Jalen Sigh Tech

Verdict

As objects, the FiiO FT1 are an unarguable success. As headphones for listening to, though, they are far from all-rounders…

Introduction

Given that it’s a rare day that passes without the launch of a new FiiO product, the fact that there are no closed-back, over-ear headphones in its line-up is quite startling.

Well, that all changes with the launch of these FT1 hard-wired headphones – and, as is established FiiO practice, the way these headphones are specified is at odds with the money the company is asking.

FiiO has offered notable value for money in the past. Is it doing so again?

Availability

The FiiO FT1 closed-back over-ear headphones are on sale, and in the United Kingdom they sell for an eye-catching £139, while in the United States they’ll cost you $159. Australian pricing has yet to be confirmed, but knowing how These Things Tend To Work I’d imagine you’re looking at AU$269 or thereabouts.

This is not an awful lot for some nice-looking closed-back over-ear headphones, but the FT1 are far from the only game in town. Austrian Audio and Beyerdynamic are two well-regarded brands with similarly specified and priced products that spring to mind…

Design

• Black walnut earcups
• 12-step headband adjustment
• Impressive passive noise isolation

Sure, broadly speaking the FiiO FT1 look like any other pair of over-ear headphones. But the quality of the materials they deploy sets them apart from any price-comparable alternative.

The most obvious of these is the black walnut that forms the outer surface of the earcups. The acoustic benefits of wood are long-established, of course, and the fact that it makes the FT1 look like a rather more upmarket proposition than any nominal rival doesn’t do any harm either. Combined with generously stuffed earpads of pleather and breathable fabric up front, the earcups seem to be from a much more expensive design.

They attach to the headband (which itself features a quantity of pleather and breathable fabric over a judicious amount of padding) using slim, polished metal. There’s a degree of articulation in vertical and horizontal lanes allowed, but not a huge amount – and the FT1 don’t fold, so their smart travel case is on the hefty side.

The same metal is used to form the headband adjustment mechanism that’s exposed above the headband itself. There are twelves stages of adjustment available here, so it should be simple enough to get comfortable inside the FT1 – although those earcups are on the large side, so the smaller-headed among us may feel overwhelmed. At least FiiO has judged the hanger arrangement and clamping force so nicely that the FT1 don’t really feel their 340g when they’re in situ.

The company is claiming an impressive -26dB for passive noise isolation. A lot of this is down to the size if the earpads and the fit they can achieve, of course – but FiiO has also included sound-absorbing cotton, an acoustic damping tube and spiral-shaped resonance dissipation chamber between the inner part of the wooden earcup and the driver itself. So as well as the inherent lack of outward leakage a close-back design offers, less external sound gets in than you might imagine would be the case.

Specification

• 60mm dynamic drivers
• 10Hz – 40kHz frequency response
• Balanced and unbalanced cables included

FiiO provides two lengths of cable with which to connect your FT1 to a source of music. Both are 1.5mm long, both are made using silver-plated oxygen-free copper, and both split at one end into a couple of 3.5mm terminations – both FT1 earcups must be wired.

One has an unbalanced 3.5mm connection at the other end, and FiiO provides a 6.3mm adapter too. The other has a 4.4mm unbalanced termination. Which means that the FT1 will connect to pretty much any device with a headphone socket – and that 4.4mm jack means that includes more upmarket devices. Which is handy when you consider these headphones are certified Hi-Res Audio capable by both the Consumer Electronics Association and the Japan Audio Society.

Once the audio information is aboard, it’s served up by a couple of 60mm full-range drivers that FiiO claims are good for a frequency response of 10Hz – 60kHz. The drivers are mostly composed of wood fibre, and each one is backed by a 25mm voice coil and W-shaped suspension gasket in an effort to minimise driver break-up. A conical baffle plate ahead of each driver allows them to be positioned parallel to the user’s ears, which ought to keep standing waves to a minimum too.

Sensitivity is a useful 98dB and sensitivity is an equally helpful 32ohms – so the FT1 should be no trouble to drive, even if you attach them directly to a smartphone or something like that.

And as far as features go, well, that’s about your lot. These are affordable passive headphones, after all – there’s a limit to what you can reasonably expect.

Sound Quality

• Energetic and forthright sound
• Good attention to detail
• Confined and single-minded presentation

When the FiiO FT1 are good, they are – by the standards of their price-comparable rivals – very good indeed. When they are less good, though, they undermine a lot of the positive work they’ve done – and the result is a pair of headphones that somehow sounds less than the sum of its parts.

On the positive side, the FT1 are a detailed and attacking listen. At every stage of the frequency range – and these headphones can dig as deep into the low frequencies as they can reach up at the opposite end – they identify and contextualise plenty of detail both broad and fine. They’re attentive to the minutiae of even the most complex recordings, and will happily contextualise even the most transient occurrences in a 24-bit/48kHz file of Skinny Pelembe and Beth Orton’s version of Leonard Cohen’s Who By Fire. They drive the recording forwards remorselessly, seemingly determined to maximise every shred of energy and drive it’s imbued with.

The top of the frequency range is almost wilfully attacking, but there’s just about enough substance to treble sounds to keep their shine and brilliance on the right side of painful. At the opposite end of the frequency range, the FT1 control bass sounds well enough to ensure convincing rhythmic expression – and they’re able to shape low-end information effectively too. There’s good variation to the bass here, a sensation of shade and texture, that’s by no means a given in headphones as aggressively priced as this.

In between, the midrange communicates eloquently, and again there’s plenty of detail available – so a singer’s mindset and motivations are explained just as fully as the nuts and bolts of their vocal technique. The overall frequency response is fairly even, and tonality is commendably neutral.

Switch to a recording that doesn’t require feral levels of drive or attack, though – a 24-bit/88.2kHz file of Bright Horses by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds will do – and the FT1’s attempts to hurry the song forwards and invest it with some entirely unwelcome and unwarranted energy are uncomfortable.

The FiiO actually sounds hurried, unwilling or unable to allow the recording to unfold at its own pace. And when you add a rather two-dimensional soundstage into the mix, the immediacy of the FT1 presentation is much too much. No matter the music you’re listening to, it’s doesn’t ever get the breathing space on the stage that it requires – instead, everything is forced towards the front where it has to attempt to muscle its way past every other element of a recording. The end result is a presentation that’s narrow, flat in terms of projection, and ultimately rather tiring.   

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