Introduction

ThieAudio with its Legacy 5 saw us debut our detailed frequency response measurements for headphone and earphone reviews, and the brand clearly liked it enough to offer two very different IEMs as a follow-up. Being Linsoul's house-brand, ThieAudio has hand-selected personnel for design, engineering, and manufacturing of its products, including for the identification of the best driver setups and tuning, typically in the form of hybrid drivers involving a combination of dynamic (DD) and balanced armature (BA) drivers. This hybrid setup scales quite well and is being used for the Legacy 9 with 1 DD and 8 BA drivers. Moving past this point would either result in an all-BA system as with the massive 14 BA Voyager 14 or the tribrid route. Enter the ThieAudio Monarch, and thanks again to Linsoul for arranging a review sample for TechPowerUp!


What's a tribrid, you ask? Well, if a hybrid driver system uses two types of drivers, logic dictates that a tribrid would use three. ThieAudio is using a combination of dynamic drivers, balanced armature drivers, and electrostatic tweeters (EST) with its tribrid Signature Series that currently has four members. Given using a number in the product name can quickly get confusing, the company has wisely stuck to using different names for each. The ThieAudio Monarch is the current flagship of the series, adopting 1 DD + 6 BA + 2 EST drivers, which makes tuning all the more customizable and hard. How does this complex system work out in IEMs that barely use hybrids, let alone actual tweeters? We aim to find out in this review that begins with a look at the product specifications in the table below.

Specifications