I’m exploring budget IEM’s and got the Chu II and Castor Pro. I think the Chu’s are great for the money and the Castor Pro’s are almost great for the money but the bass is making my head swim. I feel like I’m experiencing a cabin pressure change on takeoff. I turned off the manual switches and EQ’d but good golly.
And it’s not even bad sounding bass. It’s just too much. Also, the instruments are hidden. Lots of bass and mid-bass, great vocals but the crack of a snare or complexity of a riff are just fine.
Anyway, I think I need to return them. Should I be looking for something that’s just considered balanced? I listen to bullshit that isn’t recorded particularly well and I have no idea what to buy. I was looking at the KZ PRX next.
And to be clear, I listen to bands like Thou, Mispyrming, Deathspell Omega, Marduk, Djevel, Alice In Chains, Immortal, Emma Ruth Rundle, Blut Aus Nord, mgła… if you’re familiar.
I haven't tried any KZ IEMs personally, but your description doesn't surprise me. The Chu II, I have tried though, and I gotta say, they are not that great IMHO.
Vocals have unnatural timbre and are too forward, bass is unclear and untextured while obscuring the midrange leading to reduced clarity. Clarity and sound stage do improve slightly when driving from a proper DAC/amp stage instead of a high impedance output (e.g., laptop or PC headphone jack), but even so, I was disappointed. The metal build quality is great though, and they're super small for IEMs, so I use them for falling asleep to ambient music now.
Given that you listen to quite tonally complex music, I would make clarity a priority. Check out these two IEMs, they might be of interest: https://graph.hangout.audio/iem/5128/?share=JM-1_Target%2CZero2_S1%2CGate&bass=0&tilt=-1&treble=0&ear=0
I also highly recommend using squig.link as a resource, and getting a feel for what kind of frequency response you like. Remember that the actual frequency response will be different for you because of your unique ear canal, hrtf, etc.
Also see this Super Review video on recent releases: https://youtu.be/GTNXnIzZ6G0
Good luck on your IEM journey! It's a wonderful hobby :)
Great response and much appreciated. I've always been an over-ear headphone listener and I'm really excited to start collecting IEM's. I'm dabbling with cheap ones for now and once I know what I like, I'll start buying more substantial IEM's.
As far as the Chu go, I definitely agree with you. I suppose I meant that for 20 bucks, something that I can keep in my pocket for when I need a pair of IEM's while grocery shopping, tinkering in the garage, listening to podcasts, riding my bike, etc. they're great. I tried sitting down with them and running them through my ifi ZEN DAC this morning and I won't be doing that again.
Just curious, what's you opinion of budget planar IEM's? I don't think I'll mess around with KZ again but AliExpress has great sales on KZ right now and I was considering trying them one more time. I believe it's the PRX that I was considering for $15. $63 on Amazon.