Coming up…

I was trying to do some further optimisations for the reference tuning lately and although I managed to achieve an even smoother response, it started to deviate too much from what I perceive with speakers and I reverted back to my original settings which I only minimally readjusted for myself.

To have an even more reliable neutral reference I ordered a used pair of Neumann KH80 monitors which should arrive next week. Together with their internal DSP correction the KH80 should hopefully offer and even more neutral and consistent sound and allow for even better tuning results I can hopefully achieve in future.

In the meantime I also ordered some IEMs which I would like to include in an upcoming comparison. I already received the Apple AirPods Pro and the Nuratrue TWS, which I both tested yesterday shortly. I was positively surprised by the AirPods Pro, although lacking detail being somehow muddy and too bassy overall they still managed to sound rather natural and usable and by applying an additional hearing profile it definitely helped to open the sound even more. While far from perfect the sound was quite Ok and didn’t sound off. 

Although the measurements look a bit weird lacking eargain in the 3khz region the ear canal resonance seems to be kept nicely under control with no obvious peak, probably thanks to the adaptive Eq which unfortunately there is no control over. The overall response changes quite a bit though with different insertion, not sure how the shifting upper harmonics which you can see as peak in the treble region would affect the overall sound for different ears. Still I think Apple did really nicely and I could imagine many even preferring their sound over what I was trying to achieve with the Free Pro 2 as the AirPods Pro have a nice sound stage (probably also enhanced by some DSP) this was also something that I noticed: the overall sound always appears processed and digital, as if lots of FX were going on in the background.

The Nura on the other hand are really bad for the asked price. Without hearing profile the sound is a bad joke. It manages to improve with the user profile but is still far from natural sounding. It sounds even more artificial than the AirPods Pro, the frequency response I measured with my hearing profile applied looks very strange which makes me wonder how this can even manage to sound close to something usable.

It’s not completely horrible but definitely nothing I would like to spend money on. After unboxing it tells you to first charge them for at least an hour, then you need to create a user account for the app to be used, wait for the firmware update, perform the hearing profile… After having wasted 2 hours with them I was really disappointed by the results.

Next week the Anker Liberty 3 Pro together with the Nothing ear (1) should arrive, I am not sure I will order something else as well. But I will try to measure them all and also prepare some sound samples to be included in my video.

Despite all the effort finding one’s ear canal resonance and possible frustration thanks to the bad usability of the Airoha app, I think you get way more value from the results one gets out of the Free Pro when the proper tuning is applied with maybe some additional personal corrections and I will definitely try to convince more people trying it out as long as it is still offered especially for the ridiculous current price. Because with the pervert market attitude currently to offer new successor models every couple of months, people do not seem to be interested a lot in “cheap old products” if they can get some more recent models costing several times as much sounding far worse at the same time.

I am currently in the process of finding a way how to create realistic sound samples for IEMs which is not that straightforward actually, so stay tuned!