FiiO Clarifies Naming-Convention of Earphones
FiiO’s got quite a broad product portfolio going now and their earphones segment in particular is growing rather rapidly. And yet, despite so many product to their name, It’s pretty difficult to think that FiiO, as a company, is barely 11 years old. Being a relatively new company, there are still a few kinks to work out, one of those being their naming-conventions for their products. Their entire portfolio has seen a number of changes over the years.
The model names for their portable amplifiers started off with an “E”, such as E6, E11K, E12 etc, but was later changed to start off with A such as the A1, A3, and A5. Their very first earphones were called EX1, after which came the EM3, and more recently they released newer iterations of the very same product called the EM3S and EM3K. Just a few short weeks ago FiiO issued a statement regarding how the naming-convention of their portable music players will change, and they’ve now done the same for all future earphone products.
In the beginning, the model names of all of FiiO’s in-ear products started off with an “F”, such as the F1, F3, F5, and F9. Exactly what the number is supposed to represent is still not clear, but the model names for future products will be comprised of two letters and a number.
According to FiiO:
- FA: Stands for Balanced Armature earphones; the coming FA7 will be FiiO’s first Quad Balanced Armature IEMs.
- FH: Stands for Hybrid (Dynamic and Balanced Armature) earphones; such as the FH1 (1D+1BA) and FH5 (1D+3BAs).
- FD: Stands for Dynamic earphones; the earlier F1, F3 and F5 are dynamic earphones, any future models will name after the FD.
- FB: Stands for Bluetooth earphones; such as the FB1.
- FT: Stands for True wireless stereo earphones.
- FC: Stands for Custom earphones.
Their first 3 products to use the new naming-scheme are the FH1, FB1, and FH5.
As we can see, this statement goes to also hint at some new products that FiiO are either working on or are planning to explore in due course. It’ll be really interesting to see what FiiO can come up with with regards to true wireless and fully custom-made models.
