WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.160 Kiwi Ears is yet another brand to come out of the Chinese high-fi scene, also known as Chi-Fi, 00:00:06.160 --> 00:00:09.520 which as a white man, I feel a little uncomfortable saying every time I say it. 00:00:09.520 --> 00:00:14.720 Kiwi Ears has sponsored this video and they sent us over a whole bevy of delicious IEMs. 00:00:14.720 --> 00:00:18.720 We got the Dolce's, we got the cadenzas, we got the quartets, we got the quintets, 00:00:18.720 --> 00:00:23.680 and we got the orchestra light, which is what we're going to be looking at today. 00:00:23.680 --> 00:00:27.280 Now I've heard of Kiwi Ears, you know, people often bring them up in discussions with other 00:00:27.280 --> 00:00:31.040 companies, but I actually haven't had an opportunity to listen to Kiwi Ears before, 00:00:31.040 --> 00:00:34.960 so I'm actually pretty excited about this. Today we're looking at their orchestra light IEMs, 00:00:34.960 --> 00:00:40.320 which has eight balanced armatures in each headphone. That's crazy. For those of you who 00:00:40.320 --> 00:00:45.520 don't know, a balanced armature is a type of headphone driver, so that's what makes the sound. 00:00:45.520 --> 00:00:50.240 One way to think about it is it's kind of like a diving board. It wiggles up and down like this, 00:00:50.240 --> 00:00:54.800 and that's what produces sound, as opposed to being like a cone, like a typical speaker, 00:00:54.800 --> 00:00:59.040 or a dynamic driver. But that's not the case for this. These is balanced armatures 00:00:59.040 --> 00:01:03.680 all the way down, and eight of them, which is kind of crazy to me, because that 00:01:04.560 --> 00:01:09.440 is a lot of little speakers for some very, very tiny headphones. I'm immediately, 00:01:09.440 --> 00:01:14.480 I love these already. Kiwi Ears says that these are made with a medical grade epoxy resin, 00:01:14.480 --> 00:01:19.120 and that they're hand soldered, and I believe it because I don't know how else a machine would 00:01:19.120 --> 00:01:24.240 make it in this exact fashion. It's pretty dang cool. These are going to be your balanced armatures 00:01:24.240 --> 00:01:28.880 that are focused on bass right at the top of those two big boys. Then along the side, you can see 00:01:28.880 --> 00:01:36.000 one, two, three, four. It's kind of tough to see the fourth one of the mid-range drivers, 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:39.840 and then you also see that tiny little pair right there. That's two. Those are going to be 00:01:39.840 --> 00:01:43.920 handling the treble, because that's so cool. I love that you can see right inside of these. 00:01:43.920 --> 00:01:48.640 Oh, I love these so much. These are so cool. We need to see what else is in the box. 00:01:49.440 --> 00:01:54.640 Foam carrying case, which is nice. Something to know about these orchestra light IEMs is that 00:01:54.640 --> 00:02:00.560 they're like a refresh, or I guess a different version of the orchestra IEMs that they've already 00:02:00.560 --> 00:02:04.640 released, but they're like half of the price or something. Kiwi Ears says that they've found a 00:02:04.640 --> 00:02:09.040 lot of ways to make these more efficiently and on a cheaper budget, and they're trying to pass the 00:02:09.040 --> 00:02:14.400 savings onto you, but half the price mean half the performance. Well, Kiwi Ears claims that that's 00:02:14.400 --> 00:02:18.560 not true, that these are going to be just as delightful and wonderful as their orchestra IEMs, 00:02:18.560 --> 00:02:24.560 which I have not listened to. Now back to what's in the bag. So you get a nice custom hand-crafted 00:02:24.560 --> 00:02:32.480 cable, not the longest cable. What the hell was that? I mean, to be fair, it was held on by tape. 00:02:33.200 --> 00:02:36.480 It looks like the cable doesn't have much memory, which means it's not bouncing back and trying 00:02:36.480 --> 00:02:41.520 to reform into the coiled ball that it was in here. Elsewhere in the bin, we have, wow, a lot 00:02:41.600 --> 00:02:46.640 of ear tips. We've got ear tips in three different sizes and three different styles. I'm not sure 00:02:46.640 --> 00:02:51.280 if there's any actual difference between the styles of ear tips. They all look pretty similar. 00:02:51.280 --> 00:02:56.240 One thing I do wish that was included was maybe a set of foam ear tips. I prefer foam ear tips, 00:02:56.240 --> 00:03:01.120 but it's still gonna have to do. Let me grab my favorite pair and I'll just dress them up. 00:03:01.120 --> 00:03:06.560 I will say that to get the three-way crossover of all of these balanced armatures, the nozzle on 00:03:06.560 --> 00:03:12.720 these has to be quite big. And if you're somebody with small ear canals like yours truly, these 00:03:12.720 --> 00:03:17.920 could cause issues for fit. I guess there's nothing left to do, but take a listen to them. 00:03:17.920 --> 00:03:21.440 The nozzle on these are quite large and I can feel it in my ear canal, but I'm still getting a really 00:03:21.440 --> 00:03:27.920 good seal. My ears are plugged. And cable noise, cable noise is actually quite good. There's still 00:03:27.920 --> 00:03:32.640 a little bit of like lower vibrational noise, but I think that it's pretty good from what I've heard. 00:03:32.640 --> 00:03:37.600 It's not like ringing or really resonating. So good job Kiwi ears. 00:03:42.560 --> 00:03:46.720 One thing that Kiwi ears set out to do was create an IEM that's going to have a sound 00:03:46.720 --> 00:03:50.080 signature that's going to please a lot of people. They're probably going to be doing something like 00:03:50.080 --> 00:03:56.000 targeting the Harman curve, which is what we base our own headphone target here at LMG on. And I 00:03:56.000 --> 00:04:01.120 think they've probably done a great job at that. They're fun. They have punchy bass. They're still 00:04:01.120 --> 00:04:06.320 rich and they have a lot of detail in the highs. And I think specifically the way they've tuned 00:04:06.320 --> 00:04:11.600 the highs, it gives it a feeling of space that you don't get with a lot of headphones. And I find 00:04:11.600 --> 00:04:15.840 that that sound stage really resonates with these IEMs. And I think that that's pretty impressive 00:04:15.840 --> 00:04:19.520 because IEMs is always kind of difficult to make it sound like it's bigger than just the head 00:04:19.520 --> 00:04:23.600 that's wearing them. I think that Kiwi ears is actually getting quite a bit out of the eight 00:04:23.600 --> 00:04:28.480 armatures in here. They have those two bass balance armatures, give it plenty of punch, 00:04:28.560 --> 00:04:35.680 and the two treble ones provide actually quite a bit of detail. I would border on maybe a little 00:04:35.680 --> 00:04:40.560 bit too crispy for my taste, but I'm sure if I spent a little bit more time with them, I would 00:04:40.560 --> 00:04:44.800 probably adapt quite well. It's definitely not offensive. That's for sure. You might find that 00:04:44.800 --> 00:04:48.400 these will benefit from like a dedicated DAC and amp, especially if you're going for like really 00:04:48.400 --> 00:04:52.160 critical listening. But if you're also looking for some versatility allowing you to maybe just take 00:04:52.160 --> 00:04:56.960 these when you travel, you don't want to bring a whole proper source with you, I think you're also 00:04:57.040 --> 00:05:01.040 going to be pleased. But that's my opinion. Let's take a look at some squiggly lines. 00:05:01.040 --> 00:05:05.840 Looking at our Labs results, we can see that it does actually follow our curve pretty nicely. 00:05:05.840 --> 00:05:10.960 I think it's funny that Kiwi ears calls out like a bass boost, a bass bump, but to me it sounds 00:05:10.960 --> 00:05:15.920 like it follows the Harman curve pretty well. I wouldn't call it very like boosted, but it 00:05:15.920 --> 00:05:21.600 definitely has the fun that is typical of a Harman curve based headphone. And I thought it sounded 00:05:21.600 --> 00:05:25.360 quite delightful. You might find that there might be a little bit of honk if you're particularly 00:05:25.360 --> 00:05:29.600 sensitive to that. That kind of sounds like it is. Maybe like horns and treble sections sound like 00:05:29.600 --> 00:05:34.960 they're more like... But as we go up, we see that the treble looks actually a little bit laid back 00:05:34.960 --> 00:05:40.320 compared to our target. Just in the lower brilliance region, we see a dip of about 6 dB 00:05:40.320 --> 00:05:46.720 around 7K, which might be where I'm finding the dryness is I think that that dip might be making 00:05:46.720 --> 00:05:52.560 things sound a little bit less full in the high end and making things sound a little bit more 00:05:52.560 --> 00:05:57.840 brittle because we have an increase in brilliance for the rest of it. Moving on to noise isolation, 00:05:57.840 --> 00:06:01.600 you can see that these have a pretty solid attenuation of the high end, which is 00:06:01.600 --> 00:06:05.360 exactly what you'd expect for earplugs. And then as we get lower down into the bass and 00:06:05.360 --> 00:06:10.240 sub bass region, they don't attenuate so much. This is completely normal. Usually if you want 00:06:10.240 --> 00:06:14.400 to get rid of any noise below the kind of like low mids, let's say like 500 Hertz, you're going to 00:06:14.400 --> 00:06:18.480 need to use active noise cancellation, which these don't have. They don't have microphones of any kind. 00:06:18.480 --> 00:06:22.240 But I found that, yeah, I got a really solid seal with these and they plugged things up 00:06:23.360 --> 00:06:29.760 heck and quiet. It's, you guys have to yell. It's like, I've not listened to anything and it's very 00:06:29.760 --> 00:06:35.040 plugged. My ears are very plugged. In terms of actual comfort, I find that the shape makes 00:06:35.040 --> 00:06:40.320 them very lovely. It's a kind of, it's a very common shape that we've seen a little bump here 00:06:40.320 --> 00:06:44.960 that kind of balances the weight of that earphone. So it doesn't sit like, it doesn't feel like it's 00:06:44.960 --> 00:06:50.480 hanging out of your ear and it nestles nicely into this part of your ear. There's a term for it. 00:06:50.480 --> 00:06:54.400 I don't know it. I'm not a scientist. And I think that they're actually pretty comfortable, 00:06:54.400 --> 00:06:58.800 assuming that you have the ear canals that are big enough. You can get the Kiwi Ears 00:06:58.800 --> 00:07:04.800 Orchestra lights for 250 USD. That's dollars, my friends. And if this is out of your budget, 00:07:04.800 --> 00:07:08.640 don't worry, Kiwi Ears has got you covered with a whole beverage of cheaper options 00:07:08.640 --> 00:07:12.080 that I don't have time to check out today, but I will be checking out in my own time, 00:07:12.080 --> 00:07:16.400 because I like headphones. And I like you. Thanks so much for watching and thanks Kiwi Ears 00:07:16.400 --> 00:07:20.400 for sponsoring this ShortCircuit. 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