Introduction

Lime Ears is an IEM brand based out of Poland, having made a strong name for itself among many musicians from the region and beyond. It started as a 2-person company in 2012, dedicating the next few years to making custom IEMs that are useful for stage monitoring—the real reason IEMs were made and are named accordingly. While Lime Ears continues to be popular with live performance use, and indeed a lot of its product line is available in custom-fit versions, the audiophile market tends to go with universal-fit models as a safe entry to test the fit and sound signature, since it's also easier to re-sell/swap compared to a custom-fit one. Lime Ears debuted on TechPowerUp a few years ago with the PNEUMA, which has since been replaced by the newer PNEUMA V2, and today we examine its latest offering that has already been getting rave reviews from customers.


The Lime Ears TERRA is a hybrid driver set of IEMs with six drivers in total—one dynamic driver and five balanced armature drivers in a 4-way crossover. Emil, the proprietor of Lime Ears (guess what the letters E-M-I-L spell backwards?) had me try the TERRA in its final form at CanJam London 2024 before its release, and I was immediately impressed with what he had managed to achieve. This set uses aluminium shells, yet is lighter than some resin shell IEMs. It's small and comfortable, while also sporting a highly catchy synthetic opal faceplate that looks right in place in a terrarium—hence the name. I tried it again at the Shenzhen International Audio Show in September, and this reaffirmed my interest in the set to where I reached out to Lime Ears and here we are. So let's dig deeper into the TERRA and see if the hype is justified under more critical listening, and begin our coverage with a look at the product specifications in the table below. Thanks to Lime Ears for providing a review sample to TechPowerUp!

Specifications