Short-but-still-long answer to your question is its one of the best fitting/feeling IEMs I’ve had the chance to daily drive. For that reason, choosing to use Lumen instead of the other stuff I have around just makes sense.
But the fact that it doesn’t need EQ to sound excellent is reason enough for me to use it instead of something I’d really want to use with EQ (like basically every other one of my headphones/IEMs). Especially because this affords me the ability to use it with my iPhone with no sound quality compromise.
My advice to others, however, is that if people can EQ to something more like Lumen (I wouldn’t fixate on trying to copy it exactly), I highly recommend just doing that.
Now that said, I also can’t help but think of something DMS always says. “Vote with your wallet.”
While yes, Lumen isn’t cheap, I can’t think of another approach to IEM design from top to bottom that I’d rather vote for with my wallet to indicate “this is what I want and expect from this market”. That doesn’t mean everyone should buy it, but if I had the money it would be the only product over $1000 USD that I’d ever consider actually spending money on.
Funny enough, Josh from Prisma says quite often to the people saying that they want to buy both Lux and Lumen that they should buy the one they think they’ll like more, and just EQ it to the other if they want—which would be very simply done with just two shelf filters (and it works well since they’re acoustically quite similar, same drivers etc.)
He clearly understands and advocates for people using EQ instead of buying his product, and I’m doubly happy to suggest doing so 