Nah they sound fine with any genre of music, and soundstage is a meme, a tonally correct frequency response will have a small perceived soundstage with most stereo recorded music.

If you don’t use sideloaded apps or lean heavily on the voice assistant you lose nothing in the transition, it’s just going to take a brief adjustment period getting used to the new OS. If you do lean heavily on google assistant maybe reconsider, Siri is kinda shit.

Any Bluetooth earphones will work perfectly well with an iPhone, Apple’s devices just have extra features. In terms of Bluetooth audio the only non-SBC codec supported is AAC, which is implemented extremely well on Apple devices. It’s generally better than aptx and audibly nearly equivalent to LDAC at its highest bitrate, and equivalent at lower more stable bitrates.

If you’re shopping for new Bluetooth earphones and have an iPhone you may as well just get Airpods, they’re among the best on the market anyway.

If you don’t notice the frame hangs and stutters that’s cool, but Android animations being faster/fewer frames is not the same thing as the phone being faster.

Longtime Nexus/Pixel user and yea, they’re great as Android goes, but no Android phone is as smooth as iOS.

> Do yourself a favor and watch all the stupid little iOS trick YouTube videos. No one tells you to hold the space at down to move the courser for editing words or to use your finger to slash the numbers in calculator to delete your last action.

This is a big one, iOS has a lot of little gestures and such that aren’t really documented and which make a huge difference in usability.

> I get the impression that the Elex may be worse than the Clear though. There are also plenty of reports of driver failure particularly on older (pre-2020 revision) Utopias, and the Elex.

They redesigned the voice coil for the Clear, which is why it doesn't have the same problems the Elear and early Utopia units had.

Passive headphones and IEMs have been as good as they're going to get for a long time now, yes.

There are going to be large strides forward in the next couple of years via active headphones and IEMs with built-in DSP however, the future of personal audio is wireless earphones with adaptive DSP.

There's a reason that traditional 'high-end' audio companies like Focal, Mark Levinson, Bowers & Wilkins, Sennheiser, and others, are all pushing hard into the digital market: It's the future, and traditional headphone/audio companies which don't adapt quickly enough are dead.

Zero tips are not good, whereas Chu comes with nice spring tips.

Personally I would go Chu for the better tips despite the permanently attached cables, both of these IEMs are likely going to disintegrate from cheap build long before the cables die.

Starting to think Moondrop fluked out with their handful of successes.

Bought the Salnotes Zero to check the hype, wasn't impressed. Included tips are bad and sound quality was a pretty significant step down from the slightly less cheap ER2 series.

Gave them another shot recently for a bit, couple hours later realized I'd just been listening to music on them happily enough all that time.

There's a reason most people are perfectly happy with garbage quality audio from bluetooth speakers or whatever: It doesn't actually matter that much if you're not paying attention to it.

I'd get a Chu for that price instead tho just for the spring tips it comes with.

Dunu Luna uses a bespoke driver platform developed in-house with a pure beryllium dome, which is both extremely rare in the industry and quite expensive to manufacture consistently to tolerances. It’s also got a shell machined out of titanium. Do they cost anywhere near $1600 in materials to produce? Of course not, but Luna and the Eclipse driver platform they designed for it haven’t been a real commercial success for Dunu. Even the Zen Pro which uses the same Eclipse platform with a cheaper Mg-Al dome didn’t rake in the margins it would need to be considered a real success. For their cheapest Eclipse platform IEM Falcon Pro, Dunu went out and found an existing OEM driver which had some of the same features of their Eclipse design, allowing them to sell the Falcon Pro near Kato prices.

Sennheiser’s IE900 shares a driver design platform with the IE600 and IE300, however the drivers in the IE300 use different voice coils and are manufactured to looser tolerances in China, whereas the IE600 and IE900 drivers are made with higher grade components to tighter tolerances. In addition, the IE900 has a fully machined housing with machined Helmholtz resonators internally for tuning, which is expensive; even the Chinese IE900 knockoffs with shittier machining quality run $270.

The actual drivers in the vast majority of IEMs are either off the shelf OEM components or custom variants of OEM designs, and the drivers in most single-DD IEMs cost less than a dollar a piece when purchased in bulk.

There’s a huge step up in costs from using a drop-in driver and tuning with damping filters to using custom designed drivers ordered from an OEM combined with acoustic shaping in the IEM body/nozzle, and another huge step up in costs from there if you want to actually design and build the whole thing, or nearly the whole thing, in-house.

Lack of QC is a large part of how these chifi companies can profitably sell IEMs as cheaply as they do; this is far from a Moondrop exclusive issue, you just hear more about Moondrop since they’re the biggest chifi IEM brand globally.

Dunu has a better reputation, but their Aria competitor Titan S has had some early production issues as well.

Being interested in the gear you listen to music with does not necessitate also jumping onto the hedonic treadmill.

Buying shit isn’t a hobby.