MiM Dark Magician Impressions
Price: ~$500 USD
Configuration: 1DD
Special thanks to reader “OGK” for loaning these for review.
The Dark Magician…boy does this take me back to playing Yu-Gi-Oh as a kid. But we’re not talking about the famous playing card today. We’re talking about the less known single-DD IEM. Indeed, I suspect most won’t be too familiar with this IEM. To lend some context, it’s produced by ethanmusic7’s in-house brand, MiM. Currently, the Dark Magician can be purchased exclusively on the SG shopping site, Carousell, but it looks like Linsoul might be stocking it soon too.
Diving into the sound, bass on the Dark Magician is mid-bass oriented and just slightly above neutral. As one might imagine with this type of tuning, decay does lean toward the faster side and bass texturing is a little too dry for my tastes. Doesn’t sound like it pushes much air either. An interesting tidbit about the Dark Magician is that it has small vents on the nozzles that one can block by sliding the ear tips further down. That said, even with the vents blocked, I don’t find the Dark Magician’s bass transients to be particularly thick, nor does it sound like it has as much SPL as it graphs with. In a manner not dissimilar to the SeeAudio Yume, I suspect that this has something to do with the nature of the bass slope. Anyways, I prefer it unblocked and, overall, this is just a passable bass response in my book.
The midrange of the Dark Magician is its strength to my ears. It’s right about where I’d like it to be as a self-proclaimed aficionado of the “Western” tuning philosophy. Lower-mids are warmer than neutral, sitting oh-so-pleasant to my ears on Joe Nichol’s discography, and the pinna compensation and upper-midrange are gentle and forgiving. I’m reminded of the Vision Ear VE7’s midrange in many respects. This is the type of midrange you can listen to for hours without fatigue, and it’s probably why it took me a while to catch on to what I was hearing (see my thoughts on technicalities further below).
Now, the treble response of the Dark Magician strikes me as somewhat odd. Stick impact is generally a little fuzzy and, not dissimilar to the Etymotic ER2XR, there’s definitely a dip somewhere through the mid-treble that kills crash on cymbals. I believe it comes back up from this dip in the upper-treble (just after ~10kHz), but too early and with inadequate SPL to give the Dark Magician a real sense of airiness or splash. It exacerbates an odd, dry sort of scraping to when certain synths are hit on Taeyeon’s “Vanilla” (0:10, 0:40, and 1:35 for example); it could just be the recession itself even if I don’t hear a similar phenomenon on my ER2XR. In any case, timbre doesn’t sound quite correct even if I can’t bring myself to really hate this treble response. It’s missing something.
And here comes my caveat with the Dark Magician. The overall tonality is pretty pleasant, but I couldn’t knock the feeling that it wasn’t all that resolving while listening. Bringing in the Moondrop Kato and Etymotic ER2XR for A/B suggests that the Dark Magician is still decently resolving (in that they’re all roughly par), but not really $500 material. I don’t hear the Dark Magician as having noteworthy “latent” intangibles either. Dynamics are average; abrupt hits to the piano keys, such as on Sawano Hiroyuki’s “scene” at 1:00, don’t quite pop and sound as loud and jarring as I feel like they should. Same story for imaging where staging is confined to the shell like most single-DDs.
I feel that assessing the competitiveness of the Dark Magician requires some nuance. It should be noted that most all (good) single DD IEMs you’ll find under $500 are sporting some iteration of the Harman target or the Diffuse Field target. That isn’t the Dark Magician. It offers a more relaxed, yet balanced tuning for people who find those IEMs overly shouty. But the technicalities aren’t necessarily better or even comparable with the cheaper competition. That in mind, I think that you’ll have to decide for yourself how much that tuning distinction is worth. $500 is on the steeper side of what I’d be willing to pay, and at that price I’d rather go for a hybrid…but hey, that’s just my opinion.
Score: 5/10
All critical listening was done off the 4.4mm jack of my iBasso DX300 with the stock tips and stock cable.