How we choose what to sell

There are thousands of earphones on the market. New "hype" sets launch every month. Most reviewers contradict each other. A lot of what you read online is marketing dressed up as opinion.

We sell four sets for each budget, and here's how.

We listen to every set

Before anything goes on the site, it's been through real listening. Not a five-minute demo — days of normal use, on the music we actually like, through the gear most customers will pair it with.

I do most of the listening myself. But I also lean on a small group of people whose ears I trust and whose taste runs different from mine. If a set survives all of us, it goes up. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I don't take a brand's word for what their own earphone sounds like, and I don't fully trust my own ears either.

Every set has to fit a specific kind of listener

We don't carry "good for everything" earphones. They don't really exist. When a brand says one does, it usually means it does nothing especially well.

Every earphone in the shop is here because it does one job better than the others at its price. Bass that hits hard. Vocals that sound real. Speed and energy for fast, layered music. Detail and honesty for the people who care about that.

The quiz on the homepage is how that gets matched to you. Tell us how you actually listen, and we point you at the one that fits.

The brand has to stand on its own

We only stock brands that sell directly to their customers and aren't tied to one giant distributor. This matters more than it sounds like it should.

When a brand is locked into one big retailer, two things tend to happen. The earphone becomes a marketing vehicle more than a product — designed to chart well in reviews, not to last. And if something goes wrong, you're stuck with the distributor's policies, not the brand's.

The five brands we work with right now — Dunu, Letshuoer, Hisenior, Aful, and Juzear — all have their own sales channels and their own customer support. If you ever have a warranty issue, that's a real difference.

If two earphones do the same job, only one stays

We'd rather drop a good set than confuse you with two near-identical ones at the same price. So if a new earphone comes in that does the job better than something already on the shelf, the older one gets cut. Even if it sells well.

This is also why the lineup is small. Twelve is enough to cover every kind of listener at every budget. A thirteenth would mean selling something we believe in less than what's already there.

What we won't carry

• Brands that exist mostly as marketing for one big retailer
• "Hype" sets that get hot for a month and disappear
• Cheap pack-in earphones — the gap between $30 and $80 IEMs is real, but the gap between $15 and $30 isn't
• Anything we haven't personally listened to long enough to describe honestly

The honest tradeoff

We can't have the cheapest price on every set. Big retailers will always win that fight, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.

What we can do is read your email when you have a question, give you a straight answer instead of a sales pitch, and stand behind everything we sell. That's the trade.

— Valentin