I think they are an interesting technology, very compact driver with full-range extension. But for now, the limitation is going to come down to tuning them, as the current ones require a lot of DSP to sound decent.
I think they are an interesting technology, very compact driver with full-range extension. But for now, the limitation is going to come down to tuning them, as the current ones require a lot of DSP to sound decent.
This is definitely a question that I was anticipating.The short answer is that you are 100% correct that it’s a conflict of interest. There’s nothing I can do that will change this (short of quitting as a reviewer). But I can do my best to massage some doubts.
Financial motivation is the conflict that most people will point to. And while I usually shy away from talking about personal finances, I have to point out that I don’t review for a living. My content work makes up less than 10% of my total income. That could change, but I don’t have a strong incentive to push sales of my IEM because what I make from my full-time job is enough to sustain myself and dwarfs what I make from reviewing.
More importantly, I’ve also built up a strong reputation for honesty. I see this as a long-term feedback loop, where people keep coming back to my reviews because what they experience is consistent with what I write, or I offer a useful perspective. If I suddenly switched up by panning everything as being worse than Mirai, I would be breaking this trust. It’s difficult to build trust, it’s easy to break it.
On a more sentimental level, the goal behind Mirai wasn’t entirely about turning it into a collaboration to sell to the market. I really just wanted an IEM that I could call my own, with my idea of good sound. But you need resources to build your own IEM, and there needs to be a reciprocal relationship to springboard development, hence why it became a collaboration.
I know there’s an element of “trust me bro” to this response and that I’m very fortunate to be in a position where I don’t need this to be my bread and butter. And of course, collaboration IEMs will always present a conflict of interest. But hopefully this helps to address some concerns!
So I think a lot of people were expecting a 64A-esque tuning, but I ended up taking the Mirai in something of a different direction. The most significant distinctions compared to the U12t are the Mirai’s peak coming back up at 4kHz (versus 5kHz on the U12t) and significantly more energy at ~8kHz where the U12t dips. This basically gives the Mirai some more bite in the upper-midrange and more of a focus on sparkle in the treble. It also won’t sound as bass-y even if they graph similarly in the bass region. Basically, they sound like very different IEMs in practice, and I wouldn’t really think of the Mirai as being a U12t replacement.
Compared to the IER-M9, it’ll be a lot less warm and it’ll be leaner.
Doesn’t sound like the LCD3, sorry. Honestly, I found the LCD3/4 to not be my cup of tea, something like the UE Reference Remastered would probably be closer to that type of sound (but still not nearly the same).
None of them 🙈
But if I HAD to choose one, it’d probably be the Susvara or the HE1
Sure, so the units are often sourced from our own stock (Headphones.com pays for it) or they come directly from manufacturers. Reviewers often have them for a couple weeks (sometimes longer, if it’s not high-priority) before they’re sent back to HQ or passed onto the next reviewer. We do keep a couple on-hand long-term for reference sometimes (for example, I’ve had a U6t from them for a couple years haha).
I’m not 100% sure what happens to the units after, I think some do end up as open box if they’re super clean (and sourced from our own stock) but most of them are just kept around as references.