TRUTHEAR x Crinacle Zero:BLUE2 IEM Review

[brandall10]

Crinacle is not only a tuner, he is a very well known member of the online headphone community and a very entertaining and informative YouTuber. He also has a headphone shop/demonstration room in Singapore.

Like Amir, he is one of the “good guys” in this space.

For some backstory, his rise to fame came from ranking a metric ton of IEMs starting nearly a decade back on head-fi. He had no channel/website for the first few years, I believe it was just a thread maintained on head-fi with a google sheet.

He's not alone in that, plenty of others had rolling review threads. But he was one of the earlier proponents using measurements in his assessments and he seemed to carefully reconsider and rerank things and his style of reviewing seemed to engender a bit more trust... local shops would lend him things, people would send them in, so there was a critical mass of items reviewed that his lists became the closest thing to a gold standard.

By the time his first collab came around he probably had been doing this already for 5 years or so. Just an overzealous headfier who turned it into a business op.

 

[RogerSmith]

For some backstory, his rise to fame came from ranking a metric ton of IEMs starting nearly a decade back on head-fi. He had no channel/website for the first few years, I believe it was just a thread maintained on head-fi with a google sheet.

He's not alone in that, plenty of others had rolling review threads. But he was one of the earlier proponents using measurements in his assessments and he seemed to carefully reconsider and rerank things and his style of reviewing seemed to engender a bit more trust... local shops would lend him things, people would send them in, so there was a critical mass of items reviewed that his lists became the closest thing to a gold standard.

By the time his first collab came around he probably had been doing this already for 5 years or so. Just an overzealous headfier who turned it into a business op.

Yes, the origin being a headfier is still very much present, not the least in attributing to different IEMs and headphones different levels of 'technicalities', which, by pure accident, mostly correlate with price.

 

[markanini]

Yes, the origin being a headfier is still very much present, not the least in attributing to different IEMs and headphones different levels of 'technicalities', which, by pure accident, mostly correlate with price.

No one’s trying to put Crinacle on a pedestal here. When he got traction on Head-Fi, ASR wasn’t a big hub for IEM discussion, so he used terms like technicalities that resonated with the Head-Fi crowd. That’s where he began. Before headphones.com came along with their polished corporate spin, Crinacle brought measurements to a wider audience as an independent reviewer. His rankings often are biased toward pricier IEMs. Still, he did a lot to promote budget and ultra-budget IEMs, showing they could compete with more expensive models. I've noted unlike most that followed his footsteps he states who his sponsors are. You would expect everyone in this space would do that and sadly most don't.

 

[raif71]

Finally got this two days back. I have since then tried both silicone and foam tips and I settled on the foam tips. This is the only iem that I use foam tips with and it comes with sizes of small,medium and large. I use the middle sized foams and if I'm not mistaken there are 2 pairs of the mid sized ones. One more thing, I prefer the Zero Red over this.