World’s first MEMS/DD/BA Earphones are launching today on kickstarter
30th April 20206 sees the start of a Kickstarter campaign to generate enough £$€ to get the Kiwi ears Halcyon off the ground. Kickstarter are an online crowdfunding company. Crowdfunding is where prospective buyers pledge money to a product in return for the product to be made and sent to them when sufficient revenue has been obtained to be able to produce the item. It is often considereably cheaper to purchase something decent using this method. The company know how much they need to bring the product to market and the consmer funds the start up costs. They, effectively, cannot lose. As a reward for taking on all the risk, the product is offered for a lot less than the retail price on completion of a succesful campaign. The risks? You could lose every penny. You could pledge £1000s on a product that never gets to market. That money could be sat in someone else’s bank account for years, the company then goes bust, and, well, nothing. Have you lost money on crowd funding products before?
There is a compromise; pledging on a new product from an established company carries far less risk. Increasinly, the Chinese brands have ventured into crowdfunding with the odd product. Kiwi Ears have plenty of succesful products behind them. Your pledge will be safe here. I have been sent numerous products by kiw over the last 12 months. This is their 1st kickstarter product – The Halcyon. It would seem that early pledgers will be able to secure this for $199. Perhaps the final price for later backers will be $249. What you need to know is just how good are they, what do you get for your money and how are they different?
Many earphones are hybrids these days. There are innumerable variants of the dynamic bass and balanced armature mid/tweeter drivers out there. Where these differ are the addition of a silicon solid state MEMS driver to enhance the high frequency sound spectrum. We’ll get into the effectiveness of that real soon, don’t worry. This is clearly the focus that kiwi ears are putting in these earphones, so, for them, it’s make or break. If the MEMS is not clearly giving something extra, then it won’t fly.
But what is a MEMS? MEMS stands for micro electrical mechanical systems, and could look like anything, as long as that thing is very very small. MEMS drivers are a relatively new thing being manufactured by a handful of companies. In this case, USound are producing the high frequency driver for the Halcyon. The aspect of the MEMS driver that is causing ripples in the audio field; the transients are fast, very fast. Transients are the speed with which a note will come and go. Transients are all about speed. The faster one note disappears and another one comes to the fore, gives one an enhanced appreciation of the cleanliness of a track. Transient sound is definetely a god thing to pursue.
Here we see everything unwrapped. The MEMS driver looks to be part of the low frequency setup, but is primarily aimed at enhancing the higher frequency ranges and balancing out the subwoofer effect that the 10mm dynamic driver brings. Here is a graph (there is always a graph) to show you how the Halcyon has been tuned.
Whenever I see a diagram like this, I tend to go cold. I always want to put on said item and get a feel for what is really happening, rather than perusing over graphs, which are more often than not on an entirely different scale from one another. Looking at a graph and understanding how an earphone should sound is not a skill I have, or ever want to have. It is far quicker to put them on and plug them in; you’ll soon find out!
The Halcyon comes with an array of accesories. The first is cary case. It is a standard kiwi ears black box with the white logo. You can secrete the 2 (yes 2) plugs that come with a hybrid cable that is standard on this kickstarter campaign. Blanced or unbalanced sources are now available on the Halcyon. For my iBasso DX340 I am currently using the balanced connection. I have tried the smallest wide bore tips and small bore tips, but am not convinced by wiher. I currently have the largest small bore tips in, and am impressed by the bass being delivered. The treble is, of course, what many of you have been waiting to hear about. This is pretty special. It doesn’t have that sparkle that an electrostatic has, or that slight roughness of a planar. It is more subtle in it’s personality; but our MEMS is making a difference. There is a feeling of more space between the notes in the upper range, bringing an effortless smoothlness to the proceedings. For heavy metal, pop, rock, classical; you are going to hear your music in a different way. More precision, more accuracy, with less fatigue. These makes the Halcyon an intruiging option at the price point. Who will be bringing out a cheaper MEMS earphone? And even i fthey did, would it be as good as this one? I will leave you to figure that one out.
