Ziigaat x HBB Arcadia Review – The View From The Cheap Seats

The $199 Ziigaat x HBB Arcadia earphone was supplied by Linsoul for my review, and I thank them for that. You can purchase it here.

At least in more advanced nations than mine, you’re not supposed to try to influence the judge before the trial, but our feckless leader Jürgen sent me these for review with some of the harshest criticism ever leveled to an inanimate object (“…sounds as if somebody has stuck cotton balls in the nozzle…”). Now, contrarian that I am, I often disagree with my colleagues on sound impressions, so I approached the Arcadia with an open mind. But truth be told, these don’t sound right.

Headshells are solidly built and rich feeling, though packaging and accessories seem pretty minimal for the $200 fare. Easy to drive (I used my modest Moondrop Dawn dongle); soundstage is actually quite expansive, with performers well separated across a wide,  low ceilinged space.

Timbre, however, is off—it’s both preternaturally bright and veiled (what some other reviewers might call “smooth”). Bass is underemphasized and overshadowed by a loud, overamped high end; overall clarity isn’t very good. Cymbals and drums, in particular, sound awful– splashy and thin—without any sense of body or reverberation.

Mostly, however, the Arcadia suffer from incoherence—the different instruments (bass, guitars, vocals) sound like individually-recorded tracks which haven’t yet been mixed, and your ears get drawn willy-nilly to the separate components without any sense of cohesion or continuity. I kept flashing back to my misspent youth, where I spent a lot of freezing nights listening to a concert from the window outside the venue—you can sorta hear it, but all the nuance and impact is missing.

From what I gleaned on the Interweb, the Arcadia are some sort of design collaboration with a popular influencer, and I’m glad to see manufacturers accepting outside input and trying to transcend their own biases and default tunings. In this case, I have to give a resolute thumbs down, but of course I’m only some guy with an opinion and a keyboard.

Specifications Ziigaat x HBB Arcadia