Today we’ll talk about CrinEar Reference, in-ear headphones worth of $350 on the manufacturer’s website or 23,000 rubles on Russian marketplaces. The in-ears are positioned as having ‘the most neutral sound in the world’, and this is, you know, a very bold statement. What sound neutrality is, whether Reference are close to this very neutrality,…
For some reason, I was particularly eager for these headphones. The Moondrop team has been training in making planars for only the second year, but they seem to be doing it quite consciously. Therefore, my personal expectations were high, especially because Laputa has become the ‘second most expensive’ model, leaving Cosmo in the first place.
Sometimes I just want a little audiophile miracle.
Most TWS earphones sound disgusting. I stated this 5 years ago, and nothing has changed in these 5 years: everything ‘true wireless’ that came into my hands by accident (like, a colleague let me try it on) sounded very, very bad. However, there were always some people who would appear in the comments section with a take like “why are you messing with your wires when there are OK wireless models?”
I’m watching products of the EPZ company with interest — at least because I see a certain logic, a certain vector and progress in what they’re doing.
The Meteor’s release turned out to be suspiciously quiet. Last year, the same thing happened to Concerto: the model happened to be so disappointing that it was almost immediately discontinued and moved from the category of headphones to one of audiophile oddities. So, it seemed to me at some point that Meteor had suffered the same fate.
I know the EPZ company only by a single, but extremely successful earphone model, EPZ G10. It’s those ‘earphones with a flashlight included’. P50 is a completely different story both technologically and in terms of the price/self-presentation. This is a bid for ‘real’ sound for a little less than $200.
Even before the release of the excellent ZERO:RED, Truthear became known for two other models, NOVA and HEXA. We’ll talk about NOVA sometime later, yet about HEXA right now, since there is plenty to talk about here.
This review matters for me a lot because it’s my first one of a kind: the very first review of a sound source that I would never have intended to write if it hadn’t been for Hidizs, which suddenly offered me to test their portable DAC.
