Moondrop x Crinacle Blessing2:Dusk Review (2) – Minority Report
Pros — Highly resolving & ‘clean’ sounding, mid-focused tonality with a low bass bump, amp-friendly, great technicalities, relatively natural timbre.
Cons — Bass doesn’t retrieve every last detail, treble might be too rolled off for some and upper mids a touch too high for others, ‘light’ note weight in the mids and highs compared to full DD units.
Executive Summary
The Moondrop x Crinacle Blessing2:Dusk is a tonally balanced (with tasteful bass bump), technically focused hybrid that does just about everything right. Its highly resolving midrange features lighter note weights and excellent detail retrieval, imaging and instrument separation for a very ‘clean’ overall presenation. While technicalities are the first impression, I don’t find anything really ‘off’ about the timbre. Its revealing rather than euphonic nature would make it a complement to, rather than a replacement for, a good dynamic-driver pair.
Tonality and Technicalities
These in some ways have the classic Moondrop signature (before their attempts at diffuse-field neutral, eg SSR, SSP Illumination): a not-too-exaggerated upper midrange and a slightly rolled-off treble – but, with a bit of added bass, focused on the low- to sub-bass. The balance of the bass on these is very good, having a good low rumble along a level of mid- to upper bass that doesn’t intrude on the lower mids. It’s not bass-head material and neither does it overly warm things up. The bass, however, is the one area I find the technicalities of these earphones are a bit lacking: some detail is missing in some material, e.g., reverb trails fade too early and ‘dirty’ distortion is underplayed or absent.
In the upper midrange, I find that between a balanced-armature earphone and a dynamic-driver earphone that measure the same, the BA will seem to be more shouty and harsh than the DD, possibly because of the BA’s faster but ‘lighter’ transients. With the Moondrop Blessing2:Dusk, I find the upper midrange to be getting close to the edge of what’s acceptable, perhaps because of the contrast with a treble that rolls off early.
One of the main notables for me about these earphones is the resolution through the midrange. Detail retrieval is excellent, all sorts of microdynamics and subtle pitch variations being discernible even with amps that tend to gloss those aspects over (Dragonfly Black). At least partly because of this, imaging, instrument separation, and L to R staging are also very good. While sometimes an overly technical focus will make for an unsatisfying overall musical picture, I don’t find these phones to exceed the boundaries of good taste in this respect. For me another big plus is that the common ‘BA timbre’ of overly fast yet lightweight transients, most noticeable in how cymbal shimmers decay, is barely present in these earphones.
Source Synergies
While many all-BA earphones have a difficult impedance vs frequency profile, leading to amplifiers with somewhat elevated output impedances markedly changing the phones’ frequency response, hybrids as a class don’t seem to suffer from this as much. The Blessing2:Dusk is one of these, its impedance profile indicating that the mid-treble would be boosted significantly only if amps of 10 Ohms or greater are used.
In other respects they’re fairly amp-friendly too. They’re sensitive enough to be driven loud from portable sources and don’t seem to need great power to make them ‘wake up’, yet not so sensitive that they hiss or overly restrict the usable volume-pot range from typical headphone/IEM desktop amps. I don’t mind a bit of treble rolloff, so I found sources with a neutral or slightly laid-back signature to work best, allowing the midrange technicalities of the Blessing2:Dusks to shine through without emphasizing the upper mids too much. People wanting the last gasp of treble might prefer brighter sources.
Concluding Remarks
While a) I don’t really want to buy any more IEMs and b) I’m cheap, I’ve been thinking that a more technicality-focused BA or hybrid pair to complement the weightier, dynamic-driver timbre of the Drop JVC HA-FDX1 would be a ‘nice to have’. At their $US320 price, the Moondrop Blessing2:Dusk, with their well-balanced tonality, great midrange technicalities, and lack of ‘BA timbre’ have me thinking about it.
Disclaimer
I received these from Jürgen as part of a tour initiated by Crinacle, and held them for two weeks, before sending them on to the next reviewer.
Get the Moondrop x Crinacle Blessing2:Dusk from SHENZENAUDIO.
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