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Kiwi Ears is yet another brand to come out of the Chinese high-fi scene, also known as Chi-Fi,

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which as a white man, I feel a little uncomfortable saying every time I say it.

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Kiwi Ears has sponsored this video and they sent us over a whole bevy of delicious IEMs.

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We got the Dolce's, we got the cadenzas, we got the quartets, we got the quintets,

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and we got the orchestra light, which is what we're going to be looking at today.

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Now I've heard of Kiwi Ears, you know, people often bring them up in discussions with other

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companies, but I actually haven't had an opportunity to listen to Kiwi Ears before,

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so I'm actually pretty excited about this. Today we're looking at their orchestra light IEMs,

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which has eight balanced armatures in each headphone. That's crazy. For those of you who

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don't know, a balanced armature is a type of headphone driver, so that's what makes the sound.

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One way to think about it is it's kind of like a diving board. It wiggles up and down like this,

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and that's what produces sound, as opposed to being like a cone, like a typical speaker,

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or a dynamic driver. But that's not the case for this. These is balanced armatures

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all the way down, and eight of them, which is kind of crazy to me, because that

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is a lot of little speakers for some very, very tiny headphones. I'm immediately,

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I love these already. Kiwi Ears says that these are made with a medical grade epoxy resin,

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and that they're hand soldered, and I believe it because I don't know how else a machine would

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make it in this exact fashion. It's pretty dang cool. These are going to be your balanced armatures

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that are focused on bass right at the top of those two big boys. Then along the side, you can see

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one, two, three, four. It's kind of tough to see the fourth one of the mid-range drivers,

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and then you also see that tiny little pair right there. That's two. Those are going to be

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handling the treble, because that's so cool. I love that you can see right inside of these.

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Oh, I love these so much. These are so cool. We need to see what else is in the box.

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Foam carrying case, which is nice. Something to know about these orchestra light IEMs is that

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they're like a refresh, or I guess a different version of the orchestra IEMs that they've already

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released, but they're like half of the price or something. Kiwi Ears says that they've found a

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lot of ways to make these more efficiently and on a cheaper budget, and they're trying to pass the

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savings onto you, but half the price mean half the performance. Well, Kiwi Ears claims that that's

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not true, that these are going to be just as delightful and wonderful as their orchestra IEMs,

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which I have not listened to. Now back to what's in the bag. So you get a nice custom hand-crafted

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cable, not the longest cable. What the hell was that? I mean, to be fair, it was held on by tape.

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It looks like the cable doesn't have much memory, which means it's not bouncing back and trying

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to reform into the coiled ball that it was in here. Elsewhere in the bin, we have, wow, a lot

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of ear tips. We've got ear tips in three different sizes and three different styles. I'm not sure

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if there's any actual difference between the styles of ear tips. They all look pretty similar.

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One thing I do wish that was included was maybe a set of foam ear tips. I prefer foam ear tips,

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but it's still gonna have to do. Let me grab my favorite pair and I'll just dress them up.

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I will say that to get the three-way crossover of all of these balanced armatures, the nozzle on

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these has to be quite big. And if you're somebody with small ear canals like yours truly, these

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could cause issues for fit. I guess there's nothing left to do, but take a listen to them.

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The nozzle on these are quite large and I can feel it in my ear canal, but I'm still getting a really

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good seal. My ears are plugged. And cable noise, cable noise is actually quite good. There's still

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a little bit of like lower vibrational noise, but I think that it's pretty good from what I've heard.

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It's not like ringing or really resonating. So good job Kiwi ears.

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One thing that Kiwi ears set out to do was create an IEM that's going to have a sound

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signature that's going to please a lot of people. They're probably going to be doing something like

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targeting the Harman curve, which is what we base our own headphone target here at LMG on. And I

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think they've probably done a great job at that. They're fun. They have punchy bass. They're still

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rich and they have a lot of detail in the highs. And I think specifically the way they've tuned

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the highs, it gives it a feeling of space that you don't get with a lot of headphones. And I find

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that that sound stage really resonates with these IEMs. And I think that that's pretty impressive

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because IEMs is always kind of difficult to make it sound like it's bigger than just the head

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that's wearing them. I think that Kiwi ears is actually getting quite a bit out of the eight

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armatures in here. They have those two bass balance armatures, give it plenty of punch,

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and the two treble ones provide actually quite a bit of detail. I would border on maybe a little

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bit too crispy for my taste, but I'm sure if I spent a little bit more time with them, I would

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probably adapt quite well. It's definitely not offensive. That's for sure. You might find that

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these will benefit from like a dedicated DAC and amp, especially if you're going for like really

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critical listening. But if you're also looking for some versatility allowing you to maybe just take

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these when you travel, you don't want to bring a whole proper source with you, I think you're also

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going to be pleased. But that's my opinion. Let's take a look at some squiggly lines.

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Looking at our Labs results, we can see that it does actually follow our curve pretty nicely.

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I think it's funny that Kiwi ears calls out like a bass boost, a bass bump, but to me it sounds

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like it follows the Harman curve pretty well. I wouldn't call it very like boosted, but it

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definitely has the fun that is typical of a Harman curve based headphone. And I thought it sounded

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quite delightful. You might find that there might be a little bit of honk if you're particularly

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sensitive to that. That kind of sounds like it is. Maybe like horns and treble sections sound like

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they're more like... But as we go up, we see that the treble looks actually a little bit laid back

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compared to our target. Just in the lower brilliance region, we see a dip of about 6 dB

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around 7K, which might be where I'm finding the dryness is I think that that dip might be making

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things sound a little bit less full in the high end and making things sound a little bit more

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brittle because we have an increase in brilliance for the rest of it. Moving on to noise isolation,

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you can see that these have a pretty solid attenuation of the high end, which is

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exactly what you'd expect for earplugs. And then as we get lower down into the bass and

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sub bass region, they don't attenuate so much. This is completely normal. Usually if you want

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to get rid of any noise below the kind of like low mids, let's say like 500 Hertz, you're going to

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need to use active noise cancellation, which these don't have. They don't have microphones of any kind.

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But I found that, yeah, I got a really solid seal with these and they plugged things up

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heck and quiet. It's, you guys have to yell. It's like, I've not listened to anything and it's very

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plugged. My ears are very plugged. In terms of actual comfort, I find that the shape makes

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them very lovely. It's a kind of, it's a very common shape that we've seen a little bump here

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that kind of balances the weight of that earphone. So it doesn't sit like, it doesn't feel like it's

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hanging out of your ear and it nestles nicely into this part of your ear. There's a term for it.

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I don't know it. I'm not a scientist. And I think that they're actually pretty comfortable,

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assuming that you have the ear canals that are big enough. You can get the Kiwi Ears

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Orchestra lights for 250 USD. That's dollars, my friends. And if this is out of your budget,

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don't worry, Kiwi Ears has got you covered with a whole beverage of cheaper options

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that I don't have time to check out today, but I will be checking out in my own time,

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because I like headphones. And I like you. Thanks so much for watching and thanks Kiwi Ears

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for sponsoring this ShortCircuit. If you liked this video, well, we have so many more that you

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can watch. You just gotta click on the button at the bottom. This is ShortCircuit and then you

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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.

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There's so many good videos on ShortCircuit. Please watch ShortCircuit.