Ok, mine arrived a day earlier than expected (nice!)
Very brief first impressions (source: M11):
Light, comfortable, quite good passive isolation.
Bluetooth - honestly, not bad at all. I don't like BT, I'm a wired guy. I thought this was acceptable. Not the same quality as the Mobius from my V30 but not so bad that I would never use them like this.
All further comments are based on wired which did improve the overall performance, as one might expect.
Sound Signature: Quite pleasing. Prefer it to the Sony sig (though I will A/B them to double check). Bass is there but not overpowering, details are there but not sharp, soundstage is reasonable for closed cans at this price.
Sound Quality: as a separate criteria to signature, there is a slight cheapness here. Seems like I'm picking up moments of slight distortion. I'll listen more and report back. But there is a caveat at the end of this.
ANC Effectiveness: Pretty much hit expectations. Not as strong a performer as the Sonys but then it's less than half the price and as my wife quite rightly pointed out, you'd be a bit pissed if they did as well, because that's money wasted on the Sonys! Sonys are hers, by the way. I put a YouTube video of plane cabin noise on my surround system, at an unpleasantly loud volume and the Fiios knocked out 98% of it. They will certainly do a good enough job for me on the flight at this price.
ANC Sound quality/signature: Yes, ANC does strongly effect the signature with an overall muffling of the audio. It's definitely noticeable but it's not a deal-breaker for me. If you listen in a quiet environment with ANC on..well, it makes more sense to leave it off and enjoy the better quality sound. However, in a very noisy environment it's considerably less of an issue and I found it to be a reasonable quality of reproduction. Again, this is good enough for me at the price.
The caveat - here's the thing. I'm coming from the Anandas, the Nighthawks (I don't care what you think, I love them) and the InEar Prophile 8s. High quality gear. Of course, this 1300RMB pair of noise cancelling headphones do not match up. Once I stopped measuring the difference and just listened to what they were providing, I was quite pleased with my purchase.
To my mind, these are aimed pretty directly at someone like me. An audiophile who is prepared to compromise a little in the name of saving some money, especially given that each of the premium options has its own drawback. In an arena where no competitor is perfect, these provide the convenience of noise cancelling, an understated but certainly not underwhelming sound signature at a price-point that won't break the bank. I'm a happy Fiio customer, yet again.
I'll be even happier if Fiio make improvements via firmware (
@FiiO )