Yea its a tricky one. Some amp’s low gain work with IEMs but some arent great. The ones Ive found to work well with IEMs are:
RME ADI-2 DAC
Topping A90 and assuming other topping gear
Schiit stuff esp Asgard 3!
Chord stuff.
And of course, any DAP
It’s interesting you list Asgard 3. I’ve been looking for a solid state amp I can use with headphones and not worry about leaving it on all day.
Being able to use it with IEMs would be a bonus and reduce equipment clutter too.
Thanks!
I’ve seen people recommend the Drop THX AAA 789 for IEMs and Schiit says its new Jot 2 " is super-quiet for the most sensitive IEMs." I’d be interested in reading reviews of the Jot with Campfire Audio BA IEMs!
Nice! I’ll check out those brands.
I finally bought some Xelastec tips and now I understand why people love the Moondrop Starfield. The cool thing about these is that they make it so easy to get a seal that I can just use different size tips to achieve different insertion depths, without having to worry about comprising seal or stability. Also, they don’t make my canals itch the way that a lot of silicones do.
That’s great to hear, I’m glad they’re working out for you. They definitely amount to a different kind of tip from the others on the market. I’ve found that the regular short and light Azla Sedna tips are also pretty versatile and easy to get along with.
A couple of suggestions about the Xelastec tips: they can crease over time, i.e. they can fold over on themselves; to alleviate this, it can be good to remove them and then rotate them slightly and put them back on the IEMs. I’ve also seen someone suggest that they can be put in hot water for a while to get them to return to their original shape.
Thanks for the tips @Tchoupitoulas and @antdroid! The point about inverting the tip before heating it seems important, as TPE doesn’t actually have a memory effect, so getting it really hot without some sort of support would likely just deform it further.
With IEMs what is the thinking regarding variations in how different people experience the same IEM?
Seems like outer ear shapes would have little or no effect but that still leaves inner ear effects and possibly things like variations in physical fit and seal.
Plus, if our brains have normalized based on our individual outer ear shape what happens when that is removed from the equation?
That’s kinda why you see some people has come up with their own target curve with different pinna gain compensation. For example, this is Antdroid’s target curve
Here is mine for comparison
Removing your ear geometry, then there is one preference playing in. I think how you ear is both the combination of how your ear is formed (physically) and your own perception of sound (psychologically)
Your target curve looks almost identical to the Thieaudio Clairvoyance!
You are the 2nd person who told me that :'D
This is why I am a little bit interested in the clair
Got my Tin Hifi T2 plus in today.
This my first IEM. (see my earlier post about absolute absence of bass and eartips) I’m pleasantly surprised by the sound!
Things I learned from the first test with the eartips supplied with the T2 plus:
…will try the larger tips later to see if I can get a seal without plugging then in so far as to almost touching my brain. 
Got spinfit, Comply and InEar tips on the way. So more testing to come. But I’m already happy with what I’m hearing for now.
I know my Shure SE530’s are super old now, but I just got a pack of replacement ear foam ear-tips. I had used the original for a very long time. The new foams are so much nicer and the bass is back 
Did some more tip-rolling last weekend:
Now I’m looking for a European shop where I can get some Spinfit CP100-XL, CP145-M and L and some CP220 M2’s. Amazon Germany and Netherlands don’t carry many Spinfit options. There’s a Polish shop, but I need Google translate to even understand what it says. Don’t know if I can trust the site.
Great post. Europe is abysmal for buying tips. The good ones at least. Its a case of buying from America or Asia and with shipping sometimes costing as much as tips.
Yeah I noticed. Luckily my current favorite tips are available at Amazon Germany.
I’m going to try my luck with the Polish shop I think. They have all the types I’m looking for at good prices.
Oh, and how do you figure out which Comply tips fit your IEMs? The info they supply you with is …confusing. (to put it nicely) I think I just got lucky with the ones I ordered.
Yeah, the Comply tips I tend not to use. They don’t last long and are expensive. Its not just the cost because if I find something I like I will pay for it but they just aren’t my favourites. They are a premium product but just not for me.
All I can suggest is to measure the iem for tip size.
Wild, right? Regarding measurements, the only time that I’ve been able to see any difference is when comparing foam with silicone tips, and even then it was pretty minor. The problem is that a real ear canal is way more complicated than a simulator, with irregular bore, bends, soft flesh and what not. I think the bulk of what makes tips sound different is how they interact with your specific anatomy, which unfortunately means that tip recommendations are almost as unreliable as IEM reviews themselves.
I’ve had way more fun with IEMs since investing in buying an unreasonably large variety of tips. With enough experimentation, I’ve found that pretty much every IEM I own can be made to sound enjoyable. I’d almost say that, especially when starting out, people should spend more on tips than on the IEMs themselves!
Yes, this is a tough one! It can be a bit overwhelming at first.
My sense is that people tend to gravitate towards a handful of tips that typically work well for them with certain kinds of IEMs (e.g., I mentioned above using foam tips for deep insertion IEMs and silicone for shallow). As a result, some folks have a go-to selection of tips at the ready for trying out new IEMs, and they tend to know how those tips will likely interact with IEMs.
I’ve found, for example, that Azla Sedna tips work well for me with shallow-fitting IEMs like the Campfire Solaris 2020 and the Andromeda 2020. For the most part, the tips have predictable effects on the sound; the regular ones make both these IEMs sound slightly thicker, richer, and darker, with more bass emphasis; the light ones, by contrast, make the sound a bit less bassy and brighter. (Others have reported the same thing; so it’s not entirely about individual preferences - or at least it isn’t always).
In other words, once you’re familiar with the tips, you can dial in your choice with an IEM to suit your preferences. There can certainly be occasions, though, when your go-to tips don’t produce the desire result; then you may have to experiment further.
The trick is not really having a baseline for knowing what the IEM should sound like in the first place. If you look through threads on various forums for the original Campfire Solaris, you’ll see diverging views about the sound based on whether people were using foam or silicone tips. Sometimes, a consensus about tips can emerge.
It’s good to read around, then, to find out which tips others are using and what they’re hearing with them - for this reason, it’s best when people giving their impressions specify which tips they’re using! Otherwise, as you note, impressions can be all over the place!
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Re. finding the right Comply tips: if the Comply charts don’t list your IEM, you can check on head-fi - do the search within the thread option to save yourself from scrolling through gazillions of posts! You might also email Comply!
