UE Premier review: How $3,000 earbuds almost ruined music for me

Because the Premier are custom-made (and customizable) IEMs, it’s worth discussing the ordering process. The Premier are at the top (obviously?) of an eight-product line that starts with the UE 5 Pro at $549, with prices (and specs) increasing from there until you land at the flagship UE Premier.

Using the UE Pro website, you start with the base Premier IEMs at $2,999. At this point, you have two choices: go with either the standard fixed faceplate version or UE Pro’s Switch swappable faceplate system, which adds $199, but comes with three sets of faceplates. Either way, UE Pro offers dozens of colors, textures, and graphics to choose from. Can’t find one you like? Upload your own artwork for an additional $200 and get whatever you want on your IEMs. Want a different choice for each earbud? No problem.

For my review sample, I picked the transparent “clear,” the dark wooden “ebony,” and the skull-themed “godhood,” because why not? Sadly, due to the specific shape of the Premier, if you already own UE Pro Switch faceplates from the company’s other IEMs, they won’t fit the Premier, something UE Pro neglects to mention on its website. I mean, technically they do fit — the locking mechanism is identical. But they’ll look a bit goofy because the shapes don’t match.

Under the faceplate choices, you’ll see a tiny checkbox for the ambient option. This is mostly designed for live performers as it adds a small port to the bottom of the shell, letting in 12 decibels (dB) of “stage bleed” so that artists don’t feel so isolated from their audience — the one ingredient that isn’t always adequately preserved in their in-ear mix. It adds $50 to the price, and UE Pro provides two sets of plastic plugs that can be used to seal the ports if you decide you need the full 26 dB of isolation offered by the non-ambient version.

I went with the ambient option not so much because I spend a lot of time onstage (unless it’s drunken karaoke, you won’t find me anywhere near a microphone), but because I was curious about how the two levels of isolation sound. Don’t plan on using the Premier for live gigs? Skip this option — I’ll tell you why in a moment.

One thing to know, especially if aesthetics matter to you, is that the ambient port can’t be covered by a faceplate, so the shape of the faceplate will be different than what UE Pro shows on its website preview function.

You then get a choice of cable — two lengths (50 and 64 inches) and two colors (black or clear). Since UE uses IPX connectors on the Premier, these are IPX cables (versus 2-pin or MMCX, the two more common IEM interfaces). But what’s surprising — especially on a set of pricey custom IEMs — is that there’s only one type of audio plug offered: 3.5mm unbalanced. You can always buy a balanced IPX cable from Ultimate Ears Pro for another $149, but it feels weird that this isn’t an option during the ordering process. Do balanced cables make a difference? Not in my experience. But their supposed electrical noise-suppressing quality sure is popular with the audiophile crowd.

Do these look oddly shaped? (Thanks, those are my ears you’re judging.) The long, slightly bent section of the Premier is the tip that extends into your ear canal.

Some custom IEMs use a shorter tip that only snugs up against the first curve of an ear canal (e.g., the UE 5 Pro pictured above), which feels just a wee bit more intimate than a standard set of silicone-tipped earbuds. The best part is that there’s no pressure — they just fill your conchas completely. However, they can still become dislodged with aggressive jaw movement as your ear naturally flexes in response.

The Premier go past that first curve, all the way to the second curve. It’s very intimate. If the custom molding process has been a success, you should still feel no pressure, but the real benefit is for singers: open your mouth as wide as you like and scream until you’re hoarse — the Premier aren’t going anywhere. The shape also is a necessity for the Premier’s acoustic architecture; it allows the sound tubes to be a specific length, which helps to give them their sound signature.

The notion of a product that has been custom fit to the exact contours of your body is inherently desirable. A bespoke suit from Savile Row is the height of sartorial indulgence, and every Formula 1 driver gets a steering wheel that has been molded to the size and shape of their hands, and a seat molded to that end, too. And yet, a set of earbuds that feel like someone has poured molten plastic into your ears takes some getting used to.

Don’t be surprised if you don’t love it at first. I’ve been using the Premiers for more than six weeks and they still feel weird. It’s the so-called occlusion effect — that sense of having your ears plugged — that is especially strong with the Premiers.

As you might expect, it’s the portion of the tip that sits deepest in the canal that requires the most acclimation. Because the shape is so closely contoured to your canal, there’s only one position that won’t cause discomfort, something I found out the hard way. But once you’ve located that sweet spot, they are very comfortable, and much to my surprise, they don’t cause the same amount of fatigue or itch as conventional IEM designs.

If you just can’t get comfortable, UE Pro will allow for up to two rounds of adjustments, using your feedback on which part of the IEM is causing problems. If that doesn’t work, they’ll create a new set from scratch, without charging you anything more.

The result is astonishing. With the ambient plugs installed, I can safely say I have never heard anything like the UE Premier. The sheer amount of detail these IEMs can render makes lesser earbuds sound two-dimensional by comparison. And I’m not talking about the kind of garden-variety IEMs you can buy on Amazon for $50 to $75. I put the Premier up against models varying in price from $500 to $1,500, including the custom-fit UE 5 Pro ($549), Meze Audio Advar ($699), Audeze Euclid ($1,299), and custom-fit Campfire Audio Supermoon ($1,500).

Tonally, the Premier sound balanced to me, with no particular emphasis on any one frequency range. Ordinarily, a balanced or neutral EQ translates as dull or flat to my ears, and often lacking in low-end.  I did not love the UE 5 Pro because of this — but the Premier are lively, with no detectable holes, and no missing bass. Without any measurement equipment to confirm it, I suspect the Premier’s five crossovers and multiple drivers make all the difference here.

Clarity across the frequency spectrum is excellent. Within any given song, each instrument and vocalist stood apart. If you want to place your focus on a single element — like the vocals or a bass line — doing so is effortless. The Premier are a high-powered magnifying glass, letting you zoom in on the details.

But that precision is more than just a separation of frequencies. It also maps those elements across the soundstage with astonishing accuracy. The sphere of sound extends from just in front of your face to several feet away in all directions. That depth becomes really noticeable as you listen to Emily Wolfe’s White Collar Whiskey. The reverb on her guitar and the echo on her vocals decay into space like ripples on a pond’s surface.

It’s not uncommon for audiophiles to praise a set of speakers, headphones, or IEMs for their ability to let them hear details in their favorite tracks that were previously unavailable — and this has definitely been my experience with the Premier. One particularly gratifying moment came while listening to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Tin Pan Alley, a track I’ve now heard more times than I care to count. As Vaughan does his signature guitar work, I was able to hear the lowest notes propagate to the left, while higher notes careened to the right. That little bit of spatial detail has presumably been there all along, and I’d never noticed it. It made me hit Google in search of photos of the recording session so that I could see how the engineers had placed the mics in the studio. Alas, no such luck.

Are the UE Premier perfect? No. Transients like snare and cymbal hits can feel a bit mushy at times. Going back and forth between the Premier and the Campfire Audio Supermoon on a track like the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Higher Ground reveals how the Supermoon’s planar magentics drivers deliver a more taut, energetic reproduction of the percussion. The same comparison also shows that the Premier’s remarkable soundstage can have the unintended consequence of creating too much space in the overall sound, which can diminish cohesiveness. This effect was more noticeable on some recordings than others. Don Henley’s Boys of Summer, for instance had a lot, while Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car had almost none.

There is, however, a very big caveat to using a set of IEMs like the Premier. Because of their ability to reproduce sound at an almost clinical level of accuracy, you may realize that the rest of your gear — and maybe your music sources — aren’t as good as you thought.

Sticking with the magnifying glass analogy from above, seen from several feet away, a painting and a photo of the painting might look similar. If you were to look closely at the painting, you’d be able to appreciate all of the subtle details in each brush stroke, but a similar inspection of the photo would likely only reveal the dots of ink that make up the photo. The same is true for music. The UE Premier will apply their precision to all material equally, and that could mean you’ll become aware of flaws that were previously inaudible.