Good, but is it worth it?
This IEM is one of the EST-implemented IEMs that is crowded with comparisons at its price point, and it certainly is competitive, but may not be the best among the crowd.
Testing equipment used:
Moondrop MIAD01(yes, their own mobile phone DAP)
Asus Motherboard with ALC4080 Codec and Savitech SV3H712 AMP
First, the cable is really nice, one of the nicer ones of many IEMs I personally have that's more expensive on the chart. It is lightweight, very durable, and not easy to self-tangle itself, which is a nice plus(there are cables out there that are so heavy, drag IEM out of your ear during normal use, and don't even have a cable clip).
The ear tips are what made me subtract 0.5 points from them. The Moondrop Crinacle Dusk's spring tips(which are Moondrop proprietary in-house ones) are the best ear tips(subjectively) to use on a Moondrop IEM, and while the Variations are priced higher than Dusk, it just comes with garbo ear tips, so I have to buy Spring Tips from china and while its shipping I rolled some Spin Fit W1 SS tips, so far so good.
Sound quality:
Mediocre, at best, for the price point it's asking, you would definitely double-think before buying. Long story short, it's on the muddy end of EST implementations, definitely performs, but requires a lot of power to drive, and sometimes for the same song you listen it performs worse than the Dusk. Also, on the price point, I found the Hisenior Mega5EST 7th anniversary edition to be outperforming the Variations in terms of surgical clarity and neutrality. The Variations is definitely warm-tuned, to a degree it's not very applicable to some use cases, for example, gaming. When I tried gaming on the Variations, its muddiness made me unable to hear enemies' footsteps, and it generally performs worse than an Epos H6 Pro Openback, which is at a fraction of the Variations price.
So overall consideration, it's a good one, but not recommended, for sound clarity you can go Dusk and save some bucks, if want the EST thrill, there's Hisenior Mega5EST at the same price, but with better musicality. The cable is nice, but the tips aren't(that's my biggest gripe since Moondrop does make good tips but they chose not to implement them to their 500$ IEMs but for those 200-300$ ones). Also, these come with no nozzles nor filters, which you can buy official filters on their aliexpress website, again, something they could have easily added to prevent future warranty claims of earwax falling into the sound ducts, they have them on Kato and Kadenz, not the Variations...
