Looking at the Graph Before Buying — What Chinese Audio Moved Was Authority, Not Price

The numbers became the ground

Underneath all this is Harman's research, which tried to derive the "preferred sound" of headphones statistically. Play music to a large number of listeners, measure which frequency response they prefer. The target curve that came out of it is the Harman target, and the in-ear revision is widely cited as Harman IE 2019.¹

This is not one master's ear. The procedure is published, so it can be replicated and argued with. Audio evaluation acquired a yardstick you can share with other people.

MOONDROP has made that yardstick its signboard. On its product pages the company describes its own target curve, VDSF, as "a target frequency response curve made based on HRTF of B&K HATS in diffusion field and ideal room preference curve," and takes the position that the closer a product sits to it, the better the timbre and imaging.² Even on the budget CHU II, the central selling point is a frequency response that follows VDSF.

Audio advertising used to talk about materials, the designer's ear, years of development, brand history. MOONDROP skips all of that and leads with measurements. The company was founded in 2015 in Chengdu and officially cites a 4,000-square-meter production facility and a presence in more than 20 countries and regions³ — but judging by the language it uses toward consumers, its collateral is numbers rather than history.

The place where those numbers get lined up and compared was built outside the manufacturers. On crinacle's In-Ear Fidelity, the graph database lets you overlay an enormous number of products measured under the same conditions.⁴ Brand and price bracket don't organize the display — the lines just sit next to each other, which turned out to be about as favorable a ground as a newcomer could ask for. Having no history costs you nothing there.

The reviewer's name went into the product name

At the end of 2020, MOONDROP released Blessing2:Dusk, its own Blessing 2 retuned together with crinacle. Crinacle wrote up the process himself; preorders opened on December 12, 2020.⁵ An individual reviewer's name printed alongside the manufacturer's product name.

It became a format. Products like the Truthear x crinacle Zero, built on reviewer collaboration from the start, go straight into the graph database.⁶

By older instincts, this is like a book critic's name being printed on the cover next to the publisher's. The line between the party doing the criticism and the party being criticized has largely dissolved. And none of it is hidden. The collaboration is stated, the tuning intent and the measurements are published. Making it transparent seems to be what justifies the dissolving.

They were also good at social media

What worked about as well as the products, I think, was how these brands used social platforms. X, YouTube, r/headphones on Reddit, Head-Fi, and the blogs and timelines in Japanese. New models circulate with graphs attached before release, review videos appear all at once, price-to-performance comparison tables go around. "This response for under 10,000 yen" is a shape that travels well.

Where spontaneous enthusiasm ends and where seeding begins is not something you can tell from outside.

What you can see is the structure. Free review samples, affiliate links, revenue from collaborations, coordinated review embargo dates. None of this is specific to audio — it's standard equipment in the gadget review economy — and its presence is not enough to conclude that anything was undisclosed advertising. Under what terms an individual post was written cannot be verified from outside unless it is stated.

Regulators have started treating that ambiguity as a problem. In Japan, the designation and operational standards for stealth marketing were established in March 2023, and since October 1 of that year, representations that an ordinary consumer cannot identify as coming from a business have counted as misleading representations under the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations.⁷ Domestically, at least, advertising that doesn't look like advertising is no longer a gray area.

Seen that way, graph culture is conveniently built. It moved authority from private ears to data that anyone can check, and at the same time that objective look works extremely well as advertising. An image of overlaid lines is persuasive. Who ran the measurement, and under what conditions, doesn't appear in the image.

This isn't unique to Chinese audio. But the more a brand leans on measurement as its signboard, the more of its weight rests on that convenience.

Aim at the numbers and the sound converges

Once a target curve is shared, products move toward it. Earphones in the same price bracket over the past few years do look alike on a graph. When proximity to the reference becomes the axis of evaluation, that follows.

It is also convergence on an average. Bass pushed to an extreme, a colored midrange, a soundstage deliberately kept narrow — the parts once called "that brand's sound" are easy to mark down as deviation from target. As more became measurable, the value that sat outside the measurable axis dropped out of the conversation.

The yardstick itself is less settled than it looks. As measurement moved from older couplers to head simulators like the B&K 5128, translating existing target curves became a problem, and Harman ran fresh listening tests. In research reported in 2024, a Harman IE 2019 translated for the 5128 and SoundGuys' preference curve came out statistically tied.¹ Under what looks like an objective standard, both the measurement rigs and the target curves are still moving.

So buying by the graph is less like buying the correct answer than like buying the current consensus.

Edifier came from the other direction

Edifier is a company that predates this way of evaluating things.

Image: CES 2012 - Edifier speakers by Doug Kline / CC BY 2.0

By the official timeline, it was founded in 1996, its first product an all-wood anti-magnetic speaker. It set up manufacturing in Beijing in 1998 and Shenzhen in 2001, and by 2003 held a leading position in the domestic market. Headphones followed in 2006, and the company listed in China in 2010.⁸

So Edifier built its scale before graph culture, on the everyday demand for PC desktop speakers. It spread as a practical thing to put on a desk rather than as an object of audiophile evaluation.

Then, in 2012, that company took full ownership of Japan's STAX.⁸ In electrostatic earspeakers, STAX is close to a proper noun. (Some secondary sources date the announcement to December 2011, a year off from the official timeline. Unverified.)

Image: Stax SR-007A headphones by Jud McCranie / CC BY-SA 4.0

As a method it looks close to the inverse of MOONDROP's. Instead of rebuilding authority through measurement, buy a brand that already holds it. If you have no history, purchase some.

Neither is more correct, but it's worth noting that a single phrase like "the rise of Chinese audio" contains two routes of quite different character. MOONDROP rose by using the change in evaluation criteria itself. Edifier built its footing in volume sales and bought legitimacy afterward.

What's left

What has certainly changed over the past decade is the height of the entrance. For a few thousand yen to around ten thousand, you can buy earphones whose frequency response isn't broken. What used to occupy that price bracket was a resignation that this is about what you get.

It resembles what I wrote about in the DJ console in your palm: the cost and knowledge required to start dropped, and "just try it" became realistic.

Something is being lost too. The time spent relying only on your ears, lingering in a shop, choosing on a hunch with nothing behind it. Graphs shorten that hesitation considerably, and the shortened part may be exactly where the relationship between you and your gear used to thicken. The pleasure of modifying a cheap Casio and the pleasure of buying the optimum after reading a graph probably don't get along.

For now, I look at the graph before buying. What stays with me afterward, though, isn't how close the line ran to the reference — it's how the thing sounded that day, in that room.

Sources and notes

• Factual claims draw where possible on manufacturer primary sources and the measurement sites themselves.
• Nothing here asserts unlawful conduct by any specific company regarding social media marketing. The article discusses only the structure common to the review economy and the regulatory situation in Japan.
• The year of Edifier's STAX acquisition differs between the official timeline (2012) and secondary sources (announced December 2011). Unverified.
• The description of Harman IE 2019 and its translation for the B&K 5128 relies on reporting; the original papers were not consulted.