Guide for MOONDROP Aria

About Guide for MOONDROP Aria

If you want a good sounding set of buds with nice looking metal housings, the Aria ranks as a great option. It can be picked up for a reasonable price, and its replaceable cable ought to keep the buds around for quite some time in your rotation. Isolation won't blow anybody away, so if that's a high priority you might look elsewhere, or upgrade ear tips to memory foam.

Frequently uttered in the same breath as Tin HiFi and KZ, the Moondrop Aria seeks to balance the desire for a nice set of in-ear monitors (IEM) with an affordable price. We put the Aria through its paces to see if it’s worth the upgrade price over some of its contemporaries, or if you ought to stick to the usual suspects.

About this Moondrop Aria review: We tested the Moondrop Aria over a period of a week. The company provided the unit for this review.

Who is Moondrop Aria for?
Audio enthusiasts looking for in-ear monitors for less than $100 USD can certainly afford the Moondrop Aria. Anyone interested in a portable set of wired earbuds without compromising audio quality. Folks dipping their toes into audiophile style earbuds who want nice sound, but don’t want to shell out large sums of cash should check out the Moondrop Aria.

What’s it like to use the Moondrop Aria?
In Moondrop’s signature manga girl adorned packaging you’ll find the gold-on-black Aria earbuds. Included is a small, round crosshatch textured vinyl case with a gold zipper and discreet branding. Attached via a 2-pin connection is a nylon (or nylon-like) fabric-covered cable that is loosely braided and terminates in a right angle 3.5mm jack. Similar to the KZ ZSN Pro X, the cable comes pre-bent and wrapped in a smooth plastic sleeve to go up and over your ears. This secures the Aria buds in place, and it’s a more refined implementation than the Moondrop Chu, which requires the user to place the sleeve around the cable themselves.

You also get tweezers and six replacement grills to cover the 10mm liquid crystal polymer dynamic drivers inside. The Moondrop Aria housings are matte and smooth, made of metal, but it’s not clear what kind, so anyone with zinc sensitivities should proceed with caution. You can swap out one of the six sets of silicone ear tips (11mm to 14mm, with duplicate sizes) to get the fit right. It’s clear from the long stem that the ear tip slips over that the Aria will feel pretty invasive like a lot of IEMs.

The Moondrop Aria goes pretty far into the ear, and for me the right earbud feels more comfortable than the left one. Luckily, there are no rough edges or pressure points, but the over-ear cabling doesn’t feel like it does much, and instead imparts a somewhat unpleasant textural sensation along the tops of my ears. Rather than utilizing a one size fits all bent over-ear cable, Moondrop could’ve just implemented an integrated memory wire instead, to avoid disproportionate pressure anywhere along the ear.

How does the Moondrop Aria connect?
Moondrop utilizes a removable 0.78mm 2-pin cable that is a less reliable, but cheaper design compared to the MMCX connection point we see on higher end products. The cable is 1.3m long. A word of caution: when swapping or disconnecting the cable from the buds, the innards shift and do not feel especially sturdy.

You can pair the Moondrop Aria with your favorite portable music player, even if your favorite player is just your phone with an adapter. If you want to use the Aria with a device that doesn’t have an analog output or headphone jack, you’ll need some sort of DAC or a headphone amplifier.

Does the Moondrop Aria need a headphone amp?
No, with a very high sensitivity of 122dB/Vrms (at 1kHz) and an impedance of 32Ω, the Moondrop Aria can get plenty loud without needing a headphone amp. In fact, with such high sensitivity devices, you need to be very careful to keep your volume low, or even lower your maximum volume limit if your source device allows this.