So after Capetownwatches told me about his $20 "secret weapons" (KZ ZSN earphones) it is no secret that i decided to get myself a pair - and i have been telling all of my friends about it and there's one friend in particular who has an import license who has been busy getting these for a fair amount of my buddies too .... and now i'm used to IEMs ie enough to decide that i do need a very good set for portable usage and thus when i buy myself the DAP (Fiio M11) that i'm after i really do need a good set of IEMs with it
now as with most other people i'm not really at that level where i can spend a lot of money on the things that are considered to currently be the best for example IEMs like the Campfire Andromeda or Solaris which for my current financial situation remain a distant dream (like when i win big in the lotto or something like that
) so i need to find something cheaper but still good
the problem for me is that while i do have a fair amount of experience with Hi-Fi and Home Theatre equipment my experience with Head-Fi equipment is severely limited to things that belong to other people or the cheap things that i have decided to buy so just as with the KZ ZSN pro's i still needed to experiment a bit to decide how different a better set of earphones can be so i considered dabbling with the KZ ZS10 which many reviews say is tonally similar and also just as much fun to listen to as the ZSN pros that i have .... with the additional extra money charged being justified by a bigger soundstage and more precise imaging ..... and then i also considered the rival which costs around the same as the ZS10s
THEN
one of my other buddies asked me a question which i did not know much about at that precise point in time ie "whats the difference between Dynamic drivers and Balanced Armature drivers in IEMs" and truth be told i had no freaking clue so i sat down over a long Google session to try and find out .... this then led to an interest in multiple driver IEMs and why i needed to be aware of this if i wanted to try out any IEMs and make sense out of them .... and during my reading i saw that the KZ ZS10 was also a hybrid design with a Dynamic driver for the bass and then it used 4 balanced armature drivers for the higher frequencies ..... which led to the question "are all these multiple drive earphones actually better sounding or is it all hype based around the adage that "more is more" or was there even "more" to the story"
in all of this i learned a bit about two sayings ..... the first being "don't always believe what you read" and the second one being "first impressions are lasting impressions" ..... and while the first one was proved true the second one was proved patently false in my current experience. Curious? ...... well read on if i haven't already bored you to death with what i have been saying up above
the upshot of everything was that i decided to order a set of KZ AS16 IEMs which use 8 balanced armature drivers per side .... but these damn things are not really cheap if they were only for an experiment but i eventually decided what the heck since i'm only going to live once i might as well go big or stay home .... so we clicked submit on a set of AS16
inbetween while i waited for these i decided to read a few more reviews of many Chi-Fi earphones and even a few reviews of good models like the Fiio FH7 and the campfire Audio models (just for curiosity) and all the tin audio and other KZ models and i read a review where the guy had so many good things to say about the ZS10 that i began to question ordering a $140 earphone instead of a $50 one for experimentation and then i read another review where the guy tested the AS16 in a direct comparison to the ZS10 and his conclusion was that he personally preferred the ZS10 over the AS16 because the ZS10 provided more bass due to its low frequency dynamic driver vs the AS16 using only balanced armature .... and that review had me breaking out in a cold sweat - had i just thrown away some money by foolishly ordering something that might not be much better than something a lot cheaper that i already possessed? And this question haunted me until these things arrived.
so they did arrive and the package was surprisingly sparse - besides for the earphones - there was only a cable and two other additional differently sized tips
this time i ordered it with the cable that had the mic plus the button that allows you answer calls while using the earphones with a smartphone
then the actual earphones
so while i was picking them up i carried along a few of my portable DACs and bluetooth receiver and some USB cables etc so that i could compare these with the ZSN and my buddy who helped me out with the importing also was part of this quick comparison .... but we listened more to the AS16 than really to the ZSN because we have both been using the ZSN for a month or two already ..... and both of us agreed at that point in time that the ZSN was a really warmer earphone and the quick listening seemed to imply that the additional expense was not worth it ... but the guy doing the review preferred the ZS10, so would it also be the same for me? - and incidentally we also tried out another thing my buddy had imported from Amazon ie a Spectra nextdrive X DAC/AMP USB C to 3.5mm adapter unit which uses an ESS sabre 9018 DAC chip
now this is where the second saying comes in ie remember what i said about first impressions? well i went home and ate supper and then watched TV for a while and then decided well i may as well try it all out in a more in-depth comparison but this time i left the DACs and amps and everything else out if it and i just used the earphones directly from the phones headphone output jack
after listening to about 5 of my regular auditioning and comparison tracks i realized that the AS16 is a detail monster - sure the ZSN does have more bass and some of the bass detail was a lot better ie it had more decay and it was easy to see that the bass extended much lower BUT the AS16 was much cleaner and clearer and i know its a cliche when the guys say that a "veil has lifted" but yes it applies here as in much of the other situations - the AS16 just sounded much ore open and precise and also a whole lot bigger in soundstage scale and you heard all those fine details much more clearly, for example in the Eric Clapton track "Change The world" i noticed for the first time that its more than one person playing guitars .... and i heard this track so many times but it never registered that there was more than one guitar playing ..... and from this point on the more i listened to the AS16 the more i realized that the ZSN presented in a much smaller scale and seemed subdued and the midrange and treble were also much slower .... which was evident i the attack and decay of almost all notes even vocals which sounded as if the singer was singing with more vocal range and also emotion
so never ever believe the first impression because when i did the direct comparison track for track it became evident to me that i was now going to pack away those ZSNs back into their original packaging and only use them if i was going traveling into high risk areas where they could possibly get stolen but for the more serious listening i was only going to be listening to those AS16 despite their lack of bass .... and after about 3 to 4 hours of listening to the AS16 i can appreciate how subtly they are actually way better than the ZSN .... and to me right now they re more enjoyable than even the full size headphones that i currently am using (the Hifiman HE4xx are warmer but the AS16 present more detail and a larger sense of scale as well as produce more intensity and drama to the listening possibly because of the high sensitivity and lower impedance in comparison the larger headphones .... the level of detail out of these tiny little things is absolutely astounding even though they have other flaws)
In conclusion they are not perfect and are unlikely to be the last pair of IEMS that i purchase but to me they are more fun and more musical despite less bass than the other cheaper stuff that i have, and i have read another review where the guy does a comparison between these and the Fiio FH7 where he says that the FH7 pretty much had around the same effect on him as i experienced above as to how much of an improvement they are over the cheaper alternative brand models ....so yep my mind is pretty much set on the FH7 as my endgame IEMs - just need my home theatre stuff to sell so that i can afford those FH7 and that M11 DAP at the same time and i reckon thats going to be my endgame portable system .... and after that i'm going to start looking at more fixed Head-Fi equipment .... till then i reckon i'm going to be happy tinkering with my phone and these AS16s :thumbs:
now as with most other people i'm not really at that level where i can spend a lot of money on the things that are considered to currently be the best for example IEMs like the Campfire Andromeda or Solaris which for my current financial situation remain a distant dream (like when i win big in the lotto or something like that
) so i need to find something cheaper but still good the problem for me is that while i do have a fair amount of experience with Hi-Fi and Home Theatre equipment my experience with Head-Fi equipment is severely limited to things that belong to other people or the cheap things that i have decided to buy so just as with the KZ ZSN pro's i still needed to experiment a bit to decide how different a better set of earphones can be so i considered dabbling with the KZ ZS10 which many reviews say is tonally similar and also just as much fun to listen to as the ZSN pros that i have .... with the additional extra money charged being justified by a bigger soundstage and more precise imaging ..... and then i also considered the rival which costs around the same as the ZS10s
THEN
one of my other buddies asked me a question which i did not know much about at that precise point in time ie "whats the difference between Dynamic drivers and Balanced Armature drivers in IEMs" and truth be told i had no freaking clue so i sat down over a long Google session to try and find out .... this then led to an interest in multiple driver IEMs and why i needed to be aware of this if i wanted to try out any IEMs and make sense out of them .... and during my reading i saw that the KZ ZS10 was also a hybrid design with a Dynamic driver for the bass and then it used 4 balanced armature drivers for the higher frequencies ..... which led to the question "are all these multiple drive earphones actually better sounding or is it all hype based around the adage that "more is more" or was there even "more" to the story"
in all of this i learned a bit about two sayings ..... the first being "don't always believe what you read" and the second one being "first impressions are lasting impressions" ..... and while the first one was proved true the second one was proved patently false in my current experience. Curious? ...... well read on if i haven't already bored you to death with what i have been saying up above
the upshot of everything was that i decided to order a set of KZ AS16 IEMs which use 8 balanced armature drivers per side .... but these damn things are not really cheap if they were only for an experiment but i eventually decided what the heck since i'm only going to live once i might as well go big or stay home .... so we clicked submit on a set of AS16
inbetween while i waited for these i decided to read a few more reviews of many Chi-Fi earphones and even a few reviews of good models like the Fiio FH7 and the campfire Audio models (just for curiosity) and all the tin audio and other KZ models and i read a review where the guy had so many good things to say about the ZS10 that i began to question ordering a $140 earphone instead of a $50 one for experimentation and then i read another review where the guy tested the AS16 in a direct comparison to the ZS10 and his conclusion was that he personally preferred the ZS10 over the AS16 because the ZS10 provided more bass due to its low frequency dynamic driver vs the AS16 using only balanced armature .... and that review had me breaking out in a cold sweat - had i just thrown away some money by foolishly ordering something that might not be much better than something a lot cheaper that i already possessed? And this question haunted me until these things arrived.
so they did arrive and the package was surprisingly sparse - besides for the earphones - there was only a cable and two other additional differently sized tips
this time i ordered it with the cable that had the mic plus the button that allows you answer calls while using the earphones with a smartphone
then the actual earphones
so while i was picking them up i carried along a few of my portable DACs and bluetooth receiver and some USB cables etc so that i could compare these with the ZSN and my buddy who helped me out with the importing also was part of this quick comparison .... but we listened more to the AS16 than really to the ZSN because we have both been using the ZSN for a month or two already ..... and both of us agreed at that point in time that the ZSN was a really warmer earphone and the quick listening seemed to imply that the additional expense was not worth it ... but the guy doing the review preferred the ZS10, so would it also be the same for me? - and incidentally we also tried out another thing my buddy had imported from Amazon ie a Spectra nextdrive X DAC/AMP USB C to 3.5mm adapter unit which uses an ESS sabre 9018 DAC chip
now this is where the second saying comes in ie remember what i said about first impressions? well i went home and ate supper and then watched TV for a while and then decided well i may as well try it all out in a more in-depth comparison but this time i left the DACs and amps and everything else out if it and i just used the earphones directly from the phones headphone output jack
after listening to about 5 of my regular auditioning and comparison tracks i realized that the AS16 is a detail monster - sure the ZSN does have more bass and some of the bass detail was a lot better ie it had more decay and it was easy to see that the bass extended much lower BUT the AS16 was much cleaner and clearer and i know its a cliche when the guys say that a "veil has lifted" but yes it applies here as in much of the other situations - the AS16 just sounded much ore open and precise and also a whole lot bigger in soundstage scale and you heard all those fine details much more clearly, for example in the Eric Clapton track "Change The world" i noticed for the first time that its more than one person playing guitars .... and i heard this track so many times but it never registered that there was more than one guitar playing ..... and from this point on the more i listened to the AS16 the more i realized that the ZSN presented in a much smaller scale and seemed subdued and the midrange and treble were also much slower .... which was evident i the attack and decay of almost all notes even vocals which sounded as if the singer was singing with more vocal range and also emotion
so never ever believe the first impression because when i did the direct comparison track for track it became evident to me that i was now going to pack away those ZSNs back into their original packaging and only use them if i was going traveling into high risk areas where they could possibly get stolen but for the more serious listening i was only going to be listening to those AS16 despite their lack of bass .... and after about 3 to 4 hours of listening to the AS16 i can appreciate how subtly they are actually way better than the ZSN .... and to me right now they re more enjoyable than even the full size headphones that i currently am using (the Hifiman HE4xx are warmer but the AS16 present more detail and a larger sense of scale as well as produce more intensity and drama to the listening possibly because of the high sensitivity and lower impedance in comparison the larger headphones .... the level of detail out of these tiny little things is absolutely astounding even though they have other flaws)
In conclusion they are not perfect and are unlikely to be the last pair of IEMS that i purchase but to me they are more fun and more musical despite less bass than the other cheaper stuff that i have, and i have read another review where the guy does a comparison between these and the Fiio FH7 where he says that the FH7 pretty much had around the same effect on him as i experienced above as to how much of an improvement they are over the cheaper alternative brand models ....so yep my mind is pretty much set on the FH7 as my endgame IEMs - just need my home theatre stuff to sell so that i can afford those FH7 and that M11 DAP at the same time and i reckon thats going to be my endgame portable system .... and after that i'm going to start looking at more fixed Head-Fi equipment .... till then i reckon i'm going to be happy tinkering with my phone and these AS16s :thumbs:
