Now I know there has been… high expectations for my opinion on the BL03. It certainly has not made writing this review any easier, especially when I’ve been seeing people so confidently predicting that I’d rank these in the B ranks or even up in A!

So where I’d just drop the rank and run in my other reviews, I’ll switch it up a little with this one and sort of put into writing my thought process. Just looking at the more notable IEMs that I’ve rated at B- (excluding the MH755 for outlier reasons), we have the following:

ikko OH1 (OH10 as well)

Tin HiFi T4

VSonic GR07

All of which are many times more expensive than the BL03, but when in direct A-B comparison in the complete absence of price-to-performance value, I personally did not find the BL03 matching up to their levels of technical performance.

Now I will note one thing: I actually preferred the midrange tone of the BL03 to all of the above. The T4 and OH1/OH10 were a tad too shouty in the upper midrange for me, while the GR07’s treble response left something to be desired. The BL03 balanced upper-end energy without being overly-forward, and the “safeness” of its tuning is therefore its greatest strength.

But is its tonal balance enough for me to overlook its shortcomings in technical performance? I’d argue no to that. But on that note: is its tonal performance enough to distinguish itself from being simply “average”? Certainly.

Even as a C+ IEM the BL03 can still thrive extremely well, being one of the few handfuls of sub-$50 IEMs that I would recommend when asked. Its immediate competition is really only the following:

The Tin HiFi T2, an IEM with a completely different signature (neutral) and is still more expensive than the BL03 at its cheapest

The CCA C10, arguably the biggest threat value-wise due to its lower street price

The Zero Audio Carbo Tenore, which is rather hard to find these days and comes with worse build quality compared to the BL03 (such as the lack of detachable cables, for instance)

The Final Audio E1000/E2000, which has the same problems as the Carbo Tenore but with even worse QC issues than the BL03, and so hardly gets my personal recommendation

In that regard, the BL03 is still one of the most value-for-money IEMs out there, even if it may not be the ultimate market shaker that everyone seemingly wants it to be.