I realize I put my impression in the wrong section, so reposting her in Reviews. --

Back to report my experience with the P5. I am going to copy most of my thoughts from my youtube comments under Honest Audiophile's video on these.

First, I drive them off of an iPhone dongle or MB Air headphone jack. I also tried them out of a very old Portaphile amp, good quality, and the sound signature didn't change.

My scores reflect the sound with the eartips I found that provide the best seal (wide bore)... Still, an 8mm ordinary driver for a $220 DD/BA earphone? No tip rolling will fix that. I suspect these are designed for a narrow bore tip, such as the one supplies... it just didn't work for me. I have Final E tips on the way which are narrow-ish, and that might completely change the 5k-7k tizziness of the P5 when used with wide bore tips.

Second, before I start, I have to correct somebody's mistake in the specifications. There is no "60mm" bass tube. 60mm is 2.4 inches. It is the length of a medium size thumb. Really? Plus hifry on youtube has broken these open, and there simply is no such tube. I think what they meant is 6mm tube.

OK, now to the sound.

1) Tips: 1/5 The red and blue are identical., but the small are narrower bore, while medium and large are larger bore... but not quite true wide bore. Anybody who posted that blue are narrow bore and red are wide bore simply made an assumption... I've measure both, and red/blue are identical. I suppose you could use a red for right and blue for left. I couldn't use them. The small were too small, and the medium didn't fit right. I just couldn't get a seal so the bass was anemic. I ended up using a Final E medium which are wide bore, which fit great and the bass came alive. I should also mention that the EQing I talk about at 8k below might be a result of the eartip that worked for me. Maybe if the medium supplied tips had worked, 8k EQing might not have been needed. The 250 and 2k Eqing i did have nothing to do with eartips.

2) Bass: 3/5 It's good most of the time but on bass heavy tracks I think it distorts a little. I have to disagree with a poster above who wrote that AFUL chose quality drivers. My guess as to why the bass shows difficulty on some tracks ... there is only so much you can get from an 8mm standard driver. This to me is the primary weakness of this set... underspec'd, cheapo bass driver. The opposite of "quality drivers". 8mm, really???

3) Mids: 3.5/5 Didn't like the mids without Eqing -- thought they were slightly muddy and pulled back, so to fix that I added 1db at 125, took out 1.7 db at 250, and added 1.7db at 2k in macEQ. Cleaned it up and the vocalist stepped forward. Some reviewers mention BA timbre. Again, as with the bass driver, AFUL didn't use quality mid drivers like Sonion, so this is to expected. BA timbre is an imbalance in tuning, and it is possible that cheap BAs are only so tunable. They really spec'd the parts for these P5 on the cheap.

4) Treble: 4/5 I eq'd 8k down 1.7 db (this is to reduce the unwanted tizziness in the 5k-7k region). I am using slightly wider bore tips than those supplied, so that could be a reason I felt the need to eq those at 8k.. but about half the reviewers of this IEM mention the same tizziness using supplied tips. I will say that listening without throttling back the 8k was OK, I could live with it, but refining it just felt more relaxed to me. The eqing down of the trebles could possibly also affect my perception of the vocals stepping more forward, just a hunch, b/c as we know changing any area of the frequency spectrum changes perception of all the other areas.

I'm keeping them. With my minor EQing to (possibly) suit the wide bore eartips I chose they sound good. I'm not a basshead, so the tiny bass driver doesn't affect my library much. I do notice the thunkiness, but can live with it. These do give me some much appreciated upper treble energy (air, more realistic cymbal strikes) that I don't get from the single DD Olina SE. Actually I don't think any singe DD can provide a sense of air.

My advise to AFUL would be threefold:

1) use a high quality 10mm bass driver. That $2 dollar cost 8mm unspecified driver (IOW probably not beryllium, or DLC or any other quality driver) are an embarrassment on any IEM above $15. It can't deliver and such an under performing driver might be found in a KZ IEM from 3 years ago. Notice how nowhere in the specs or marketing does AFUL say what the driver is? This 8mm driver cannot be fixed with any kind of EQ or eartip rolling.

2) Use quality mid and high freq BAs. The whole price point per quality has fallen in the past 18 months, and Sonion drivers are what would be expected at the +200 price level IEM, not no-name cheapo BAs.

3) Tune so that 2k is not underrepresented, and 5k-7k is not overblown. The recessed, muddy vocals can be fixed with prober 2k energy, and the tizziness/splashiness that is immediately evident in these after hearing better tuned IEMs would disappear. All of this is clearly seen in their graph and easily heard within two seconds of starting any song using these. I suspect that this is the best AFUL could do with cheapo BAs.

I would like to get the Hype2 at some point (which does use Sonion BAs for both mids and highs), or even the KiwiEars Quintet, which i suspect are different enough that I might keep both styles, so that should be a fun adventure.