Ice Ice, Baby! ICELAB’s Spectacular Spectrumica

Tweaking Spectrumica

Despite its holistic design and generous accessories, Spectrumica can still be tweaked in several ways. While ‘upgrading’ to more expensive third-party cables or using different tips to those supplied isn’t strictly necessary, we all hear differently, so it makes sense the fine-tuning can better align Spectrumica to your personal preferences. 

Cables

I genuinely love Spectrumica’s Mica cable. It looks great, matches aesthetically, feels premium, isn’t microphonic, and fits like a glove around my ears. So why switch? The answer to that, as is usually the case, is because I can. 

Nightcraft Vesper ($1,500, review coming soon). This is my personal pick for Spectrumica, and will most likely displace Mica for extended periods. At face value, Vesper is much heavier and thicker (8-wire with shielding), less forgiving around the ears, and arguably less portable. But it makes up for these ‘shortcomings’ in several ways. 

For one, it’s incredibly well-made. It’s also styled perfectly for me, resembling the best design elements of my other favourite brand, PW Audio. But the real advantage here is sonics. Vesper’s is a larger, wider sound, stretching the boundaries of Spectrumica’s already-generous stage even further, but also upping its resolution with a pitch-black background, which makes subtle sounds easier to hear even though they’re more ‘distant’.

Vesper also improves on other sonic elements, like bass texture, and while I hear Mica as more ‘intense’ comparatively, Vesper’s sheer scale is mesmerising at times. 

Eletech Odyssey ($1,999, reviewed here). Eletech’s latest co-flagship continues the company’s Parnassus Series line of impressively technical-yet-musical creations. It’s a literal work of art, even though it’s not the prettiest of Eletech’s cables, at least compared to its other flagships – or Mica for that matter. 

What Odyssey does really well, though, is refinement. It’s a lithe-sounding cable, adding subtle and gentle cues that Mica sometimes misses, and giving Spectrumica a smoother presentation for those who somehow find it too forward. It tightens up the bass some, too, while keeping the midrange and treble notes even-keeled.

Ergonomically, Odyssey is the pick of the bunch. It’s lighter and even less microphonic than Mica, certainly more so than Vesper, to the point where the cable almost disappears after a while. If maximum portability without technical compromise is your goal, Odyssey would be a good starting point.    

Tips

This will be short and sweet – I only use SpinFit CP145 tips with Spectrumica because they fit me best. Often that’s the only important criteria for choosing ear tips, and in Spectrumica’s case, definitely so. 

Case in point – I tried to wear Spectrumica with HiBy’s smallest liquid silicone tips that Ice recommends for maximum bass response. I failed miserably. While I could squeeze them into my ears, I couldn’t get them in far enough to sit Spectrumica’s shells flush with my ears, a no-go for any bone conducting IEM. 

I then tried Eletech’s excellent Baroque tips (reviewed here), which I already have spares of in my preferred super small size. Again, while they more or less fit comfortably, getting Spectrumica to sit flush was still a challenge. I could do it for a while, but never without that feeling of stuffed ears. 

If you can sport either Hiby or Eletech Baroque, both are worth a try. Baroque in particular expand the stage and give a subtle refinement to the vocals while opening up the treble for more clarity. The SpinFits I use are relatively punchier than Baroque, with a slightly smaller stage, but not enough that it bothers me. In this case, comfort is king.  

Continue to closing thoughts…