Introduction

ThieAudio launched in 2019 as a house brand for Linsoul—one of the biggest international audio distributors today—but don’t dismiss its relatively recent beginnings as an indicator of inexperience. In fact, ThieAudio has been putting out competitive products at various price points in both the earphones and headphones space! My very first proper IEMs review was that of the ThieAudio Legacy 5 and I still rank the V16 Divinity as among my favorite sets. ThieAudio was also the first brand to make me emotional enough to shed a tear or two by allowing me to listen to my first set of premium IEMs in the form of the original Monarch—a tribrid driver set which continues to be sold today and offers a sub-bass focus with oodles of mids that hasn’t been reproduced since. Perhaps that was for a reason though since the Monarch had its fair share of complaints from people who could not get behind the lack of mid-bass presence. ThieAudio aimed to rectify this with the Monarch MKII that launched alongside the V16 Divinity and quickly became a popular choice in the $1000 price range for its tonality. But once more there were complaints about wanting more bass, and better bass at that. It’s now 2023 and the kilobuck market is ruthless with competition from brands large and small, old and new. Will the third time truly be the charm for ThieAudio?

Today we take a detailed look at the ThieAudio Monarch MKIII (mark 3) which immediately differentiates itself from its predecessor by offering several custom designs. In fact, only the thumbnail of this review shows the default aesthetics of the Monarch MKIII with its black shells and a face plate using black and smokey white trails with bits of shiny metallic particles that is lovely in its own right. But you can opt for—at an additional cost—different shells and face plates, which allows end users to get one of the better aspects of custom IEMs while still maintaining the universal fit. For example, the title photo above is of the Monarch MKIII in the “black bat” shell and “butterfly” face plate combination. There are 6 shells and 14 face plates to choose from outside of the default design which makes this a build-to-order set getting more hands-on attention too. All of them share the same internals including—for the first time from ThieAudio—a dual dynamic driver system handling the bass which feels purposely made to address all the complaints from before. The Monarch MKIII is a new tribrid driver set of IEMs that has become quite popular since it recently launched, so let’s thank ThieAudio for providing a sample to TechPowerUp as we see whether the hype is justified in this review which begins with a look at the product specifications in the table below.

Specifications