Sure, so the units are often sourced from our own stock (Headphones.com pays for it) or they come directly from manufacturers. Reviewers often have them for a couple weeks (sometimes longer, if it’s not high-priority) before they’re sent back to HQ or passed onto the next reviewer. We do keep a couple on-hand long-term for reference sometimes (for example, I’ve had a U6t from them for a couple years haha).

I’m not 100% sure what happens to the units after, I think some do end up as open box if they’re super clean (and sourced from our own stock) but most of them are just kept around as references.

I think they are an interesting technology, very compact driver with full-range extension. But for now, the limitation is going to come down to tuning them, as the current ones require a lot of DSP to sound decent.

This is definitely a question that I was anticipating.The short answer is that you are 100% correct that it’s a conflict of interest. There’s nothing I can do that will change this (short of quitting as a reviewer). But I can do my best to massage some doubts.

Financial motivation is the conflict that most people will point to. And while I usually shy away from talking about personal finances, I have to point out that I don’t review for a living. My content work makes up less than 10% of my total income. That could change, but I don’t have a strong incentive to push sales of my IEM because what I make from my full-time job is enough to sustain myself and dwarfs what I make from reviewing.

More importantly, I’ve also built up a strong reputation for honesty. I see this as a long-term feedback loop, where people keep coming back to my reviews because what they experience is consistent with what I write, or I offer a useful perspective. If I suddenly switched up by panning everything as being worse than Mirai, I would be breaking this trust. It’s difficult to build trust, it’s easy to break it.

On a more sentimental level, the goal behind Mirai wasn’t entirely about turning it into a collaboration to sell to the market. I really just wanted an IEM that I could call my own, with my idea of good sound. But you need resources to build your own IEM, and there needs to be a reciprocal relationship to springboard development, hence why it became a collaboration.

I know there’s an element of “trust me bro” to this response and that I’m very fortunate to be in a position where I don’t need this to be my bread and butter. And of course, collaboration IEMs will always present a conflict of interest. But hopefully this helps to address some concerns!

So I think a lot of people were expecting a 64A-esque tuning, but I ended up taking the Mirai in something of a different direction. The most significant distinctions compared to the U12t are the Mirai’s peak coming back up at 4kHz (versus 5kHz on the U12t) and significantly more energy at ~8kHz where the U12t dips. This basically gives the Mirai some more bite in the upper-midrange and more of a focus on sparkle in the treble. It also won’t sound as bass-y even if they graph similarly in the bass region. Basically, they sound like very different IEMs in practice, and I wouldn’t really think of the Mirai as being a U12t replacement.

Compared to the IER-M9, it’ll be a lot less warm and it’ll be leaner.

Doesn’t sound like the LCD3, sorry. Honestly, I found the LCD3/4 to not be my cup of tea, something like the UE Reference Remastered would probably be closer to that type of sound (but still not nearly the same).

None of them 🙈

But if I HAD to choose one, it’d probably be the Susvara or the HE1