FiiO JT1

>>I am brazilian and I speak portuguese, so forgive my english, I’ll use translation tools to help<<


INTRO:

I had my sights set on the Fiio JT1 for a while now, I was curious about what it could do at it’s price point. After a long wait, I finally got my hands on one, But lets start with the review.

When you open up the box, you will see Inside the headphones, 6.3mm adapter and the removable cable which feels like its decent quality. The connector for both L and R is 3.5mm and is color coded for which side goes where. Blue goes to the L and red goes to the R., the other end of the stock cable uses a trrs 3.5mm end which is for the in line mic. On the right side connector, is the mic which has a mute button, that allows you to disable the mic or turn it back on.



The Headphone has auto adjust meaning it adjust to your head as soon you put it on, while I found this to be less hassle to manually set the size. The headband has a very thin padding, I found it to be light on my head, but I still rather there was a little bit more padding on top. Same for the ear-pads, they’re not thick enough for me since I a glasses wear.



Lucky the ear-pads can be removed by twisting the pads to remove the attachment from the cups. On the top the headphones are held together by an Aluminum foil design. To me it feels kinda cheap and but it’s decent enough. Which you can put them in a different ear-pad and then twist the attachment and the pads on til they snap in place. After doing so I no longer had any issues with wearing the headphones due to putting on thicker ear-pads. The stock ear-pads are 100MM, I found that my oval 110mm ear-pads worked with the ear pad mount without an issue. The attachment makes it real easy to swap pads.




The headphones may look open back due to the rear of the cups, but in reality they are closed back headphones. While wearing I didn't have a issue with getting a seal. And it was very light on my head.



Mic wise it works very well, better then I thought it would work. A friend who I tested the mic with didn’t have any issues with hearing me, there wasn’t any static and the sound was clear.

Now on to how it sounds, the first thing you notice is the bass, its boomy. I found my self enjoying it in a lot of DnB, EDM and other songs. I don’t really have an issue with the bass.


Theirs no brightness here as its smooth at the same time I didn’t have an issue with details, they didn’t stand out. To my ears voices come off as being directly in front of me, all up in my face, while still being outside my head. While the sound stage feels like its wider on the L and R sides of my head, then it is in comparison to the front of me. Gaming and movie watching shared the same results.

Overall there really isn’t any major issues that bother me with the JT1, aside from the voices coming off as too close to my face. As I prefer the vocal to be bit more further away from me in front. Other then that I found my self liking the JT1.

Disclaimer

FiiO offered me this headphone in exchange for my opinion.

YouTube version of this review, in case you don't like reading.

---

Build, Aesthetics and Ergonomics

The first thing that should be obvious when picking it up, is the weight.
At 303 grams (353g with the cable – measured on my home scale) it feels lightweight for a full size headphone, especially one with obviously many metal parts.
The weight may give some the impression that it is not constructed well, or lacks quality,
but the reality is far from it.

The tolerances are low and the parts are simple, but well thought out.
There are no parts that feel loose, rattly or squeaky.

The headband suspension strap has a light but persistent elastic pull that does not apply pressure that is too strong or too weak.
You never feel like the headphone is trying to climb up your head or sag down from it's own weight.
The head-clamping force feels about the same. Just a good middle ground.

The only part of the headband that may cause any concern is the complete lack of a swivel.
Since there is no rotation, I think it's impossible to guarantee that it will comfortably fit every head out there.
If like me, you find that these headphones comfortable, you will likely be able to wear them all day.

Moving on to the finer details there are also 2 small hard foam buffers to stop the cups from noisily hitting the headband metal.
In practice though this is more functional in protecting the cups cosmetics from mechanical damage.



The cups are very light and have a bit of a ring to them if tapped, so obviously they’re not perfect.
Ideally you want your best headphones to be acoustically dead aside from the drivers, but I really think that's not something most people should care about at this price point.

At a glance the cups appear to be open back, as there is an open grill pattern, but these are actually closed-back headphones; more on that later.

So, aside from the 5 pieces of text, these headphones are structurally symmetrical.

The ear pads appear to be made of the same protein leather material that covers the suspension strap and also contains very light foam which is extremely light and springy.
This was very likely a design choice to make up for the lack of cup rotation, and as such there should be no problems getting a good bass seal.
I don’t wear glasses, so I won’t comment further on that.

As a side note, I should mention that I tried rolling a bunch of other ear pads on the JT1, and I found that it was largely forgiving, without deviating too far away from the original sound with most pads of similar size and material
So it should be relatively easy to find 10cm diameter replacement pads for this headphone in the future, for improved comfort reasons or to replace worn out pads.



The cable is about 1.5 meters long, has a y-split and is completely sheathed in synthetic fabric.

All plugs are 3.5mm stereo TRS type, with the main plug being a TRRS type for the microphone.
If your device does not support a TRRS microphone plug, you will have to purchase a splitter adpater to separate the headphone and microphone input, as no adapter is provided.
This isn’t a big negative point as they’re cheap so it won't be a deal breaker for most people, but they’re cheap, so FiiO could have also supplied one.
The plugs all have good looking metal housings and a very short rubber strain relief.
Either way, it should be very easy to find replacement cables or make your own.
I'm usually not a fan of fabric sheathed cables, as they are more prone to transferring friction noise and these are no exception.
Head movements will transfer more noise than average to the headphone.

One thing I am happy to see is that despite the fabric sheath, the cable remains very pliable and is, for example, much easier to bend than some fabric coated mouse cables I've used in the past, but it has still retained some shape memory from it's storage in the packaging which hasn’t fully correct itself over time.
I would have liked to see the cable shipped out in a coil rather than the more common, faster and easier back and forth wrapping method used on this cable.
Obviously FiiO is trying to keep costs low here, but it seems to be a fairly high quality cable for this price piont and I think this packing method is not ideal for this cable type.

Some nice touches are the colour coded blue and red plugs which match the blue and red colour code for left and right channels on the inside of the headband.
Also when plugged in correctly, the FiiO logo faces forward away from the wearer.



As for the microphone sound quality, I think it’s about average.
Not as bad as some bluetooth portable headphone mics, and better than the microphone on my 3 Euro MX500 earbud clone.

Overall the build quality is more than satisfactory, I just would have hoped for a more complete build with cup rotation.
For some people like myself, that won't be an issue.
For whatever reason, the depth of the pads combined with their extra soft foam allow me to wear these headphones for hours on end with no discomfort, so I can only assume that this will be the case for many others.

Now I’d like to suggest we take a look at the 50mm polyether ether ketone, polyurethane composite with aluminium foil coated drivers… but there's a piece of foam glued to the baffle, hiding it.
So let's just have a look inside the cups.



At the back of the drivers through the main vent we can see that the driver is indeed a shiny metallic colour as the aluminium foil suggests.

The cups have been sealed with what appears to be a thick piece of sticky-backed card.
I think we can safely assume that this headphone could well have been an open-back headphone in it's development stage but that changed at some point.
In any case, there is definitely some modding potential here, which is going to appeal to some.

I give both the build and ergonomics a well deserved 8 out of 10.

---

Sound

To get the easy stuff out of the way, the soundstage is good.
It's not huge, but its larger than average for a full sized closed-back.
There are sounds that appear to escape from the space in your head, from quite far to the left and right, but imaging isn't great. Sounds extend well from quite far left and right, but the image remains on a relatively thin plane that doesn't spread out in front of you.

For 3D gaming where positional cues are helpful, this isn't a bad choice, you could do a lot worse.
Positional audio is easy to pick up and understand, but it's not quite laser focused or highly accurate either.

The detail is really good. I can't complain about that at all.
I think some people would prefer a slightly stronger upper Treble presence to bring out a bit more perceived detail and air, but it's never too strong or piercing and doesn't sound grainy or rough, even when playing some infamously treble-forward recordings.

The Bass is the ‘party piece’ of this headphone.
It stands out as sounding bottomless, thunderous and potentially overpowering.
There are moments where it can sound boomy and unpleasant, and unfortunately that is entirely dependent on the recording, so results can be a bit of a mixed bag, again depending on the music you personally listen to.

The Midrange and the general tuning of the headphone...
This is where things get complicated.

From an objective point of view these headphones are not perfect.
Of course no headphone in this price segment (or at any price) can make that claim either, but this headphone is something of an outlier.

Here’s a frequency response graph:
(measured with miniDSP EARS)



The main thing people should look for when reading these graphs is overall linearity, and a lack of significant peaks and dips.
But in my experience, this holds true for open-back headphones only, with a BIG asterisk.
When listening to a closed-back headphone, there are actually some tuning tricks that can be used to make the headphone sound more clear, improve the sense of space and the overall musical performance.

Let's compare this briefly with three other headphones.
(Fiio Jade Audio JT1)
Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro
SoundMagic HP100
Rockjaw Acero



The most significant and obvious thing I have to point out is the dip between 100-300hz.
Objectively this looks like a bad idea, so why are so many closed-back headphones tuned like this?
From all my listening experience, this is exactly where you want to put a dip especially if you have a raised bass shelf. Something all these headphones do have, albeit to varying degrees.
The reason being, a bass shelf with a gradual slope into the midrange will often sound thick, boomy and on the whole distasteful.

There are other headphones which try to use a dip in this way, like the Bowers and Wilkins P9 and Meze 99 Classics, but they both start their dips higher, over 300hz and 200hz respectively.
The former is a bloated boomy mess, while the latter just sounds a bit too thick depending on the genre and recording.

I think this is the reason headphones like the DT770 Pro are still modern classics and the Rockjaw Acero in it's day found a small cult following.
This is also the reason why I can't hate the JT1.
Looking at it's overall frequency response, it is clear these are far from neutral.
They are strongly coloured.
You could even go as far as describing these as having a W-shaped signature.

If we ignore the whole ‘roller-coaster’ and focus on the general curve, it's mostly a normal’ish heaphone with an extra strong bass shelf and a few lightly exaggerated frequencies; which is how most people who aren't objectivist, purist audiophiles will hear it.

(The dip around 4KHz is also exaggerated by the miniDSP EARS which notoriously dips around 4KHz with most closed-back headphone measurements.)

Also in the case of the particular location of all these peaks and dips, it gives the impression of a much larger sound than you would get from a more accurately neutrally tuned closed-back.
You could call this a kind of artificial soundstage or positive psychoacoustic effect.

---

So while objectively there is no way anyone should ever consider a headphone like this for recording or audio production, there is definitely a group of people out there who will find this sound profile exciting.

This tuning however does not lend itself to all genres.
Basically almost anything with an electronic beat will sound lively and fun.

The bass shelf can sound quite good with some metal and hardcore music, although I noticed moments where it edged extremely close to boomy territory that it was difficult to decide if I enjoyed it or not.
It could just be that I found it a bit overwhelming.

As tunings go, this one is undeniably extremely basshead oriented, and also slightly fatiguing.
I’m a fan of strong bass, but the sound pressure from the JT1 can reach fatiguing levels sometimes.

To be clear, I can't recommend this headphone to everyone.
The timbre is hyper exaggerated.

I found it especially difficult to enjoy this with some classical music where emotional and the accuracy of the timbre is essential to conveying the emotions of the performers and their instruments, but it did breath new life into some especially bad recordings, such as 1940's jazz recordings, so the same should hold true for most genres with notoriously questionable mastering decisions like Metallica's Master of Puppets album which is missing about 10 decibels in almost the entire bass region; the JT1 corrects a lot of those problems, but it's still not perfect.

From an objective point of view, I can only give this a 5 out of 10 (which is average to be fair), as detail and staging are both really good.

From a subjective point of view, it gets an 8 out of 10 from me, as I find the bass a little overwhelming, even at lower volumes, but there are many genres that can really get your head bopping.

---

My Conclusions

Aside from the microphone which is quite frankly a bit 'meh', this is a headphone you can actually listen to music with, a headphone that isn't made entirely of plastic and marketing promises and is not only a pleasure to listen to, but a pleasure to wear.

It's certainly a much better choice than pretty much all other so-called 'gaming headsets' under 100 euros.

As I mentioned previously, I can’t recommend it to everyone, but anyone who has heard and appreciates headphones like the JVC HA-DX1000, Rockjaw Acero or the Soundmagic HP100 and can handle a bit more 'flavour', the JT1s are worth more than a cursory audition.

In any case, I think it is easily the best budget basshead headphone available today, and can only improve with careful EQ.