A visit to the HUM headquarters

Curious about this locally designed and built product, we decided to pay a visit to the headquarters of HUM, the Hong Kong based company responsible for creating the 2 BA driver HUM Pristine as well as the Pervasion music player to see what the fuss was all about.

Campfire Audio Andromeda – Soaring into Space

Established in 2006, Audio Line Out (“ALO”) made its name by building high end audio cables for audio equipment. In 2015, ALO announced the creation of another branch that would be responsible for making IEMs called Campfire Audio (“CA”). Since then, CA has launched an impressive lineup of IEMs: the single BA Orion, the dual BA Nova, the single DD Beryllium driver Lyra and the four BA Jupiter.  Their latest 5 driver flagship offering, the Andromeda caught my eye and I decided to take a leap and purchased it.

Audio-Technica IM70 – The IM50’s refined sibling

Read more to find out the difference between the IM70 and 50.

Shure SE846 – The Sound and the Fury

Back when I was still in high school I blindly bought a pair of Shure earphones without knowing anything about audio. At that point in time I hailed from an illustrious personal audio track record, such as having upgraded from the basic Apple ibuds to the Apple ‘in-ear EarPods’. The source was a sky blue Sony MD player, and listening to soapy break-up ballads from NSYNC, A1 and Westlife without ever having experienced any break-ups while cruising in a Chinese taxi in the Nanjing rain at a crawling speed was as good as I thought things could get. I remember feeling nothing after getting the Shure, I got it partly because of the brand name, and partly because I simply wanted to spend. Music listening soon became an indispensable part of my life, and somehow I splurged on the then Shure flagship E500PTH (push-to-hear).

Sennheiser IE80 – A Single Driver Classic

Note: the custom cables depicted here were not used for the review.

The Sennheiser “IE” series began with the IE6. Thick, round and bassy, it was well received for its staggering bass frequency but lacked embarrassingly in the mids and highs. Next, was the IE7. Sennheiser trimmed up the fat and cleared the mids and highs, but the fans felt that they had gone too far. In their pursuit for clarity, Sennheiser had cut the claws off their beast. Gone was the thundering subbass that made it clear to the world that the engineering department at Sennheiser understood that sound begins and ends with bass. In 2008, the Germans had finally struck a balance between vibrant mids and deep bass authority. The IE8 carried the Sennheiser flagship iem moniker for three years until it was given a slight tweak and a brushed aluminium facelift in 2011 and renamed the IE80. 

Audio-Technica IM50 – Top Budget IEM

I have a love-hate affair with Audio-Technica’s “dual symphonic driver” offering, the IM50.

I love it since it’s probably the best $450 HKD (around 58USD) I’ve ever spent. The only IEMs I had back then were the Xiaomi Pistons 2 and Havi B3, but I had heard about the IM50 and was curious. I picked it up immediately after demoing it at a shop. Now that I’ve gotten much deeper into the audiophile trap, I’ve started to hate the IM50s. And it’s not because they sound bad –  it’s because they have such an enjoyable sound for the value that even after having tried many better IEMs, the IM50 still makes me reluctant to spend 10x the money on a nicer pair.

Welcome to Accessible Audio!

For those new to this site, we’re an audio review blog focusing on IEM (In Ear Monitor) reviews! We’re just three normal dudes based in Hong Kong and Shanghai who hope to bring the sometimes overly technical and geeky aspect of audio to a wider audience to spread our love and passion of good sound in personal audio. We want to show in a more accessible package that there are many considerations other than price when making purchases such as design, comfort, durability, packaging, and eartips, to name just a few factors.

We’re excited to start this blog, and have many IEM reviews lined up, ranging from the cheapest budget earphones to premium top of the line picks, as well as some quicker impressions from audio expos and shows!

Follow us on Instagram for smaller updates at this link!

-The AA Team