I was FORCED to listen to these - CrinEar Daybreak

Okay, okay, I'm gonna listen to them, I'll listen to them. And I'm very excited to do so. The Crin-Ear Daybreak, if you don't count that weird limited edition one, is Crinicle's first full production IEM under his own brand. And if any of the marketing that he's done around this is accurate, it's an extremely exciting product. He basically says, look, it's not the best IEM on the market, but at this price point, you ain't gonna beat it. And if our lab's testing is anything to go by, he's right. If I can just get the box open. I like the look. Stealthy. Right out of the gate, these are already making me happy. So instead of the gigantic nozzles that have been featured on some of Crinicle's previous collab products, these measure just under six millimeters, which means that they should comfortably fit inside human ears, which from my understanding is the intended target of these, right? They are, compared to your AirPods or whatever, still gonna be a little bit on the larger side, but that's to accommodate the five drivers inside each in-ear monitor. Another nice touch, interchangeable cables, though that's not really unique at this price point. The two-pin standard gives you the benefit of, from my experience, a more secure connection, but you lose the benefit of it being swivelable, so make of that what you will. Nice little carrying case. Got your bougie silver-plated copper, not that I've ever been convinced that that makes any difference whatsoever to performance. It looks cool, though. I like the modular connector. Instead of using an adapter, well, okay. No, no, don't tell me. I'm gonna figure it out. There we go. We just unscrew this piece at the bottom. Got a little guide pin, and you can switch over to a 4.4 millimeter balance connector. Hey, I had the thing happen. The little cosmetic cover piece came off, but Critical says that they're gonna get that fixed, and if you have this little piece come off, then they'll send you a new one. I swear, half of Hi-Fi products is just making them look and feel cool so that you look and feel cool for owning them. But hey, mission accomplished. Let's see what we got for accessories here, shall we? This is hilarious. Distinguish the left and right for both the IEM and cable. Did he actually put a label on the IEM? Oh my God, he only labels the right. Okay, I get minimalistic product design, but label your ----. I don't wanna guess. Wow, even with the six millimeter nozzle, those mediums are, I don't know if they're that medium. I bet I could jam that in there really good if I wanted to. Anyone wanna go to a merge? Emergency. Like if I had a thing jammed in my ear because I didn't attach it to an IEM to remove it. I think I'm gonna go small for these. He includes small, medium, and large silicone ear tips as well as medium foam ear tips. I prefer silicone, not because they sound better or seal better, but because they are just more durable and I don't feel like buying new memory foam ear tips every like three weeks. This is a giant carrying case. I can't fault the, you know, feel of quality and stuff, but like, does it really need to be that big? I can fit so much more stuff in there. You know, Steve Jobs famously took a prototype of something and hucked it in an aquarium and then when bubbles came out of it, he said, make it denser. I actually don't know if that's true, but this could be smaller. So here's my carrying case. Ahem. To be clear, I'm not faulting it for the feel of quality and if you have larger hands and you have, you know, difficulty getting your fingies into places to extract things, then you're fine. But I personally would rather that it was a little bit more compact. That's all I'm saying. But enough yik-yak about the carrying case, how they look, how they feel. It's not what you came here for. You came here for how they sound. What's that? Segway? Oh, right. To our sponsor. Thanks to Sharge for sponsoring this video. Packed with a 24,000 milliamp hour battery, customizable RGB lighting, and even an adjustable DC output port, the Shargeek 300 Power Bank is your all-in-one travel buddy in an aluminum chassis that's as classy as you are. It has a maximum output of 140 watts per port, which means you can deliver ultra-fast charging to multiple laptops, phones, or other devices that you might want to keep powered on. Plus, you can keep an eye on each port's charging rates, the battery status of the power bank, and even some wild stuff like power curves and charging histories. Learn more about the Shargeek 300 using our link in the video description. Okay, I lied a bit before. It didn't say anything about our sponsor, and we're not gonna listen to it just yet because I wanna talk about the specs, starting with the housing. Daybreak uses what Crinicle describes as a pseudo-custom shell, which we had a little bit of debate off-camera what exactly that means. And I think what we've settled on is that it means it is like a custom mold for your ear, but it's a generic one. So it's designed to kind of feel and fit like that across a wide range of ears, but you don't actually send in molds of your ears so that they are custom-fitted to your exact head. To its credit, it fits pretty okay for me. I don't know that I would perfectly comfortably sleep in them, for instance. I can feel a couple of pressure points if I really push against them. But if I don't do that, considering their weight, they're about as comfortable as I can imagine anything not custom-fitted to be. Then on the inside, things get really interesting, starting with the five drivers inside each in-ear monitor. It's got a dynamic subwoofer driver, custom spec for deep controlled bass, a couple of custom balanced armatures for the mid-range. Then for the tweeters, he's using what he's describing as next-generation micro planers for exceptional treble extension and clarity. And all of that is just sort of gobbledygook because you could have an IEM that is full of really, really amazing drivers, but if you don't put in the work on the tuning, then it's going to sound like crap. But this is Chronicle we're talking about, so he did put in the work on the tuning, specifically targeting the IEF Preference 2025 curve, which aims to balance natural speaker-like tonality with dynamic and engaging low-end response. Again, which may not mean that much to you, but in a nutshell, the IEMs that he's comparing these against are considered an amazing value at about three times the price. And from what DMS has said, he's actually gotten really close. They're not the same as those ones that cost three times more, which he had me try just for a little bit before I sat down today. It was like sitting at the optician's office and they flip around all the different lenses, and then finally they do the last one where they start with not quite right and then they click it into just right, and you're like, is everyone that hairy? Like they're that clear. These I haven't listened to yet, but if they're anything like that, very excited. Oh, right, right, right. Well, okay, well, I guess that's one thing that I could kind of say about them. Isolation, not the best, but you're never gonna get that with silicone ear tips, so make of that what you will. Oh, we haven't talked about the length of the cable, which DMS painstakingly measured at 1.1 meter. You're welcome. That wasn't in the spec sheet. I don't really like looking at the frequency response curve before I actually listened to them, but like, damn, he's like right in the range. As long as that bass is actually tight and controlled, these are gonna sound really fun. Let's start with something with no vocals. Always a good sign when there's like a low, soft bass note of some sort and you can kind of like feel it in your back a little bit, because that's really hard to achieve with in-ears. It feels more like a conditioned response, right? Like if you've heard it from a nice big speaker set up in subwoofer, then like something that elicits that response in your body is getting damn close, but there are no vibrations to feel. He advertised controlled bass. He delivered controlled bass. I'd probably EQ the mids up a little bit personally, but not much. The thing to remember in all of this is like, these are costing less than a pair of AirPods Pros, right? Which obviously they're wireless and they have a battery in them and there's all the convenience that comes with that. But like, it's a completely different listening experience. With the AirPods Pros, you can listen to your song, right? You can put on your favorite artist. With these, you can listen to each individual instrument in the track, if you wanted to. You don't have to. That actually, I mean, to a lot of people, that might sound like a bad thing, but it's not. It's a very good thing. It really is remarkable how it elicits that sort of like I'm listening to speakers response anytime anything happens on the low end. Not fatiguing either, which is really nice. Man, if this was your first like Chi-Fi IEM, you'd be like, I paid how much for these? I feel like some phone manufacturer, you know, like a mainstream one, your Samsung, Apple will never do it. They're too busy selling wireless earphones, but some phone manufacturer is gonna figure this out. They're gonna put a headphone jack back on their phone and like, why are it's coming back, man? You just can't, you can't do this with wireless. At least not yet, not at this price. You're not still asleep. These really can be had for $169. And from our benchmarks, they fall pretty well for the most part within our target range. And if what you're looking for is something that combines, I mean, just like Krinical said, a fairly analytical sound signature, but with fun musicality at an incredible price point, I don't know, I don't know what to say other than I think you nailed it. Obviously you're not going to get quite the resolution that you might get out of something like the Mega 5 EST, but like the price, man, those are 500 plus dollar IEMs. Like even if you can afford them, I know a lot of people that just wouldn't spend that kind of money on IEMs because they can get lost. Whereas like these, I still wouldn't want to lose them. But if I did, I could lose them twice before I'd spent that much money. Subscribe to Short Circuit. Man, I gotta stop using wireless.