Fiio Makes Slight Design Changes to F9
Fiio’s recently introduced and much loved F9 IEMs have been given a bit of an overhaul. This comes as a surprise to many people, as the F9 has only been out in the wild for a few short weeks.
It seems that Fiio have been noting down some of the minor design complaints made by consumers and reviewers, and as such have decided to make a few changes to the design for future batches.
The following text is taken directly from Fiio’s website regarding their decisions and proposed solutions.
1. The MMCX connector is too tight which made it difficult to separate the earbuds from the MMCX connector.
Though the MMCX connector is already pretty mature in the earphone industry, yet it’s FiiO’s first time utilizing the detachable MMCX connector on FiiO earphone F5. For lack of experience, we’ve learned our lesson from it: the majority feedback were the connector was too loose so that the cable would easily come off from the earbuds.
When comes to the F9—the second earphone of FiiO that utilizes detachable MMCX connector, our engineer’s very cautious on this aspect. But unfortunately, it went too far, which made it too tight this time.
Based on the experience on F5 and first batch of F9, we decided to add spiral lines to end of the cable connecting to the MMCX connector so as to increase friction and make it easier to exchange the cables. For future batches, we will also control the tightness of MMCX connector and enhance our quality control over it.
2. What’s the function of the little spacer?
The initial purpose that we design such spacer is to increase the friction when rotating the MMCX connector as well as lowering the risk of poor contact after long time of use. Later we found that this kind of concern can be removed if we can control the consistency of MMCX connector. Also, customers don’t need to have unnecessary worry about what if they lost the little spacer. So we will remove this little spacer in future batches.
3. There’s not enough space left for installing big-size plugs, and I cannot use my own replacement cable on it.
This is owing to the fact that we didn’t give too much thought to plugs with big housing, while most of the DIY cables are using big housing. Therefore, we decided to adjust the angle between the shell and the connector so as to make it be compatible with more DIY cables and MMCX cables of other brands, while not affecting the appearance and wearing.
4. Different joint sizes on left and right sides.
Owing to the complicated CNC processing technology and multiple procedures, the special design makes the defect ratio even much higher. Based on the problem of different joint sizes on left and right sides, we came out with a solution of adding a strip of decorative seam at the joint, which can ensure the consistency as well as improve the yield ratio and production progress.
FiiO’s still new to the earphone industry, but we are improving step by step, so we are confident that we can do better and bring better products to the market. Thank you all for the kind support to us all the time.
