It’s not my first rodeo with the Fearless boys; in fact, you can read my writeup of their entire lineup (besides this one) right here.

Fearless is one of the more recent in the wave of “hifi chifi”, a subset of the Chinese IEM industry where the focus is placed on pure sound quality with no compromise rather than squeezing every last drop of performance out of the buck in your wallet. This means that you’d be expected to shell out more than your typical budget-oriented Chinese IEMs, but they’re still quite a bit cheaper than their Western counterparts.

This niche was mainly dominated by the likes of qdc for the longest time but recent times have seen the rise of brands such Moondrop. The rapid exposure of Fearless in the scene shows that not only is there interest in high end Chinese products, but also sizable demand as well. Their lineup can be described as a split of two tuning directions: what I believe is their house sound that is a “basic” tuning, though taken to a high level; and what I’d classify as “the rest” where they’re more odd skunkworks projects than what I’d consider commercially viable.

Now, Fearless partakes in the trend that is the Sonion EST drivers, tweeters marketed as “electrostatics” but are closer to electrets themselves. And so the “Paladins” series is born, comprising of two traditional EST/BA hybrids (the La Hire and the Lancelot) and the Roland, a unique (for its time) EST/BA/DD “tribrid”.

Let’s see how they fare on the chopping block.