Introduction

Anyone who has been in the market for in-ear monitors (IEMs) in the last couple of years has no doubt heard of MOONDROP. The China-based audio brand originated in 2015 and has relished a meteoric rise in both brand awareness and market share, to where it has expanded greatly to include TWS earphones, portable DAC/amps and dongles, and even keyboards in its product portfolio. MOONDROP held a live stream in July 2022 to publicly announce its debut into the world of over-ear headphones with not one, but three different headphones. Not only was there going to be the expected dynamic driver set, but it surprised everyone by also announcing a planar magnetic and an electrostatic set of headphones. The dynamic driver set VOID was supposed to be released first except for a last minute hold-back based on feedback from a few people who had early access to the unit, including myself, to where MOONDROP did the right thing in delaying the launch to fix a few things and even went the extra mile in providing free updated units to those who had already received the earlier version! What this meant was that the planar magnetic VENUS ended up being the first MOONDROP headphones to be released and it was an impressive debut to say the least.

Owing to an interesting coincidence, I have in my possession three different MOONDROP VOID headphones—two older versions provided by SHENZHENAUDIO and HiFiGo and then a final release version provided by MOONDROP for this review. This allowed me to easily discern what the various changes are but this review will focus on the final version that people can purchase today. I have also decided to combine this with brief coverage of the MOONDROP DAWN dongle in its 4.4 mm variant. This was sent over by HiFiGo a while back for me to use in my reviews and it’s a handy resource that might be of interest to people—especially given how well it works with headphones such as the MOONDROP Void. We begin this review with a look at both product specifications in the tables below.

Specifications