Vadar Series

KZ Vader has been my favorite in the under $50 bunch. Gate looks so frail. Though the anime girl on the box almost always makes me buy it…

i bought kz vader + dac and it was good naman for both gaming and music

KZ Vader is also a good one here. Whatever you buy, you should pair it with a DAC like the Audiocular D07 for proper output.

Snobbish, deluded and dumb. There's no freaking way the AM16 sounds "cluttered". OP's earwax must be impacted, which is probably given he doesn't hear the flat coldness that the apple dongle has to it's sound signature. PRX (if you can get one without QC issues) AM16, Decet, ZS12 Pro X are all fantastic sets. And sets like the Vader Balanced and Kunten are pretty great when you factor in that they're $10. I dgaf how stupid their marketing is or what shitty things the brand did previously with bargains like that. The hurrr durr KZ bad group think is so dumb and seems to be parroted by people that haven't been into iems pre 2020.. what you can get these days in the budget space is nuts and KZ's sets in the last year or so are even out competing a lot of other budget sets on price/performance.

Wtf. Vader is bloody bright. Nowhere comparable to castors. Also have you tried the castor pros?

Personally I like the Trio and the Vader Balanced over any of the Truthear Zeros. You can get the Trio or Vader Balanced for under $30, and with a good cable from KBEar, you will still be under the price of the Zeros, and have better overall tonality, without the oddball shortcomings of the Zeros. I still feel, personally, that the Zero Blue is better than the Blue2. But I am in a minority for this opinion.

Long story short: when I bought my first IEMs back in June to listen to retrowave, I got the Castor Pro Harman and a dongle DAC with the same chips as yours. I had the same reaction you’re having now: they sounded thin and kind of lifeless. My ears were used to my earbuds, which have way more low-end, so I didn’t get the hype at all. I kept using them for a few days, and then one night, really late, when everything was quiet, it finally clicked. The issue was the seal. During the day I wasn’t getting a proper seal, so I couldn’t really hear what they were capable of. Once I did, I started noticing details I had never heard before. Even genres I didn’t care much about suddenly sounded amazing (jazz, strings, dream pop, electronic, etc.). I was impressed enough that I bought a second set because I read somewhere they were better (Vader). They’re not better, just different. Fast forward to today, I now own around 10 sets (mostly budget ones), plus a Bluetooth module, multiple cables, different eartips, and all that. For me, it came down to two things: getting a good seal, and giving your brain some time to adjust to the subtleties.