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junaru

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.

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That's nice anecdata.

Got a pair of FiiO earbuds - works after 5 years

Got a pair of Skullcandy earbuds - failed within a month

Got a pair of Sony WF-1000XM5 - failed within a year

Got a pair of AirPod Pro2 - works after 2 years

Got a pair of Beat Fit Pro - failed within a year

Got a pair of Moondrop Blessing 2 - works after 2 years

I can keep going for a while. Aren't all of these assembled in China? The Chinese meme strong is strong with us.

>Aren't all of these assembled in China?

Some Airpods are manufactured in Vietnam.

Manufactured in China to a specification. No anti-Chinese goods sentiment here, just agreement that provenance isn't much of an indicator of anything on its own. But I'd expect Apple above any other to have things buttoned down.

I’ve never tried any of the Chi-Fi brands so I’m not saying this to favor them but: my Apple AirPods Pro have had issues too - uneven battery usage so one earpiece would discharge before the other, and hissing during quiet passages. Tried them for a week or two and then returned them.

Hissing most likely comes from media, unequal discharge rate is legit problem. I'm not an apple fan but when it comes to reliability major brands at least do some product design and quality checks, meanwhile most chi-fi IEMs have options for MMCX connectors that are entirely unsuitable for the use case and should have been shot down during the design phase, but hey - "the more options the better".

P.S. For anyone thinking i bash just because of China or western audiophile superiority - no i just got burned by articles like this and crinnancle reviews twice and sharing my experience.

> Hissing most likely comes from media

Not when there is no media playing. This was back when the first Pros came out and when I googled it, there were a lot of reports of the same issue.

I say all this as a generally-happy Apple product consumer btw - and of course, there are many people who don’t experience these issues. But that goes for the Chi-Fi brands as well, since we’re ultimately talking about quality control.

meanwhile most chi-fi IEMs have options for MMCX connectors that are entirely unsuitable for the use case

It seems they're far more common to have a 2-pin connector now instead of MMCX.

The hissing is almost certainly an issue with either the transparency or noise cancellation features

My Samsungs didn't hiss due to their implementation of those features (although they died after about 9 months of regular use)

Hissing is _usually_ something to do with the noise cancellation. In my case it was that the microphones were dirty.

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