https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8BPyh_45gw What do you do when your flagship product is an outstanding hit, and it is already the very best you can do? How do you do even better? This was the dillema Ken Ball of Campfire Audio (and ALO Audio) had when coming up with his new flagship, the Solaris. After a bit of hit-and-miss with their first round of IEMs, with the Jupiter at the helm, the subsequent flagship, the Andromedas, were a huge hit. Despite the rather edgy shell, the 5-balanced-armature IEMs became an IEM standard. The slightly warm tuning that gave JHAudio Roxanne-like performance at a […]
Campfire Audio
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While it’s a bit late, a few people asked me what I thought were the best products of 2018. That’s a difficult choice, as I didn’t get to experience as many as I had wished, and some are still due to be reviewed. As well, I didn’t get to explore Bluetooth headphones as I had hoped, so they will be missing in this comparison. I went over everything where I’d posted a review in the last year, added items that are here for review, grouped them and selected the best of each. Here is the list. Best closed-back headphones $500-1000 […]
Ken Ball from Campfire Audio talks about the new Solaris flagship IEMs at the 2018 Autumn FUJIYA AVIC Headphone Fetival.
Campfire Audio has now dropped the price of the Vega IEMs to only $1099. Here’s your chance to get these great IEMs at a lower price and support this site as well. Click here to buy them.
https://youtu.be/vDL330SE_Ec Ken Ball has a long history with personal audio. Starting out by soldering his own headphone cables and modifying headphones well over a decade ago, then manufacturing amps and DACs, and now producing IEMs and headphones, his progression has been somewhat backwards from normal. Now with the Cascade going into production, he has come full-circle. Featuring 42mm Beryllium PVD Diaphragm Dynamic Drivers inside an entire custom design which is designed to be portable, yet produce an “open” sound, they are entering the market at the $500-1000 segment. The $700-800 price point is significant to me as is double the […]
Speaking to Ken Ball of Campfire Audio about his IEMs, he has had to face two particular dilemmas: The first is that with the astounding success of his flagship Andromeda and Vega IEMs, how do you improve upon them? The second is: How do you stop people blatantly ripping off the design to make cheap imitations? With his models, he plans to answer both of those questions. The models come at both ends of their range. The Comet is a single, full-range balanced-armature IEM. Despite being only $199 it features a custom 3D chamber, litz wire cable or an optional […]
It’s not unusual to find a headphone or IEM manufacturer to branch out into making their own amps, and then their own cables, but Ken Ball is one of two people who have gone in reverse, at first making after-market headphone cables, then amps and DACs, and now IEMs, of which the Vega is the flagship dynamic. To that end he has been quite successful with his range of balanced-armature IEMs, topped by the Andromeda. It was to my great surprise to hear that he had designed a range of dynamic IEMs as well. When I go to the Tokyo […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6lgjQoT1Tk Ken Ball from ALO Audio is a big fan of the outdoors. If you see an image of nature on the ALO Audio, and now Campfire Audio web site, it will have been one he took himself. So for his new venture into in-ear monitors it was only appropriate that The Andromeda be named after a feature of the night sky. While I did have a listen to his first three models of IEM at a previous Tokyo headphone festival, I wasn’t so enamoured by the brightness of the Jupiters, which seemed too strong for my tastes. It wasn’t until […]
