Mark Ellis saved my pockets. When I was writing the previous article, I ran into Mark Ellis written thoughts about the Az100. And just as I suspected, he indeed felt that the Az100 made strides over others Az80, but it didn’t tie the Az80s. If it didn’t tie or beat the pi8 …it had no chance against my Gemini 2. So even though I ordered them, this sat with me long enough for me to see the old me again, with a new year of the same traps. So, I canceled the order.
While everyone can either lie to themselves about the dominance of the Devialet Gemini 2s or disregard them the best they can when it comes to the overall best sound period, go right ahead. This year is going to be different for me. I’ve seen all the little adjustments, all the 5%er’s being better in this or that. I’m tired of chasing them. All I’m going to see this year is part 2’s of the same branch of earphones. And until the Gemini 2’s fail me, or their is a Gemini 3, I’m just not interested in the game of moving chairs of bluetooth earphones anymore. I wasted too much time and energy into that last year and came out on top with the very best.
And this kind of result I have with the Gemini 2s is not something that will be overtaking any time soon, and if so, it will look like everything I have been through already with something being only 5% better here or there on features or sound. If there is truly something better than the Gemini 2’s…I’m happy for them and wish the good luck on the market. I’m just done with this rat race. I just don’t want it anymore. This is THE PERFECT earphone for me in everything that it does, and I’m grateful to move on from this with such dominating earphones. Also even when you look at the frequency response of the two, you can clearly see that the Gemini 2( 5 hz to 20hz) has the better frequency response range based on what you hear the most.
I have no doubt that everyone will claim that this new shiny penny is better than the best out today( even though most of them don’t even have all that is out there) because it’s new and they have a new fancy word for their drivers. But when Mark Ellis says “it’s NEAR” the Pi8 performance …this easily means to me that its not equal to it and if my Geminis 2s are clearly better than the pi8 then there is no point for me now that I have these already. This doesn’t mean that I believe the Az100 are trash or I doubt the advancements. It just means the law of diminishing returns is too great to matter to me once I found the Geminis 2s and Pi8’s. Makes no point to buy something that never defeats the very best nor even beats the 2nd best if you already have both of them already. Getting close means nothing to me unless I have never bought the best and don’t want to spend the money to do it. Then, the Az100 will play a very important role in the market for those people. But make no mistake about it, for me, the bar is just set too high. The Az100 at $299 isn’t trying to be the best overall at any price point, though. It just needs to compete against all other $299 products, which I’m sure it will. Everybody will debate for the next couple of weeks and / or months until the next new penny hits, and then it will be “The best”. There will always be something new on the market, I’m finally ready to not care anymore about it. But I will still stand on common sense. There is no way I would recommend the Devialet to most people and would suggest the Az100 over it 90% of the time to people. If I didn’t have the Gemini 2’s and Pi8’s already …I would have gotten the Az100 and been done along with money in my pocket. But this isn’t what happen and this is why it makes not sense to me to step down a level, howbeit at whatever the small difference is. I hope that makes sense.
Tech-N-Things 