Shure SE846. They aren't perfect but pretty good even though more on the pricy side. They have a fairly neutral sound and clear even when a lot of sounds are played at once.
I had the Shure SE535 before. They are not as good and need a little bit of equalizer tweaking but have a better worth to price ratio.
SE846 are heavier than the SE535 and your ears may need a bit longer to adjust to them.
Since you don't seem to listen to a lot of technical music the SE846 are probably overkill but the SE535 may hit the mark.
I have the Shure SE535 myself, which I like, but they're relatively flat, tuning wise. Most manufacturers try to follow stuff like Harman or IEF tuning.
The KZ in ears are great for the price! Lots of low end
I’ve owned them, shure se215, se535. The bang for buck can’t be beat for the KZ ZS10 pro2. The cable design is superior to the shure design IMO
The shure cable rotates 360\* which works great at first. But when it gets filled with sweat after a year or so it will corrode the connection. Then your always getting dropouts in one ear
The KZ are 2 pins that don’t move, and sweat can’t get inside to corrode
IEMs can also give you tinnitus if you’re not careful. Volume discipline with your headphones, regardless of what you use is essential! Shure 535 are great. I also more recently use Aiaiai TMA2 wireless headphones which, although not IEMs, are amazing. If I’m playing on a big rig IEMs don’t work for me, I’d rather use cans you can remove combined with some Loop Engage earplugs. It’s all down to personal preference. Just look after your ears! ❤️
I think it really comes down to the individual brands, whether IEMs are their main or only business model, how much of a margin they build in, and how much R&D they put into the pair of IEMs you bought. I have tested and borrowed various cheaper IEMs, and I ran Shure SE535 for a while, and then moved onto their SE846 which were highly innovative at the time for the laser welded air path, effectively creating a tiny sub-woofer dampener in the ear. I later moved onto the Sony IER-Z1R, partly because they were consistently in top 10 or top 5 lists on high end IEM review lists. I was also impressed how Sony had put a lot of effort into developing each ot the drivers in them from the ground up (rather than taking parts off the shelf), the stratospheric build quality (solid zirconium shell and kevlar sheathed removable cables). I listened to demo units and was blown away by the bass and soundstage on an IEM, way beyond any previous IEMs I had heard.. and as someone that daily drives and wears at the gym, i didnt want plastic housings, weak 2 pin connectors, or general poor build quality in multi thousand buck IEMs. I haven't regreted owning them once.
I also experimented with lots of DACs and settled on the Fiio BTR17 using balanced 4.4 output and FLAC audio via tidal using LDAC codec. I couldnt hear any sound improvement over FLAC back when tidal supported MQA.. but could hear improvement from FLAC over lower bitrates and formats. If listening over bluetooth, the codec is generally the quality bottleneck, so its critical to use the highest quality mode and codec you can.. When it comes to AMPs i found that the additional power delivered over balanced outputs, generally brought better performance out of the IEMs.
There are certainly brands at the top who are taking off the shelf drivers, sticking them in a shell, creating a well enough performing IEM with average or below average build quality, the charging mega-bucks for them. But there are others who really put in the engineering time and innovate.. SONY didnt make the IER-Z1R to make a quick buck, or as a primary business model, its a rounding error on a sub-division of a sub-division of their massive corporation - a few engineers did it as a passion project, because they could, and they persued every detail, every component, every material choice; without compromise.
Top IEMs on Reddit
1
7Hz
7Hz x Crinacle Zero:2
76% positive of 493 users
Budget gaming pick, but poor cables and polarizing bass.
47FsXMj
