Okay. Okay. I'm going to listen to them. I'll listen to them and I'm very excited
to do so. The Crar Daybreak, if you don't count that weird limited edition
one, is Chronicles first full production
IM under his own brand. And if any of
the marketing that he's done around this is accurate, it's an extremely exciting
product. He basically says, "Look, it's not the best IM on the market, but at
this price point, you ain't going to beat it. And if our lab's testing is
anything to go by, he's right. If I can
just get the box open. I like the look.
Stealthy. Right out of the gate, these are already
making me happy. So, instead of the gigantic nozzles that have been featured
on some of Critical's previous collab products, these measure just under 6 mm,
which means that they should comfortably fit inside human ears, which from my
understanding is the intended target of these, right? They are compared to, you
know, your AirPods or whatever, still going to be a little bit on the larger
side, but that's to accommodate the five drivers inside each in-ear monitor.
Another nice touch, interchangeable cables, though that's not really unique
at this price point. The two pin standard gives you the benefit of, from
my experience, a more secure connection, but you lose the benefit of it being
swivelable. So, make of that what you will. Nice little carrying case. Got
your bougie silverplated copper. Not that I've ever been convinced that that
makes any difference whatsoever to performance. It looks cool, though. I
like the modular connector instead of using an adapter.
Well, okay. No, no, don't tell me. I'm going
to figure it out. There we go. We just
unscrew this piece at the bottom. They've got a little guide pin, and you
can switch over to a 4.4 mm balance
connector. Hey, I had the thing happen. >> Yeah. Um the little cosmetic cover piece
um came off, but Critical says that they're going to get that fixed. And if
you have this little piece come off, then uh they'll send you a new one. I
swear half of H High-5 products is just
making them look and feel cool so that you look and feel cool for owning them.
But hey, mission accomplished. Let's see
what we got for accessories here, shall we? This is hilarious. Distinguish the
left and right for both the IM and cable. Did he actually put a label on
the IM? Oh my god, he only labels the right.
Okay, I get minimalistic product design, but
label your I don't want to guess. Wow.
Even with the 6 mm nozzle, those mediums are uh I don't know if they're that
medium. I bet I could jam that in there really
good if I wanted to. Anyone want to go to emerge?
Emergency >> like if I had a thing jammed in my ear
cuz I didn't attach it to an IM to remove it. I think I'm going to go small
for these. He includes small, medium, and large silicone ear tips as well as
medium foam ear tips.
I I prefer silicone, not because they sound better or seal better, but because
they are just more durable, and I don't feel like buying new memory foam ear
tips every like 3 weeks. This is a giant
carrying case. I can't fault the, you know, feel of,
you know, quality and stuff, but like, does it really need to be that big? I
can fit so much more stuff in there. You know, Steve Jobs famously took a
prototype of something and hucked it in an aquarium and then when bubbles came
out of it, he said, "Make it denser." I actually don't know if that's true, but
this could be smaller. So, here's my carrying case.
To be clear, I'm not faulting it for the feel of quality. And if you have larger
hands and you have, you know, difficulty getting your fingers into places to
extract things, then sure you're fine. But I I personally would rather that it
was a little bit more compact. That's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. But enough yak yak about the carrying
case, how they look, how they feel. It's not what you came here for. You came
here for how they sound. What's that?
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I lied a bit before. It didn't say anything about our sponsor, and we're
not going to listen to it just yet because I want to talk about the specs.
Starting with the housing, Daybreak uses what Critical describes as a pseudo
custom shell, which we had a little bit
of debate off camera what exactly that means. And I think what we've settled on
is that it means it is like a custom
mold for your ear, but it's a generic one. So, it's designed to kind of feel
and fit like that across a wide range of ears, but you don't actually like send
in molds of your ear so that they're custom fitted to your exact head. To its
credit, it fits pretty okay for me. I
don't know that I would perfectly comfortably like sleep in them, for
instance. Like, I can feel a couple of pressure points if I really push against
them. But if I don't do that, considering their weight, they're about
as comfortable as I can imagine anything not custom fitted to be. Then on the
inside, things get really interesting. Starting with the five drivers inside
each inear monitor. It's got a dynamic subwoofer driver, custom spec for deep
controlled bass, a couple of custom balanced armatururs for the mid-range.
Then for the tweeters, he's using what he's describing as next generation micro
planers for exceptional treble extension
and clarity. And all of that is just sort of gobbledegook because you could
have an IM that is full of like really really amazing drivers, but if you don't
put in the work on the tuning, then it's going to sound like crap. But this is
critical we're talking about. So, he did put in the work on the tuning,
specifically targeting the IEF preference 2025 curve, which aims to
balance natural speaker-like tonality with dynamic and engaging low-end
response. Again, which may not mean that
much to you, but in a nutshell, the IM that he's comparing these against are
considered an amazing value at about three times the price. And from what DMS
has said, he's actually gotten really close.
They're not the same as those ones that cost three times more, which he had me
try just for a little bit before I sat down today. It was like sitting at the
optician's, you know, office and they they flip around all the different
lenses and then finally they do the last one where they like start with not quite
right and then they click it into just right and you're like,
is everyone that hairy? Like they're like they're that clear. These I haven't
listened to yet, but if they're anything like that, very excited. Oh, right,
right, right. Well, okay. Well, I guess that's one thing that I could kind of say about them. Isolation, not the best,
but you're never going to get that with silicone ear tips, so make of that what
you will. Oh, we haven't talked about the length of the cable, which DMS
painstakingly measured at 1.1 m. You're welcome. That wasn't in the spec sheet.
I don't really like looking at the frequency response curve before I actually listen to them, but like, damn,
he's like right in the range. As long as that bass is actually tight and
controlled, these are going to sound really fun. Let's start with something
with no vocals. Always a good sign when
there's a like a low soft bass note of some sort and you can kind of like feel
it in your back a little bit cuz that's really hard to achieve with in ears. It
feels more like a conditioned response, right? Like if you've heard it from a
nice big speaker setup and subwoofer, then like something that elicits that
response in your body is getting damn close. But there are no vibrations to
feel. He advertised controlled bass. >> He delivered controlled bass.
>> I'd probably EQ the mids up a little bit personally, but not much. The thing to
remember in all of this is like these are costing less than a pair of AirPods
Pros, right? which obviously are they're wireless and they have a battery in them
and there's all the convenience that comes with that. But like it's a
completely different listening experience. With the AirPods Pros, you
can listen to your song, right? You can
put on your favorite artist. With these,
you can listen to each individual
instrument in the track if you wanted to. You don't have to.
That I mean, to a lot of people that might sound like a bad thing, but it's
not. It's a It's a very good thing. It
really is remarkable how it elicits that
sort of like I'm listening to speakers response anytime anything happens on the
low end. Not fatiguing either, which is
really nice. Man, if this was your first
like chi M, you'd be like,
I paid how much for these? I feel like some phone manufacturer,
you know, like a mainstream one, your your Samsung, Apple will never do it.
They're too busy selling wireless earphones, but some phone manufacturer
is going to figure this out. They're going to put a headphone jack back on their phone. And like Wired's coming
back, man, you just can't you can't do
this with wireless. At least not yet. Not at this price.
You're not still asleep. These really can be had for $169. And from our
benchmarks, they fall pretty well for the most part within our target range.
And if what you're looking for is something that combines, I mean, just
like Critical said, uh, a fairly analytical sound signature, but with fun
musicality at an incredible price point.
I don't know. I don't know what to say other than I think you nailed it. Obviously, you're not going to get quite
the resolution that you might get out of something like the Mega 5 EST, but like
the price, man. Those are $500 plus dollar IM. Like, even if you can afford
them, I know a lot of people that just wouldn't spend that kind of money on IM
because they can get lost. Whereas like these, I still wouldn't want to lose
them, but if I did, I could lose them twice before I'd spent that much money.
Subscribe to ShortCircuit. All right, let's thumb it up.
>> Man, I gotta I got to stop using
wireless.