CCA CRA+ Review
Pros:
- Comfortable - can barely feel them in my ears, but fit well
- The soundstage is quite wide, it creates a nice “3D” effect similar to the Mangird Tea’s (though not as impressive), so you can really appreciate panning and stereo effects.
- They hold up quite well in busy tracks, everything still sits in its own pocket and is easy to hear
- Impressive amount of bass response, and it’s not one of those products where they just want more bass but not good quality, it’s quite crisp and comfortable to listen to
- Mids hold together well, they don’t get too messy in sections with a lot going on
- Very good value
Cons:
- Isolation isn’t great
- Build quality of the iem’s themselves feels cheap but not terrible, cheap aesthetics, the included cable feels very cheap and likely to break in everyday use quite quickly and the eartips sometimes make some annoying rubbing noises while walking around.
- The bass can be quite overpowering in some tracks
- The highs are just... too much, they bring out a lot of sibilance, cymbals stick out way too much, especially the annoying frequencies in hats (I cannot stress enough how annoying it is on these ears), brass is generally ok however.
- Brings out noise in more than a few tracks
I’ve found them to be strongest with Hip Hop and Pop bringing out bass lines and percussion with the vocals generally finding their place in the middle. They really fall apart when it comes to Metal and Jazz due to the painful highs and excessive lows.
Whilst the CCA CRA+’s do have great sounding bass, clean mids and detailed highs, in my opinion, they’re a bit of a fail. Due to the sibilance they bring out and the borderline annoying amount of bass and accent on the low mids, I can’t see myself using these as a daily.
