New Campfire Audio IEMs

Hey Music 4321,

The Andromeda is a very hard act for us to follow, indeed and everything your saying resonates with me man. I dont hear much akin in the Andro / Vega, they are totally different. And yes the Vega has more sub bass impact/physicality and emphasis. I recommend you try first before jumping into Vega water in your case. Again I do think the Vega is has some subtle rarity nuance texture that I have not heard in a DD. The price of the Vega is high, sorry about the business parts of this. We tried to keep the cost down but the R and D and all the trials really added up.

Cheers,

Ken

 

@KenBall Too late for some of us, we jumped head first bro!! Really looking forward to it though. I heard the Andros, I liked them, but wished for more bass. Hoping the Vega scratches that itch.

Shipped!!! I'll definitely have it tomorrow, can't wait.

 

Damn guys! Peepz be getting their vega within the next day.... impressions asap brothers on all new releases!

 

Will do. If I don't like them, I'm going to return them. I will over them here to anyone interested first though. Restocking fee is 20%, but I'll sell at 30% off here to anyone, if they want.

Forgot to mention, we are having another south Florida meet on the 29th I believe. @jacq please confirm. It will be in pompano Beach, at my office, if anyone is interested in coming. Vegas will be there, with several other nice toys.

 

I will be stopping by CA in a bit to pick up my Vegas!

 

SBAF rocks. early impressions from people i like and trust. for everything else, there's mastercard.

 

Could any experienced member explain the merits DD has over BA? I've tried googling, but most results point me to overly biased posts (from both camps) at HF.

 

I'm no expert but DDs move more air so they sound bigger and have better impact. However they're slower and less precise.

 

I see timbre/tone come up as sticking points with BA's sometimes (no problem with the andros, to my ears)

 

I've got the Vegas in my ears right now. Not going to comment on the sound yet, I'm still making sense of what I'm hearing.

I can say that these are tiny and insert deeper than the previous shells. I'm using the generic foams until I can get home and roll my own tips.

Do most DD IEMs require burn-in?

 

Another consideration is that from my understanding, the impedance curve for a dynamic driver is quite linear as opposed to BAs being all over the place. Correct me if i'm wrong but this should mean that DDs play better with different output impedances.

 

These need more power than the Orions for sure. I've got them running balanced on my Pono at the moment and I have to set the volume several notches higher than when I use the Orions.

 

So uh...mini meet later tonight right?

 

If I didn't have to work I would.

 

Please do. You can always edit later
We need some hype here.

And I actually need good IEMs to replace my good ol' RE-400, which - while I find extremely good for the price - don't give me an end game sound.

Debating between the Vega and Andromeda. Vega would fit right in my current setup, since the sensitivity is equivalent to the RE-400 (albeit half the impedance).

I want something with a similar tonality as the RE-400, but with better technicalities all around. The RE-600 was too dark. The UERM too thin and uncomfortable to wear with glasses.

 

Went ahead and ordered up a Lyra II, here. Given the trial period, it wasn't a tough call. Should be interesting.

 

Why choose Dynamic Drivers, an SBAF guide.

I'll try to lay out a number of arguments in favor of Dynamic Drivers (DD). We're adults, so we understand that there's no need to "pick sides" and that everything in life has its trade offs. Weaknesses can be compensated for. Having said that, it's sometimes nice to hear a clearly stated position, so I'll try to do that.

With a DD, you can cover the whole frequency response with a single driver for perfect coherence. These are really two connected points, first the wide frequency response. Armatures have a lot of trouble covering the whole range. Even high end multi-multi armatures have tended to roll off early and this is compensated for in a few ways (including having dedicated ultra-high armatures and then placing them right up the nozzle as this also makes a difference).

That leads armature designers to need multi-driver designs typically (audio engineers who like DDs have much respect for the single BA er4) and that leads to issues of coherence, impedance wackiness, size, complexity, etc. There's a lot of workarounds for all this that are not so necessary with a single DD.

Dynamic drivers tend to have a more realistic reproduction of the subtle nuances to voices and instruments (the timbre).

Why? Certainly realistic decay is part of this, but there is more. One of the main ones is that DDs tend to have lower higher order distortion. We can thank Marvey and the other measurement folks for noticing this key feature of DDs.

One more idea that a number of audio engineers like has to do with how the ear drum itself moves. The ear drum moves forward and back and has evolved to function with the ear canal open and free of any air pressure differences.

So, two related things follow from this, both related to allowing the ear drum to function as naturally as possible in the back and forth movement.
1) The ideal transducer is one that will mirror this same forward and back movement (and, some add, that it should be, again ideally, about the same size as the ear drum as well). This is what a dynamic driver can do and an armature can't.

2) The ear drum was made for an equalized pressure inside/outside. Think how you can't hear well when you are sick! The key point for earphones is that the ear drum wasn't designed to work well with an occluded canal. You get some well-known resonances (2.7khz and its friends above), and the ear canal can actually be a bit arrested in its movement. This is particularly true with a "vacuum" seal.

With a vented shell DD iem, you can often avoid a lot of this and arguably get a much better movement of the ear drum for the best perception of sound. Now for the part about bass and DDs: Because we "feel" bass in particular, the way a DD moves and the vented shell together allows for "moving air"-- pressure changes in the ear canal corresponding with how we naturally hear sound and music. This means that we can get a much more realistic bass feel and bass experience than with a sealed armature playing the same volume.

So, "SPL is SPL" is wrong because of differences in distortion and perhaps even more importantly, differences not in the pressure level (volume) put out by an earphone, but in how the ear drum in a real listening environment (not a measurement apparatus) experiences that volume.

That's why you might choose a dynamic driver for the best sound.

Just my take, your glue may smell different than the one I'm sniffing...



As a final note, to repeat: There are ways to compensate for BA designs. Even more importantly, there are difficulties, trade-offs, and expenses which designers have to consider in any earphone that we audiophiles tend not to spend much time thinking about!