Introduction

MOONDROP appears to be competing for the title of most products to be released in a calendar year based on what we have seen so far in 2023 already. The Asian audio brand has recently diversified past its in-ear monitors forte into headphones and keyboards too, but has not forgotten to put out more IEMs than most people can reasonably keep track of. The Blessing 3 was a nice change of pace from the multitude of other IEMs coming out from MOONDROP in the past couple of years although having more budget-friendly earphones continues to be a good thing for the average consumer. Today we take a look at two more such entries in the form of the MOONDROP Droplet and LAN.


Consider this article effectively two quick looks in one. I was going to have them separated initially before realizing the price points are quite close to each other and end up being direct competitors to an extent. As such, it makes sense to talk about them together here. The Droplet is an officially licensed collaboration with Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem, an excellent piece of sci-fi that had a TV show airing in China recently to where these IEMs were clearly intended to be part of the marketing hype train for the show. It uses digital signal processing similar to the MOONDROP Quarks DSP in that it terminates in a Type-C connection with an integrated DAC and has pre-loaded EQ filters too. The other item, MOONDROP LAN, can be considered as an upgraded Chu in going for metal shells and a detachable cable. Both aim to be strong contenders for your first set of IEMs, and perhaps even your last if you are happy enough, so let's thank HiFiGo and SHENZHENAUDIO for providing a review sample each of The Droplet and LAN, respectively, and begin with a look at the product specifications in the tables below.

Specifications