Fiio FH5 Review
🔥 Excellent bass, good detail, lush mids, great accessories
🧐 Treble is a bit soft
Introduction
As my first set of earphones above £100 RRP, the Fiio FH5 are a quad driver earphone which blow all of my other earphones out of the water and at a RRP of around £200, perhaps rightly so. Full disclosure, I purchased these from Ebay for £84 so my bar for quality might be a bit lower. The unboxing experience was also hampered as I only got the earphones and the original box of eartips. Despite all that, I firmly believe these are amazingly fun and decently technical and will definitely appeal to nearly anyone who tries them.
The Fiio FH5 have a single dynamic driver (DD) followed by 3 Knowles balanced armature (BA) drivers. A common trope is that DDs excel at delivering bass power while BAs provide better mid and treble responses as well as general music detail. Most of the budget earphones reviews on this site so far (Moondrop Chu, Blon BL03) are composed of a single DD.
Unboxing
While I can’t say much about the original unboxing experience as outlined above, I can say that these earphones are built supremely well. They are made with a sturdy aluminium-magnesium alloy which is smooth to the touch and very solid. Design is always a subjective topic, but to me they look very refined; no shouty logos or brazen colours, a muted solid grey body trimmed with gold, baring some sleek fin accents (website information).
These have replace-able cables using MMCX connectors, also a difference to most budget earphones which use 2 pint connectors instead. Only drawback here is being unable to use your cheaper earphone cables instead of their cable, though this worry evaporates as soon as you witness their great stock cable (probably expected at this price point). The box of ear tips provided also have a great range, containing sets of ‘balanced’ , ‘vocal’, ‘bass’ or memory foam eartips. Most of these are just changes in how wide the bore of the eartips are, but the materials are sound and do not feel cheap either. This review was made using the bass ear tips.
Overall Listening Experience
The most prominent feature of these earphones is just how fun they are without compromising on the more technical aspects of the listening experience. They are pretty V-shaped as far as their tuning goes, which means bass and treble is elevated over the mids. The Fiio provide a clear upgrade path over most budget earphones as they tend to be tuned in a V-shape as well but the difference in quality here compared to the Blons is stark.
They deliver some thumping bass with great speed and attack, the sub bass is especially good and the lower notes get delivered with impact without sounding bloated. Rock tracks play really well and each aspect of the bassline is packaged nicely, not bleeding over into the mids much at all.
Mids are presented well and it’s clear the extra BA drivers are doing some heavy lifting in this department. In terms of vocals, the upgrade over the Chus (which are about 10% of the price) is not especially prominent and this is more of a prop to the value of the Chu rather than a knock against the FH5.
Treble is elevated and cymbals come in sparkly but not harsh to my ears, ringing true and resonating well as it fades out of tracks. This also contributes to the good spacing between instruments and a certain airiness which adds to the soundstage.
This certainly beats out the Moondrop Chus in terms of both detail and soundstage. The individual components are easily picked out and you can pretty accurately discern the different instruments at play. Different regions of the tracks are emphasized well and the clarity of all the parts is pretty good. That being said, probably due to the powerful bass, some really busy tracks can get a bit muddy.
Final Thoughts
One caveat for most readers would be that these seem to have been phased out in favour of a newer model called the FH5s. However, if you’re able to find these anywhere, I would highly recommend these as a good upgrade from any budget earphone you are currently using. Not only do they sound really good, but the unboxing experience (from what I’ve seen) is on par if not better than what you’re paying for in addition to a quality pair of earphones.