John Darko
Best? When I say best, I mean favourite. My favourite hi-fi products for 2024 were chosen on merit and my predilection for (what I call) Future-Fi. Part one can be found here. This is part two…
The Clara IEM is a collaboration between Campfire Audio and Nine Inch Nails bass/synth player, solo electronic musician and – full disclosure – personal friend Alessandro Cortini. Campfire has been showing the Clara (US$1999)) at headphone events since October and I was all set to push coverage into 2025 when – bam! – the Portland headphone company formally announced Clara’s pre-sale last week. That makes it a 2024 product.
This CA x AC project started a year ago. Cortini already had an extensive Campfire IEM collection – we even discussed some of them in a Darko.Audio podcast – but he wondered if Ken Ball, Campfire’s founder, would be interested in collaborating on a new model. Ball would take care of design and production and Cortini would determine the shell type and overall sound. “Do you think he’d be interested?”, Cortini asked me, knowing I’d known Ball for over a decade. “I dunno. The only way to find out is to ask him,” was my reply. Now we all know the answer.
Cortini is very attached to the Bonneville and the Solaris (in all of its iterations) but prefers the Bonneville’s earshell because it fills more of the outer ear than the classic Campfire models (i.e. Andromeda) but isn’t as bulbous as any of the Solaris. “The Bonneville fits closest to a custom model”, Cortini told me over coffee during a recent visit to Berlin. He was in town to perform a new show and would use a pair of Clara to monitor his on-stage audio.
The Clara’s shell is made of acrylic and fills the outer ear just so. Hold it up to the light and you can see the drivers. Put it in your ear and it’ll stay put without any reseating — and you can’t say that about the OG Solaris. And like the Bonneville (and Astrolith), the Clara offers above-average levels of passive noise isolation. I know this because Cortini lent me two pairs of Clara during my last month-long visit to Portugal. The second pair was a heavier and pricier limited edition version (US$2999) with a Titanium earpiece. I didn’t hear ‘night and day’ differences between the two. One did not ‘destroy’ the other. I had to listen hard for any audible differences; I would need a more extended side-by-side comparison if they exist at all. The bass kicks hard on both – but not too hard. There isn’t as much in-yr-face bass physicality as the more V-shaped Bonneville or Astolith.
“I like the sound of hybrid designs, mainly for their superior bass weight and bloom”, said Cortini. Both the Solaris and Bonneville are hybrid designs. This is where a dynamic-driven bass is crossed over to the balanced armature drivers that reproduce the midrange and the treble. He continues: “In my experience, a hybrid ensures clarity in the mids and treble whilst the low-end dynamics give me more of an emotional connection to the music”.
Cortini isn’t only talking about the portable audio players that he takes out while walking his dog – think: Astell&Kern, iBasso, Luxury & Precision – but the DACs and headphone amplifier setups connected to his Make Noise Strega’d stage rig. The Italian-American musician asserts that dynamic driver bass better approximates the sound of stage monitors (aka wedges).
But there’s a catch. The insistent treble of many IEMs keeps his volume control on a tighter leash than he would like. “The treble is usually the first thing I notice when I turn up the volume”, says Cortini, “and that kind of tuning can be distracting in the long run”.
Inside the acrylic (and titanium) earpieces sit 1) a dual-magnet dynamic bio-cellulose driver for the bass, 2) a dual balanced armature driver from Knowles for the mids and 3) a dual Knowles balanced armature driver for the highs. This is not a crossover-less design and that crossover – along with Campfire’s ‘Tuned Acoustic Expansion Chamber’ – allowed Cortini and Ken Ball to voice the Clara long distance over a 12-month period. Cortini would road-test each iteration when playing live (and listening to other people’s music via his collection of high-end DAPs) before providing feedback to Ball. Ball would then dial in a new pair and send them to Cortini for more feedback — he told me over that same Berlin coffee that he didn’t want to make Clara sound muffled or dark but, on the other hand, he wanted less of an emphasis on the highs. Perhaps this is why Cortini says Clara has “more of a reference tuning”.
The sound here is not as instantly energised with hi-hats and guitar squalls as the Bonneville or the Astrolith. Switching back to the Astrolith and the Sennheiser IE 900 after a month with the Clara was – I gotta say – somewhat of a shock. It took me over a day to re-acclimatise to their zippier and zingier take on higher frequencies, which in turn woke me up to the idea that a more relaxed treble gives me (and possibly you) a better look at midrange depth. That Portugal-based listening was done with an Asus Zenfone 10 + FiiO KA2 dongle DAC and an Astell & Kern SP3000T.
Back in Berlin and with a second Clara loaner, I have double-checked my findings with a Moondrop MIAD-01 smartphone and the FiiO DM13 portable CD player, which both feature 4.4mm balanced outputs. The acrylic Clara ships in January with a 3.5mm-terminated cable + dongle DAC and the titanium version with a 4.4mm-terminated cable + dongle DAC. Both models come wrapped in packaging that heavily reflects – quite literally – the sleeve artwork found on Cortini’s latest album, Nati Infiniti.
As I said about the Meze 105 AER last week, a less energised top end gives the ear-brain more ‘mental’ space to hear further into the midrange’s deeper recesses. In Clara’s case, this means better-organised player placement than the IE900 but from a slightly narrower headstage. The Clara doesn’t sound as full-bodied as the full-sized Meze. Equally, the Campfire better separate instrumental layers and more cleanly define bass notes. But I’m sure we can agree that comparing an IEM to an open-backed over-ear is a bit silly. The Clara goes out into the street and onto public transport without much fuss and the 105 AER does not, especially if you care about bulk and – more importantly – not disturbing others.
Hopefully, you catch my drift: for some listeners, less treble insistence makes for a more immersive listening experience. The Clara contrasts many other IEMs – including Campfire’s own – as having too much top-end pizazz. This feature alone marks them out as one of my favourite pieces of audio hardware for 2024.
Further information: Campfire Audio
