Kotori Audio Vampire Review: Drinking Your Biased Blood
For the budget-friendly audiophiles, perhaps many of you may not have heard of this brand in case you were majorly focusing on Chi-Fi. Kotori Audio is a Singaporean IEM/cable brand that focuses on affordable, budget-friendly products and has been serving its local customers for good several years (at least since 2019 from my memory).
While their previous product line-ups used to be cable products only which made me assume they’d strictly stick to cable products, and they haven’t been gaining much global attention until their first debut IEM – called Dauntless, a single DD IEM priced at $69.
Dauntless was an impressively well-made IEM for its asking price which eventually brought Kotori Audio to meet its turning point – not only bringing up their brand awareness to the global scale but also for them to continue focusing on proceeding to release IEMs with great values. After a few quiet years, Kotori Audio has now presented two new IEMs this year – Vampire and Zephyr, each being a 1BA IEM and a 1BA+1DD IEM. Today we’ll be reviewing Vampire, Kotori Audio’s second IEM product priced at $99.
Packaging
Vampire comes with a beautifully designed packaging box that goes along with its concept. The vibrant red color painted across the black packaging is designed nicely despite being a budget earphone. The unboxing experience is surprisingly luxurious. Once opening the outer box reveals the red greeting you with Latin writings on the right and the Vampire case printed with its logo placed on the left.
As for the including, other than the earpieces, Vampire comes with 3 pairs of Sony Hybrid silicone eartips, a metal carrying case, 1 stock cable with 3.5mm termination, and the user instructions. It would’ve been nicer to see a bit more variations for the stock eartips, though after some tip-rolling I’ve figured out why they’ve chosen these tips to be their default option. They suit the best with Vampire’s sound.
Bloody Red Earpieces
Vampire has a 3D resin body with encaptivating, blood-red faceplates topped with silver logos. The textured red faceplate matches well with its Vampire concept. Another highlightable point is the incredibly small earpiece size, making them feel like small pebble stones. Undoubtedly, Vampire offers one of the most comfortable fitting and snugs tight and secure into the ears. The nozzle length is just about average and I doubt anyone would have fitting issues with these. Not only they’re small but also light (2.7g per side) and ergonomically designed, making them a perfect everyday-carry IEM just for the comfortable fit. Vampire uses a flushed 0.78mm 2pin termination and is compatible with all other standard 2pin cables.
As noted earlier, Vampire is a 1BA IEM utilizing one Knowles Full-range Balanced Armature driver with 50 Ohms impedence. Interestingly enough, Kotori Audio advice users to give a good 24-48 hours of run-in time for Vampire to make its best-desired sound. Well, using a single BA may not be much of an eye candy while other IEMs are sporting all sorts of drivers, making you wonder why bother choosing Vampire. Well, I’ll beg the differ in the sound impressions on the next page, though let’s first go through the other aspects of Vampire.
Kotori Audio Proprietary “Carbon 3” Cable
As a previous cable-only brand, Kotori Audio hasn’t overlooked the quality of the stock cable. Vampire comes with Kotori Audio’s “Carbon 3” IEM cable terminated with an L-shaped, single-balanced 3.5mm plug. Kotori Audio hasn’t specified the material of the cable but it appears to be a silver-plated copper cable. While it may look like a typical cheap cable, doing an A/B listening test with other cables will tell that the Carbon 3 cables are made of no cheap wires.
Using a single BA, while Vampire is very easy to drive and get the desired volume, I do wish they would’ve provided a 4.4mm option. Nevertheless, Vampire is tuned and made to be listened to and commented on based on its 3.5mm settings, so let’s go for it. The 3.5mm termination didn’t disappoint me after all, so why change it, now that I think?
Next Page: Sound Impressions – How Does Vampire Sound?