CrinEar Reference & The Problem with "Neutral" IEMs

Over the last week, I filmed (and re-filmed) a whole comparison video for the CrinEar Reference before realizing none of it was interesting. It was just twenty minutes of me repeating that the Reference has less bass and less treble, therefore it’s better than insert IEM here. You don’t need me to provide color commentary when you can just look at measurements to see what has more bass or treble.

So instead, I want to walk through how we got here: the long, nonlinear path that shaped what people in this space call “neutral,” and why the conversation around it has become so profoundly disappointing.

Etymotic: My First “Neutral” (That Wasn’t Neutral)

At the beginning of headphones becoming a truly lucrative market that truly affected how people thought about sound reproduction, Beats by Dre's bass-forward tuning reshaped expectations for an unthinkably massive group of listeners.

But in response, the audiophile and pro-audio world basically retreated into the opposite end of the spectrum. Anything without a bass boost could be labeled and/or marketed “neutral,” with essentially no questions asked.

And as someone with feet in both pro-audio and audiophile, I was extremely guilty of this.

When I bought the Beyerdynamic DT 990 for mixing (lol), I didn’t hear a huge bass hump, so I assumed it was neutral. One might say I deserve to have my reviewer card revoked for this one, and you know what? Fair.

The same thing happened later with the Etymotic ER4P. The extremely upper-mid-emphasized sound wasn’t actually neutral at all, but because it didn’t have bass, it must have been neutral... and that's certainly how I thought about it.

This binary mindset is still alive today, especially in pro-audio: flat or not-insane bass will absolutely be called neutral by significant segments of the consumer base, no matter how skewed the rest of the response is.

Harman: Beats Were Right, Actually—Bass is Good

When Harman began publishing IEM preference research in 2016, it was the first serious alternative take on a potential "neutral" (see: preferable) target, challenging the Etymotic-style midrange focused sound. The 2019 target that arose as the research's end result was much bassier, slightly brighter, and much less lower-midrange focused.

It should also be said that Harman's IEM work was absolutely founded on the conclusions of their prior speaker and headphone work. Their first IEM study was essentially just letting people adjust the bass of their 2013 over-ear headphone target.

The headphone and speaker research had important differences, but at their core they both verified the same thing: what people hear as good, they also tend to call neutral. It's a core reason why we test "listener preference" instead of testing "what people call 'neutral' in listening tests." They're the same thing, as has been shown multiple times.

However, because the ear simulator they used had inaccuracies, the Harman IEM target carried its own issues: as hinted at earlier, the lower midrange really was much too scooped compared to the headphone targets they were based on.

Many people—including me—accepted it anyway because it was "scientific," even if it didn't sound very good to them. Though eventually, some people did pipe up and state their discontent.

IEF Neutral 2020: The Community Pivot

When the community got fed up with the 3–8 kHz aggressiveness of Harman, Crinacle’s IEF Neutral 2020 became the alternative reference point.

It fixed some issues, especially the lower treble, but it also baked in quirks from the specific IEMs used to create it—all of which had issues in common, particularly around 1-2 kHz—and crucially, it omitted prescribing a bass boost entirely. This was done purposely, to encourage listeners to add their own bass boost.

However, this created another problem: because the midrange and treble weren't really anywhere near neutral, it caused everyone who used this target (which was a lot of people) to think neutral sounded bad... but neutral plus an extra bass boost sounded good.

This omission on Crinacle's part created a whole generation of reviewers, consumers, and manufacturers who believed neutral as a concept was insufficient to satisfy, and that “neutral + bass boost” was what actually sounded good to the majority.

And while yes, IEF Neutral 2020 with a bass boost was absolutely more balanced than IEF Neutral alone, balance and neutrality aren’t the same thing, and that we're still contending with the baggage that was packed during this era is a problem I don't see many people talking about.

New Meta: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

As more people became familiar with the measurement output from the Brüel and Kjaer Type 5128 HF-HATS, and how bad it made every single IEM (and target) look in hindsight, people naturally became much less trusting of Harman and IEF's takes on "neutral".

We entered what Super* Review called the “New Meta” phase—still somewhat rooted in conceptual errors, but at least the mids were normal now.

When I say "conceptual errors," what I mean is that consumers, manufacturers, and reviewers still apply the flawed calculus of "neutral bad, neutral but more bass good" without really contending with how the new midrange baseline needs to be treated.

Now we had neutral midranges available in the market, but near-exclusively paired with a massively inappropriate excess of bass and treble. Which meant for those who have an ear for balance over specific neutrality in a key area, its understandable that the "New Meta" would actually result in IEMs that are worse sounding overall. Well-balanced colorations can absolutely be preferable to one area being balanced while the others are ill-fitting.

This bass-and-treble baggage from the IEF 2020 era (people need more than what they call "neutral") remained almost completely unchallenged for years, and people became frustrated with the fact that this "New Meta" based on better data should have been better, but these IEMs were arguably more lethargic than ever.

Where CrinEar Reference Fits (And What It Exposes)

This is where the CrinEar Reference—and IMO, the Prisma Lumen—comes in.

Comparing it to those earlier stages lays bare the immaturity of the entire history of the IEM market: most of what we called “neutral” was never neutral, and thus people's opinions of "neutral"—especially the negative ones—are almost entirely uninformed. 

The Reference isn't important because it’s dry, boring, polite or restrained—it wins because it refuses to inherit the misconceptions baked into the last decade of this hobby's culture around tuning, and delivers something with equal balance between intensity and honesty.

It avoids the false dichotomy of “neutral vs bassy"—opting to present a take on "neutral" that still has plenty of bass—avoids the hollow midrange and overcooked treble of Harman, the midrange colorations baked into IEF Neutral 2020, and misunderstanding of balance of the New Meta that followed.

And that’s why some of the discourse around it has been so disappointing to me. People still cling to flawed frameworks generated under incomplete or flawed ideas of "neutral", ideas that were only as good as the products that were available (and make no mistake, none of them were really neutral).

Of course, when something finally corrects those ideas, it is treated like the problem rather than the solution... but I'm confident with enough time we'll eventually see the Overton window shift towards something like this being seen for what it is: the beginning of neutral IEMs actually being available in this hobby.