Review: The Moondrop Edge is Goodn't™

Okay, this is the Moondrop Edge, and it is terrible. First of all... <device speaks> "Power on! Connected! Disconnected!" I mean, yeah, I would never personally use this product, and I'm sure that that's biasing me against it. But what I don't like about this headphone is the way that it sounds. It's an inexpensive headphone that's been kind of heralded as like a giant killer or this ANC headphone that for sound quality can come in and perform well, and that it's only real drawback is that it has this sort of weeb vibe going for it. That's... I disagree. This is just a bad sounding headphone and in this video, I'm gonna explain why. Okay, first of all, yeah, I'm not a big fan of the whole cartoon child vibe that Moondrop likes to go for, and the aspects of that that exist in this are not for me. But Moondrop has released a number of products that I absolutely love, like the Cosmo behind me, I actually put that recently as my favorite headphone under $1,000. and they've also been at the forefront of providing value across the entire range of audio products, particularly to do with IEMs, and I would say in many ways pushing the IEM industry in a positive direction. For the most part, they have yet to catch up with some of the new tunings, but at the very least, Moondrop's presence and popularity in this space has made it so that other brands need to be competitive, and that's a good thing. And so I'm a big fan of their products like the Kato and the Aria and the Blessing 2s. These are all products that push the industry forward, even if only to make it so that everybody else had to be more competitive with their pricing. And really, my complaints with this product have nothing to do with how it's doing at its price point. It's with the narrative that this is some sort of giant killer, the way that Moondrop's other releases have been considered in the past, because this just isn't it. This is a headphone that only has really one redeeming feature about it, and that's the color. I was actually really disappointed with this. I wanted this to be good because the color is the correct color. Let's be real. This is objectively the correct color. The comfort is also reasonable. There's a decent amount of room inside the cup, even though my ear does touch the inside of the baffle, and it is lightweight. However, there is this faint little digital noise artifact thing that I hear whenever I'm using this headphone. I don't know if this is like this on all of the units for this, but this one is so infuriating to use because of this spurious little sound that I get. It's not super loud, but it just shouldn't be there. I mean, even though, yes, this is an inexpensive product, I think that we should expect better. Now, the big reason why I don't like this product and why I don't recommend it has to do with the sound quality. But just before I get into that, I want to let you guys know about Headphones.com. And Headphones.com actually, as of right now, carries the Moondrop Edge, but I don't recommend that you buy it. What I want to highlight here is that Headphones.com is the primary sponsor of this channel, and they do not require me to say nice things about the products that I review. They make it possible for me to basically say what I want to say about the product. I can speak my mind. And for this reason, I want to encourage you guys to support us by considering Headphones.com for your next audio purchase. If you guys are curious for a more positive take on this headphone, for someone who actually did enjoy it, I'll leave a link to that in the description. There's a full article there and you guys can check that out. And it has all the additional measurements there as well if you guys are interested in those. Okay, let's talk about the sound quality here. And this really is the thing that I'm most not thrilled about when it comes to this headphone. First of all, I should note that with the Moondrop Link app, you have a number of different sound presets that you can choose from. And there is a difference between the ANC mode and the ANC off, right? And so there are really only two sound profiles to choose from that are even remotely reasonable. The rest are just like meme sound profiles that aren't even worth considering. And in my view, the best sound quality for this one is actually using the ANC mode and using the bass EQ preset, because that does minimize some of the flaws that this headphone has as far as its tuning is concerned. It doesn't completely fix the issues, but it kind of makes up for some of them. And so what I'm telling you guys hear has to do with the Moondrop Edge in its best possible configurations with the sound default sound profiles that are available to you. The bass is actually decent. It's, you know, pleasantly elevated and well filled in. It doesn't, you know, drown out much of the mids. And I would say that the bass overall is satisfying. It's punchy. It digs deep. There's nothing wrong with the bass of this headphone in that mode. The mids and the treble, on the other hand are awful. And the thing is, it's not obviously so from the measurements. Like, it looks like it might be decent here. It looks somewhat reasonable. But I actually think you can make an analysis of the measurements to quantify what's bad about this kind of mid-range and treble presentation. Essentially, this is an absolute shout fiesta. It's a shouty, clangy, glary presentation because of the relationship between the mids and the treble, or I guess the lower treble or upper mids. You get what I mean. It's the ear gain region, the primary ear gain. And keep in mind, these are just averages. When we look at the positional data, you can see that the forward upper mids can be quite a bit more shouty with some of these positions, with some of these seatings. And this is most perceptually relevant because of just how dark the rest of the treble is. Singers sound like they have a frog in their throat. This is what I've called in the past the Shakira effect. People sound like they're singing while they're falling off a cliff. It's like this extra throaty kind of glary. But the biggest offender here, in my view, is electric guitars. They sound so glary and honky and this sort of grating character to them, and it just dominates over the rest of the response. What normally rings out clearly is just gone, right? The lower portions of those tones are dominating over what should be ringing out clearly a lot more. Then, on top of that, its treble is so relaxed for most of it, except for this one punctuated peak in the upper treble. You know, normally I'm actually okay with that region, but the contrast that I get here between that band and the rest of the treble is extreme, such that it makes it sound particularly low-res, right? This is what culminates to me in a low-res kind of sound signature, where there's something compressed or harmonically imbalanced going on, where nothing sounds appropriate or coherent or clear. It should have a much more clean and effortless presentation rather than this sort of like stifled, clenched, glaring kind of effect that it has. These are just words that I'm using to describe it. But you can see this in the frequency response as well. The one saving grace here, I think, is that the Moondrop edge is not going to be sibilant really unless you're particularly sensitive to that like 11 kilohertz issue. Or if that peak shows up a little bit further down. It's not fatiguing because of the S's, F's and T's, you know, the sibilant tones or anything like that or the shuh sounds. That's not being pushed forward. it's actually the opposite. There's not enough presence for that range. And so you get these weird imbalances. Okay, now to talk about the other sound profile and the other modes. So if you keep it in ANC mode and you use the balance preset, this is all of those things that I mentioned just without the bass. So it's just even, it's like all of those bad things, but now also lean and doesn't work for me at all. But then when you turn ANC off, the balance mode works a bit better overall, but here's the problem. For some reason, the volume goes away. So even in high gain mode, while it's loud enough for some recordings, it's going to be an issue for others. Because not only do you lose a lot of volume headroom, which can be particularly annoying depending on the music that you're listening to, you also lose the ANC, so your signal to noise ratio is worse. Meaning that you would want to turn it up louder. So this just doesn't make any sense to me. Now of course, it is an ANC headphone, so you know, you're going to expect certain compromises to do with all of these different things. The ANC quality here, to me, is irrelevant. The hope would be that a product like this would have reasonable ANC or something, you know, to attenuate the sound in some kind of way that's fine, and then the sound quality would be good. But unfortunately, it's the sound quality here that's the problem with this headphone, and so whatever extra feature you get on top of that, like noise cancelling, kind of doesn't really matter to me all that much. Maybe it matters to me, I don't really care that much. So my hope is that Moondrop does something to this headphone to improve the sound with a firmware update or something like that. This is currently firmware version 1.2.2 for anybody wondering, and maybe this is something they can work on to make the balanced mode sound actually balanced instead of an absolute clang fiesta like it is. And lastly, I mean, when you connect it, when you shut it off, the little voice prompts, you know, I'm happy to recommend a product if it actually sounds good, even if it has some of those quirks on. But yeah, I would never personally choose to use a product that had that. Like, I mean, even if it sounded good, it would make me want to jump off a cliff. And I had it in my head that, like, this is a product that makes me think, like, what are we doing? Like, if this is getting praise, are we scoring so favorably towards non-fatiguing treble that we've just completely ignored any sense of incisiveness or any sense of, like, you know, know, what makes the music actually sound like it has clarity to it or it has, you know, some, some sense of like, you know, you can hear the details in your music because you just, I can't with the Moondrop Edge. It's just this overbearing clenchy kind of glary kind of sound and it just is not good. Like this product really had me questioning like, like what are we doing? What, what is going on? Anyways, that is it for this video. I hope you guys found it entertaining at least. But as always, you guys can connect with me on our forum at forum.headphones.com. And you can also chat with me in our discord also linked below. Until next time, I'll see you guys later. Bye for now. <device speaks> Disconnected.