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

Packaging and Accessories

The ThieAudio Monarch was announced about a year ago, alongside its tribrid twin, the Clairvoyance, which in turn lacks a balanced armature driver and has a different tuning. Both shipped in similar packaging as the newer Legacy 5, which is also why you see "Monarch" and "Clairvoyance" on the sticker of the box here. A few months later, the other two tribrids arrived, namely the Oracle and Excalibur, which are both cut-down further and less expensive. All four are still quite different from the other ThieAudio IEMs, so the brand made them part of their own new Signature Series. Of course, this necessitated a different packaging scheme to distinguish these further.

Gone is the green box, as nice as it was with the Legacy 5. Instead, the ThieAudio Monarch now ships inside a larger black box with a plastic seal to start things off. With it off, the box feels more like a hardcover book now, with "ThieAudio" across the middle. The sides are empty aside from another sticker, which now tells us this is indeed one of the new EST series, and inside is the Monarch with a 2.5 mm balanced cable option. It is also a universal IEM in that the shell design and shape were chosen for a universal fit. While the option is currently not available due to long lead times, it hopefully won't be too long before ThieAudio allows you to submit a head map measurement if you have one, for their engineers to create a custom-fit, tuned version for a reasonable add-on fee. On the back is the company website URL, but their website is woefully out of date to where the Monarch is not even listed there. I urge ThieAudio to update it, or just merge it with the Linsoul website. There is also confirmation that this was made in China, next to which the inner box slides out of this actual hardcover sleeve. This inner box uses an identical design with the brand name on front, and that's about it as there is nothing else on the other five sides.


The top lifts up from the side, which reveals a completely different unboxing experience from the Legacy 5. Combined with all that foam everywhere, a foam liner on the underside of what is effectively the roof over the contents makes for plenty of protection. A branded microfiber cloth has been put over the IEMs, and it comes in handy for cleaning them periodically. The foam piece underneath has a cardboard cover that makes it easier to shape, which also has two cutouts in the middle to easily lift it off and access the attached cable in the bottom layer, where we see more foam and cutouts to accommodate the cable and included case. The IEM buds are placed inside shaped cutouts in the top layer, including for the memory wire coming from each. However, no pre-installed ear tips, so those are probably inside the case.


The case is a significant improvement over the faux leather one that shipped with the Legacy 5, even if it does not look as nice, being far more industrial with a function over form approach. It is a hard case that looks quite like the Pelican 1020 micro case selling for $25 or so wherever available. It too adopts a clear top which looks to be polycarbonate, and a POM base. The ThieAudio logo is seen on the top, with the sides containing a sturdy latch as well as an extension to carry the case with a lanyard if you prefer it. Opening it is simple enough, and doing so reveals more foam lining on the inside. In fact, a foam sandwich with the contents in the middle makes for great protection. An O-ring seal all around the storage compartment for dust and spill resistance to the case also makes it effectively airtight.


There are a lot of accessories inside, so let's go through them one section at a time. Speaking of lanyards, a nice paracord lanyard for the case is included, making taking the IEMs with you safely on the go easier. Two adapters have also been included, which you will only get if you go with the cable terminating in a 2.5 mm TRRS connector. As such, ThieAudio throws in a 2.5 mm TRRS to 3.5 mm TRS and a 2.5 mm to 4.4 mm Pentaconn TRRS adapter for when there is no available source with a 2.5 mm jack. The connectors are quite nice with a metal housing that has the logo on it, and come with a plastic cover over the connectors as well. I was quite glad to see these, especially the 3.5 mm adapter, which I used with my test setup.


Those adapters come inside a plastic bag, and we see the other remaining accessories inside similar bags. The first of the two remaining bags is smaller and contains two Size M SpinFit CP100 ear tips. We took a closer look at these before, and I really like them. They are a nice upgrade over the usual included silicone tips, but only having them in size M is a weird choice that hurts those using sizes S or L.


The last bag contains more ear tips, and this time around, we get three different sizes. These are memory foam tips that can make for a more secure and isolating fit at the expense of comfort for some and aggravating skin allergies for others. Not including SpinFits in other sizes does feel like a cop-out, especially as everything else is at a high standard.