This will be short, and hopefully sweet. I hit RMAF this year and was wandering around CanJam to see what was interesting and new. Mostly things were pretty similar to last year, although this year I got to listen to a lot more In-Ear Monitors (IEM's) to see if anything bested my Alclair Curves that I bought last year. Nope, Curve beat everything up to $1k, but the JH Audio JH13 remains the best IEM I've ever heard, at any price.
OK, preamble done. I head by the iFi booth & talk to them a bit. Their Retro unit sounds fabulous, as always. They ask me, "Hey, do you use IEM's?" I say yes I do. "Here, try this and let us know what you think". And home came the IEMatch which has one function - to reduce the level of the signal coming from your laptop or phone or whatever so that it matches the VERY HIGH sensitivity of your IEMs. I was pretty much like, "meh, whatever, sure I'll try it."
I promptly forgot all about it.
A few days later, I'm plowing my way through Farscape on Netflix and thinking how shitty the 2002 era sound quality is via my Alclair IEMs.
"Gee, it would be nice if I could improve the sound of this somehow". Oh wait.....maybe try the IEMatch? Meh again probably not even worth the effort to find it. But what the hell.
OK, put it in line and the sound is very, very quiet. Right, it makes things quiet. Ok, well then let's TURN IT UP!!
It was a revelation. Noise floor is way lower, voices are warmer and cleaner, and everything is more spacious and less 'shitty-digital' sounding. Wow.
So these things aren't going back. Luckily they are uber cheap. I rec them strongly for anyone that plugs a pair of earplugs into a phone or a laptop.
