Crinear Reference

[zonk]

I've tried Pure and Cadenza 2 recently. No, they are not as good as the Reference.
I haven't tried the others since they're not available where I live, and I’d have to pay an additional 30% for VAT and customs. Thanks for posting.

For me the Crinear IEMs are not delivering anything new. Of course they are good, but for me it's just a clever way to make money within the flood of available IEMs.
I have over 20 different IEMs here and everyone of them sounds good to me with a bit of EQ.

 

[pier25]

I've recently tried the Pure and Cadenza 2. No, they're not on the same level as the Reference, but they offer a better price-to-performance ratio.

I own the Pure and it's a fantastic IEM for the price but yeah the Reference is simply better.

IEM manufacturing is extremely manual and more expensive models have better QC. Crinacle has a video where he mentions the Reference has a max tolerance of 1db. If you check cheap IEMs like the Moondrop Chu 2 they can have as much as 3-4db of variance between channels.

 

[gzost]

I've had the Reference for a few weeks now and I continue to be delighted every time I use it. It presents music effortlessly and I never wonder whether what I am hearing is I the recording or an artefact of headphones/IEMs. It just gets out of the way.

I own multiple excellent headphones and an unnecessarily wide selection of IEMs, including a lot of the entry-level darlings from the last couple of years. The Reference, to me, is better than any of them. Not by a huge margin, but enough that I constantly reach for it over everything else.

 

[InfiniteJester]

I have never heard these IEMs, I have never heard the Prisma Lumen either.

But using them both as targets for EQ across many of my sets, I can assure that Lumen's FR sounds much more neutral and correct for me than Reference's FR.

 

[gzost]

Everybody's HRTF is different, and Reference and Lumen fall both very much within that variability. I'll give an EQ to Lumen's FR (as far as that is possible through all the vagaries of measurements and different HpTFs) a try.

 

[InfiniteJester]

Everybody's HRTF is different, and Reference and Lumen fall both very much within that variability. I'll give an EQ to Lumen's FR (as far as that is possible through all the vagaries of measurements and different HpTFs) a try.

Yes, I'm aware that results may vary. That's why I said 'for me'. You are, of course, right to point this out.