CrinEar Monolith Review - Bassheads Only

Crinacle's own IEM brand CrinEar is on a highly respectable trajectory. With the recent releases of the Daybreak & Reference, the community receives a thoughtful execution on what high-quality, balanced sound ought to look like in an in-ear monitor. 

But now comes the CrinEar Monolith—a $399 limited-edition project aimed at a different subsection of this already niche market: bassheads.

People who know me and know what I like—like Crin—could guess that I wouldn't like this thing based on... well, everything about it. So I gotta say, credit to Crin for sending Monolith, knowing I probably wouldn't have much good to say about Monolith but sending it anyway is a boss move.

Build/Design/Accessories

Visually and mechanically, everything about this product feels like an elaborate swag piece designed mostly for the memes. It arrives in an unboxing experience centered around a gaudy blockish golden box, optimized entirely for visuals instead of usability/portability. 

The in-ear monitors themselves are dense, heavy units of CNC-machined brass, fully plated in gold. This heavy-handed, ostentatious gold aesthetic runs all the way down to the Y-split, the chin cinch, and the interchangeable 2-pin cable connectors. I do not like any of this.

However, despite weighing a substantial 16 grams per side, they are remarkably comfortable to wear for me; the physical weight vanishes entirely the moment you secure them in your ears.

Crin also deserves credit for the accessory package, which packs three distinct tip styles—standard bore, short bore, and wide-bore coffee tips—giving listeners a level of personalization that more companies in the $400 range should emulate.

Sound

Acoustically, the Monolith is tuned similar to the other CrinEar stuff in the mids/low treble, but has a ton more bass. It's a lot, immediately way too much for me. Measured on the B&K 5128, it sits five to six decibels higher at every single point in the bass (<200 Hz) than what target preference research suggests listeners would find enjoyable. 

The result is a sluggish, overbearing low-end that completely obfuscates the clarity of the rest of the presentation. It isn't a tight or controlled punch; it feels like the sonic equivalent of being suffocated to death by a pillow with a light dusting of hot sauce.

To prevent this from devolving into a complete mud fiesta, the midrange features a slight lower-midrange tuck that safely isolates fundamental tones, paired with a well-behaved ear gain rise. If anything the biggest surprise with the tuning here is that the mids are a bit later in their ear gain rise than a lot of "hyper-bass" DD IEMs, and as a result the mids in isolation do retain a solid balance.

The treble is noticeably elevated for me, which helps balance the sheer mass of the low-end a fair bit, but it also presents a rather rough, strident, and compressed feeling transient etch. The short-wide coffee tips, which beautifully fixed lower treble issues on the CrinEar Reference, unfortunately fail to smooth out the grain on the Monolith.

The Competition: A Lesson in Restraint

While a specific audience of absolute bass degenerates will find this club-like specialization exactly what they are looking for, it struggles immensely when compared to more versatile options.

Internal preference testing of ours seems to indicate that I am actually the resident basshead of the team, so if this is too much for me, it probably is a fairly extreme amount.

Crinacle’s own Daybreak, which also utilizes a bass-and-treble forward tuning, concentrates its energy cleanly into the sub-bass, allowing the rest of the midrange response to shine through with far superior clarity. Similarly, the Dunu Da Vinci stands out as a far more musical, warm-thicc alternative that applies its low-frequency emphasis with at least one ounce necessary restraint (vs. Monolith's "None").

Final Thoughts

If you told me Crin was making Monolith specifically to make me review something he knows I'd hate, I would believe you. It is basically directly aimed at the exact opposite kind of customer to me, so if you're one of those people who values my reviews because they know anything I hate they'll like? Great!

Ultimately, Monolith it serves as an IEM for someone who wants to feel suffocated or completely enraptured by their IEM's bass response, and for those people, there's no real way to know the upper limit of their taste, so the best I can do as a reviewer is say: I don't like this, you might, but unless you are already aware you like a crapload of bass, this is probably one to avoid blind buying until you hear it yourself.

On our uncompressed scale, Monolith earns a 4.5 for pure sound quality, pushed up to a 5.3 in overall score due to its surprisingly exceptional comfort. If you want a pristine delivery of your music, stay far away; but if you want to experience the sonic equivalent of being hit by a truck while completely zanked out of your mind, you might wanna grab one just to see.