Fiio Flagship F9 Pro. Yes indeed.

Pros - Fiio flagship with both power handling, spacious presentation, and heighten clarity.

Cons - I could not find a weakness.

F9pro review

Welcome to this review. I participated in the headfi tour for the Fiio's flagship hybrid ear phone the F9 Pro; one dynamic driver and two knowles balance armature drivers. And I am writing this review after having spent some time listening to the F9 Pro in my unique way. As the F9 Pro is the newest and the most advanced ear phone to date that I have encountered, I approach this review with a challenge to myself that I would find something to point out in both camps, positive and negative. And what I discovered was that filling the positive camp with observations was easy. But filling the negative camp was not so much as easy. In fact I will explain what happened shortly. The overall rating of this precision engineered F9 Pro is a resounding thumbs up and a recommendation that goes as far as to say life is too short "have cake and eat it too," I'm just saying.

Ok, where do I begin? Instead of the organized and methodical approach to analyzing like in a school textbook, lets just go all over the place. I say this because the F9 Pro is great at projecting the sound presentation all over the place. It creates a listening environment that is so much like listening to big headphones and even speakers, I am amazed. This to me is very appreciative on a number of levels. For one, I found a headphone that does not mess up my hair in the F9 Pro. And second, bigger is better when it comes to sound, but F9 Pro does this with even more desirable qualities that headphones and speakers simply can not match; i.e. noise isolation, clarity, portability, and so on. Speaking of positives, I could prolly go on and on about the balance armature that there are two knowles and they bring very excellent clarity, separation, and coherence with the rest of the sound presentation. Music with a lot going on is presented like F9 Pro is not breaking a sweat delivering the nuances of the subtle details in each and every sound in the music. In another words, no mud can be found here. I really was impressed how the details in the voices and the strings became evident; where all of the details that a microphone can pick up, the F9 Pro delivers untarnished. And another important factor to mention is how well F9 Pro gets along in the community. For explanation please feel free to continue to the next section.

The F9 Pro can be enjoyable to listen with or without a dedicated amp/dac. At 28 ohms the F9 Pro can be driven easily by an iPad mini and deliver quality sound. But like all enthusiasts, you should not settle for just good enough. In this field of interest, you should seek out what sounds the best with what you can gain access to, reasonably. And I found out that the F9 Pro had skills. It had skills to be transparent; at least enough to preserve the sound signature of an amp/dac. Ideally both the amp/dac and headphones should be transparent to deliver the source music as intended just like it was at the recording. Anyway my Accessport can be bright and my Walnut V2.1 is warm. And when the F9 Pro was connected to the Accessport, the sounds came through with brightness. And when the F9 Pro was connected to the Walnut, the sound came through with warmth and tenderness; so I did what anyone member of headfi would, turn up the volume. Let me tell you the F9 Pro is a blast to play loud. Because it is so poised at maintaining its resolve; it's impressive. Now there is an inside baseball going on with the Walnut as far as balance armature is concerned. Basically Walnut's high output impedance, like 100 ohms, suppose to sound bad with balance armatures. Apparently the F9 Pro breaks free from this convention and goes where no other balance armatured equipped earphones have gone. Bcause F9 Pro sounds amazing with the Walnut V2.1.

Back in the day I used to buy a lot of music compilations; this was a period after the mixed tapes era. In those days a lot of mixes were thrown in with the more commonly heard format, the "Radio Edit" version. I suppose those mixes included unique sound manipulations, but who had time to go through them all. So now here I am using my ipad, but some hackers is adding distortion to my right channel. So I took to summoning my savvy intuition and adapted. I pulled out my music and let it lose on the F9 Pro connected to the Walnut as amp and the Benjie X1 as source/dac in shuffle mode. Since I haven't heard a lot of the mixes, this experience was more than entertaining; it was discovery and I was excited. But more importantly I was blown away at how good the F9 Pro was in delivering the music. Everything sounded fresh and new like I have never heard before; hearing things in the music in a way that I have never heard before. In essence the F9 Pro made it seem like I bought a whole lot of new music. And from an economist point of view I'm saving a lot of money getting the F9 Pro. I know right, economist knows how to get us into financial trouble; cause often they're only right half of the time, but I digress.

Some break down info in a quickie format:

Bass: F9 Pro has mid bass, regular bass, and sub bass no questions asked. But it does not have basshead bass that is always there on everything you play, unless you play only basshead music. In fact the bass has quality in the form of distinction in the bass band, never muddy. I like.

Mids: F9 Pro is clear with great separation in the mids. Voices and instruments can be very revealing with the right setup. I like.

Treble: F9 Pro has the means to deliver the treble honestly, but I prefer to tone down the brightness for the sake of longevity. And depending on the amp/dac used F9 Pro can be versatile and deliver the sound signature that I want. And F9 Pro is good in this way. I like.

Negative camp:
I tried my hardest to find a weakness in the F9 Pro by using the gear that I have, but to no avail. I concluded either there is no weakness to be found or I simply need better gear to evaluate F9 Pro better.

On a different note, this is negative camp for me because I reviewed the Fiio Q1 MK II which I thought was great in the balance mode. However I did not have access to this amp during this review. And therefore I can only imagine how much greater the F9 Pro could have brought to my listening experience in the balance mode. Especially knowing that the F9 Pro is great at handling power and space at the same time.

On a related note, I could not verify the mic and volume up and down button due to hacking on my ipad mini.

Summary:
Fiio has improved upon the F9 with the F9 Pro and I trust it is so. Because my evaluation of the F9 Pro is that it is truely worthy of its flagship status. F9 Pro does everything well. And I learned my inventory of gear can not find a fault with the F9 Pro. It is that good. So I apologize to the reader as I have failed to reveal a weakness in the F9 Pro.