Chi-fi tuning – Why it sounds piercing to Western ears (2020)

The bass heavy tendency of western consumer grade headphones/speakers is tuned for western pop music and does not sound very good with much else, some of the non-western pop traditions are not bad. Headphones/speakers with a flat response will sound lacking in bass but will not sound piercing with sources which were not mixed with bass heavy systems in mind and will play better with EQ. While flat may lack the deep powerful bass you will get used to it and you will be able to hear everything else in the track better, including the bass.

The way they get that deep powerful bass is not just by increasing the bass, that would leave everything outside of the bass too quite in comparison, they also put dips in the frequency response to accentuate the bass. These dips work fairly well as long as the instruments are fairly consistent in their ranges which is quite regular in western pop, everything is essential a bass, a guitar and vocals even when they are not and you have 10 instruments in the mix, everyone sticks to the various ranges which sound right and the engineer (assuming they are good) fudges things with the mixing. But the dips come at a cost, you lose detail.

This article is very out of date and irrelevant now. The Chi-fi market has changed drastically in the last 4 years. You can get very neutral sounding IEMs from China now, V-shaped, U-shaped, sparkly, heavy bass, etc.

One of the best-sounding, lowest distortion I've tried is also the cheapest, the Truthear Zero 2, available on Amazon for $25.

If you're interested in scientific measurements of the IEM, AudioScienceReview has it covered: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/7...

> If you have ever heard Mainland Chinese recordings dated back 30-40 years ago, they were shouty, harsh and ear-piercing (plenty examples on YouTube).

Sounds interesting, but I don't know what search terms to use. Does anyone have any representative examples?

This is an interesting read but it is also a little bit sensationalist (for the intended audience anyway). It's true that that that market is so big now that manufacturers are looking for gaps in taste by trying loads of stuff - look at sites like squig.link and you'll see how much variety there is. But I don't think it's anywhere near as culturally driven as that. I think it's simply that high end detail used to be considered the main indicator of consumer grade audio 'quality', so that's what they all tooled up for back when they were manufacturing primarily for western consumption.

I've followed Dr. Fang of HifiMan & some of their newer competition for over 15 years, and watched that industry develop and leapfrog its western equivalent in both quality and market size. As an enthusiast it's been wonderful to see - they have converged to a mass-market audio segment in which sound quality and tuning preference is either the primary feature or an overwhelming consideration, which we simply don't have over here, at least not outside the realms of gatekept audiosnobbery; we've had celebrity endorsements and beats and boses and told that woofers which fart into our brains is what 'good' sounds like. Though I guess this might be the 'western tuning' they refer to.

One thing I'm looking forward to is seeing how their custom iem market grows and develops. Custom IEMs are such a humongous leap in quality of experience, but they're simply not popular or even known outside of professional performer and high end audiophile circles, almost certainly due to cost of production and complexity of fitting. But as modern tech makes ear impressions reusable[0], and skin-friendly 3d printing tech advances, fully automated production of custom tech wear feels like the natural next step. And being able to put something into your ears that you literally can't feel once it's in there and warmed up, and cuts 40db so you can comfortably listen to it at volumes far lower than conventional earphones, is divine, it's a level-up that is difficult to explain. It's certainly something more people should have access to, and a market segment that can really afford to go down in price.

[0]: https://github.com/boomskats/my-earcanals

I once saw a YouTube a short clip of some kind of Chinese street music / singing performed by old men. It was ear piercing and weird and also strangely fascinating. I'll never be able to find it again

Why tune anyway? Isn't the job of speakers and earphones to reliably reproduce the sound that the person who produced the track wanted? The only tuning that should be done by default is to compensate for the form factor or the room, such that what the listener hears is exactly what the producer heard when making the track. Of course, give the user an equalizer with some presets they might want, but leave it up to the end user, not what the manufacturer thinks the user wants.

“Chi-Fi” IEMs in particular has been an area that has had phenomenal competition and growth in the years since this article has come out.

A significant proportion of tastes in sound are catered for, at all price points; with particular heat generated at and below the sub $100 mark. This is especially noticeable in the build quality and the quality of the tuning which has significantly improved in this market segment as competition has heated up.

It’s not about Eastern versus western. It’s more that most Chi Fi is just bad. There isn’t a real differentiator to most products so they just make a marketing splash when released and then are forgotten. Maybe Hifiman is the exception. And there are some occasional good IEMs if you like their signature. I also see more experimentation with new driver types like bone conduction in Chi Fi. But if you want reasonably accurate sound reproduction (with your preferred signature on top of that) and high build quality with consistency unit to unit, you probably need to look at brands that seem “old” like Shure, which often can just be made to sound the way you want with equalizer settings. On the IEM side there are also some great brands in the Pacific Northwest of the US like Campfire Audio, 64 Audio, and Fir Audio.

I bought a pair of BLON earbuds as my backup set that I keep in my bag so I've always got a set. Am very happy with the sound quality and thought they were fantastic value for money

Unapologetic neutral is the way to go. Coloring is distortion.

Salvageable headphones include, but not limited to (I hope...) Sennheiser HD600 and Audio Technica ath-r70x.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing.

> This is great, but for the real experience, you need to listen to this album with demonstrably worse gear.

Got a pair of TIN HiFi T2 - failed within a year.

Got a pair of Moondrop SSR - failed within a year.

Got a pair of Apple earpods - works for two years without issues for a fraction of the price.

I'm done with the Chinese IEM meme.