by the whole XBA-H1/H2/H3 series when I had a chance to demo them last years - finding them tuned in a very eccentric way and might not even consider an upgrade over the older models. While I really like the higher end full sized headphones Sony has made over the recent years (especially the MDR-1 series), their IEM remains far away from perfection. Let hopes the new Z5 can do better. No price has been mentioned yet.

IFA 2014

Here comes the IFA in a few days and we are already getting some press release.

Sennheiser is released 4 new models within the CX line, namely CX1.00, CX2.00, CX3.00 and CX5.00 (shown in picture above). Yes, the naming scheme is rather odd, and no, no price has been mentioned.

RHA is released a new flagship called the T10i, with single dynamic transducer and 3 pair of customizable nozzles with different tuning. Price is around USD$250.

Another

T-PEOS has another flagship ready for preorder. This time, it is the Altone2000, featuring a 3 ways hybrid configuration with dual BA and one dynamic. It is surprisingly affordable at only US$125 right now and US$145 after the promotion.

Brainwavz too has a new IEM, the S5, with a single dynamic transducer. Price at around US$100