Kiwi Ears is yet another brand to come out of the Chinese high-fi scene, also known as Chi-Fi,
which as a white man, I feel a little uncomfortable saying every time I say it.
Kiwi Ears has sponsored this video and they sent us over a whole bevy of delicious IEMs.
We got the Dolce's, we got the cadenzas, we got the quartets, we got the quintets,
and we got the orchestra light, which is what we're going to be looking at today.
Now I've heard of Kiwi Ears, you know, people often bring them up in discussions with other
companies, but I actually haven't had an opportunity to listen to Kiwi Ears before,
so I'm actually pretty excited about this. Today we're looking at their orchestra light IEMs,
which has eight balanced armatures in each headphone. That's crazy. For those of you who
don't know, a balanced armature is a type of headphone driver, so that's what makes the sound.
One way to think about it is it's kind of like a diving board. It wiggles up and down like this,
and that's what produces sound, as opposed to being like a cone, like a typical speaker,
or a dynamic driver. But that's not the case for this. These is balanced armatures
all the way down, and eight of them, which is kind of crazy to me, because that
is a lot of little speakers for some very, very tiny headphones. I'm immediately,
I love these already. Kiwi Ears says that these are made with a medical grade epoxy resin,
and that they're hand soldered, and I believe it because I don't know how else a machine would
make it in this exact fashion. It's pretty dang cool. These are going to be your balanced armatures
that are focused on bass right at the top of those two big boys. Then along the side, you can see
one, two, three, four. It's kind of tough to see the fourth one of the mid-range drivers,
and then you also see that tiny little pair right there. That's two. Those are going to be
handling the treble, because that's so cool. I love that you can see right inside of these.
Oh, I love these so much. These are so cool. We need to see what else is in the box.
Foam carrying case, which is nice. Something to know about these orchestra light IEMs is that
they're like a refresh, or I guess a different version of the orchestra IEMs that they've already
released, but they're like half of the price or something. Kiwi Ears says that they've found a
lot of ways to make these more efficiently and on a cheaper budget, and they're trying to pass the
savings onto you, but half the price mean half the performance. Well, Kiwi Ears claims that that's
not true, that these are going to be just as delightful and wonderful as their orchestra IEMs,
which I have not listened to. Now back to what's in the bag. So you get a nice custom hand-crafted
cable, not the longest cable. What the hell was that? I mean, to be fair, it was held on by tape.
It looks like the cable doesn't have much memory, which means it's not bouncing back and trying
to reform into the coiled ball that it was in here. Elsewhere in the bin, we have, wow, a lot
of ear tips. We've got ear tips in three different sizes and three different styles. I'm not sure
if there's any actual difference between the styles of ear tips. They all look pretty similar.
One thing I do wish that was included was maybe a set of foam ear tips. I prefer foam ear tips,
but it's still gonna have to do. Let me grab my favorite pair and I'll just dress them up.
I will say that to get the three-way crossover of all of these balanced armatures, the nozzle on
these has to be quite big. And if you're somebody with small ear canals like yours truly, these
could cause issues for fit. I guess there's nothing left to do, but take a listen to them.
The nozzle on these are quite large and I can feel it in my ear canal, but I'm still getting a really
good seal. My ears are plugged. And cable noise, cable noise is actually quite good. There's still
a little bit of like lower vibrational noise, but I think that it's pretty good from what I've heard.
It's not like ringing or really resonating. So good job Kiwi ears.
One thing that Kiwi ears set out to do was create an IEM that's going to have a sound
signature that's going to please a lot of people. They're probably going to be doing something like
targeting the Harman curve, which is what we base our own headphone target here at LMG on. And I
think they've probably done a great job at that. They're fun. They have punchy bass. They're still
rich and they have a lot of detail in the highs. And I think specifically the way they've tuned
the highs, it gives it a feeling of space that you don't get with a lot of headphones. And I find
that that sound stage really resonates with these IEMs. And I think that that's pretty impressive
because IEMs is always kind of difficult to make it sound like it's bigger than just the head
that's wearing them. I think that Kiwi ears is actually getting quite a bit out of the eight
armatures in here. They have those two bass balance armatures, give it plenty of punch,
and the two treble ones provide actually quite a bit of detail. I would border on maybe a little
bit too crispy for my taste, but I'm sure if I spent a little bit more time with them, I would
probably adapt quite well. It's definitely not offensive. That's for sure. You might find that
these will benefit from like a dedicated DAC and amp, especially if you're going for like really
critical listening. But if you're also looking for some versatility allowing you to maybe just take
these when you travel, you don't want to bring a whole proper source with you, I think you're also
going to be pleased. But that's my opinion. Let's take a look at some squiggly lines.
Looking at our Labs results, we can see that it does actually follow our curve pretty nicely.
I think it's funny that Kiwi ears calls out like a bass boost, a bass bump, but to me it sounds
like it follows the Harman curve pretty well. I wouldn't call it very like boosted, but it
definitely has the fun that is typical of a Harman curve based headphone. And I thought it sounded
quite delightful. You might find that there might be a little bit of honk if you're particularly
sensitive to that. That kind of sounds like it is. Maybe like horns and treble sections sound like
they're more like... But as we go up, we see that the treble looks actually a little bit laid back
compared to our target. Just in the lower brilliance region, we see a dip of about 6 dB
around 7K, which might be where I'm finding the dryness is I think that that dip might be making
things sound a little bit less full in the high end and making things sound a little bit more
brittle because we have an increase in brilliance for the rest of it. Moving on to noise isolation,
you can see that these have a pretty solid attenuation of the high end, which is
exactly what you'd expect for earplugs. And then as we get lower down into the bass and
sub bass region, they don't attenuate so much. This is completely normal. Usually if you want
to get rid of any noise below the kind of like low mids, let's say like 500 Hertz, you're going to
need to use active noise cancellation, which these don't have. They don't have microphones of any kind.
But I found that, yeah, I got a really solid seal with these and they plugged things up
heck and quiet. It's, you guys have to yell. It's like, I've not listened to anything and it's very
plugged. My ears are very plugged. In terms of actual comfort, I find that the shape makes
them very lovely. It's a kind of, it's a very common shape that we've seen a little bump here
that kind of balances the weight of that earphone. So it doesn't sit like, it doesn't feel like it's
hanging out of your ear and it nestles nicely into this part of your ear. There's a term for it.
I don't know it. I'm not a scientist. And I think that they're actually pretty comfortable,
assuming that you have the ear canals that are big enough. You can get the Kiwi Ears
Orchestra lights for 250 USD. That's dollars, my friends. And if this is out of your budget,
don't worry, Kiwi Ears has got you covered with a whole beverage of cheaper options
that I don't have time to check out today, but I will be checking out in my own time,
because I like headphones. And I like you. Thanks so much for watching and thanks Kiwi Ears
for sponsoring this ShortCircuit. If you liked this video, well, we have so many more that you
can watch. You just gotta click on the button at the bottom. This is ShortCircuit and then you
can go there and then it'll have all the videos and you can click on other videos and you can watch them. You can watch ones that I made. You can watch what the other people are in.
There's so many good videos on ShortCircuit. Please watch ShortCircuit.