[Ynot1]

Bingo!

 

[Ynot1]

I'm thawing it caused you know when wind chill dip below minus twenty. It's the right thing to do.

 

[Wiljen]

I'm gonna be sad to send these on. They are a fun listen.

 

[Ynot1]

Initial impressions only because this thing has challenged me. And it's bed time for me. I can't find anything wrong with it. F9pro sounds to me like a studio headphone that is very revealing with a big sound. I think I need to do comparisons to see if kryptonite exist for this thing. Nothing seems to say F9pro is doing it wrong. It's pretty awesome.

 

[Ynot1]

 

[Ynot1]

Threw Accessport at the F9pro and I failed to find a weakness.
Threw Benjie X1 at the F9pro and I failed to find a weakness.
Threw Benjie X1 with Creative G5 at the F9pro and I still failed to find a weakness.
Now, I know balance armatures and walnut relationship have been tenuous at best,
so I said what the heck, I've run out of options to bring the F9pro to real world limitations.
And you got to be kidding me. Benjie X1 feed to Walnut V2 sounded the best for F9pro.
The sound is really big. And using the walnut in amp mode extends the bass quite well.
I have to say F9pro scales. And it is telling my gears are not good enough to bring down F9pro.

 

[Ynot1]

I found something. It's not what you think. But I found something that I think will make the F9pro better.
This will help the F9pro go anywhere its aspirations desires and to reach its ultimate destinations in life.
What the F9pro needs now is a companion, like the writer but with better wardrobe and smarter.
I'm talking about extended range, higher resolution supporting bluetooth 5 cable with aptx hd and low latency,
and of course operating in balance mode and in waterproof.

 

[Wiljen]

Kryptonite for pretty much all in ears is, throw an impedance mismatch at them with an amp designed to power He-6s. Not exactly a fair expectation that they do well in that circumstance, but I'd bet you can make them sound poor if you work hard enough. I will say that they scale very well including the walnut F1 with the resistor mods removed. I do like them better with the resistor mod in play though, as it gives you more usable range on the pot to adjust as you wish. Without the resistor mod, I am only using about 15% of the available travel on the pot.

 

[Ynot1]

Interesting. And the F1 does balanced output too.

 

[Wiljen]

The Walnut F1 is a power house of a portable amp. I traded out the opamp for the muses as I think it is a bit cleaner and did the resistor mod of 18K ohm 1/4 watt resistors (1%) in parallel to the op-amp to lower the gain. You can play with from about 8k to about 25k depending on how much gain you want to remove but for me somewhere around the 15-18k mark was the best mix of leaving enough gain to power full sized cans if you decided to while making it usable for iems. Without the mod the F1 will power the Fostex Tr50p reasonably well which should tell you something about the output it is capable of.

 

[Ynot1]

Speaking of power the F9pro handles a lot of power. With the big sound presentation and the power handling the F9pro really is a blast.

 

[Wiljen]

Well sadly my time with the F9 Pro is coming to an end. On a positive note, my review is up.

https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/fiio-f9-pro-hybrid-triple-driver-iem.22784/reviews#review-19667

And to those at Fiio, to whom do I send the F9 Pro next?

 

[Ynot1]

I did a naive comparison of my kz zse and F9pro. Even though people in the kz thread have been known to throw around praises like "giant killer" and such,
I kind of thought the zse was pretty good. But F9pro makes the zse sound tiny. It's not sound staging to me. Sounds big means like the sounds coming from a big sound source. And I have to start jotting down my thoughts for the review.

 

[Wiljen]

If you really want to see where the multi-BA systems shine, find a track that is really busy with tons going on and use that. The differences can be staggering. I use Vintage Trouble - Bombshelter Sessions - Blues hand me down as one of my test tracks for this reason. Lesser headphones get muddy, murky, and bogged down by it. Better ones can keep up.

 

[Ynot1]

Good tip. Thanks.


I did not find a manual in the box, it might be somewhere. But I had no problem connecting the right mmcx, but the left took me several tries.
Holding the ear piece firm and in position was really critical for me on the left mmcx.

Also getting the ear piece out of the foam retainer was a bit tricky. I ended up using my pinky finger to push on the nozzle side.

And I have this unusual problem where I never have to bother with searching for ear tips. I pick the simplest looking silicone medium sized tip and I was good to go. I know right, I feel so out of place on headfi. But I digress and others on the tour can appreciate that i only touched one tip(set).