[spook76]

I found the blacks way to bass-y and modding them, to me, didn't help much.  Remember that the blues are neutral and the blacks and whites are -2.5db and +2.5db.  They really are very different tunings.  

True but the plus or minus is largely due to the foam. But hey I am white filter guy so my opinion is probably suspect

 

[olddude]

True but the plus or minus is largely due to the foam. 

I'm not so sure.  The foam is in both the blacks and the blues and there is a 2.5 differential.  There's NO foam in the whites and there is a 2.5 differential from the blues.  The foams in the blacks and the blues don't look all that much different.  I think there is some tuning going on in the cylinders as well.

 

[moedawg140]

 

[jelt2359]

I'm not so sure.  The foam is in both the blacks and the blues and there is a 2.5 differential.  There's NO foam in the whites and there is a 2.5 differential from the blues.  The foams in the blacks and the blues don't look all that much different.  I think there is some tuning going on in the cylinders as well.

I remember someone had looked at this and said the base of the cylinder looked different for all three filters..

 

[Music junky]

hi, I slipped the lil fomeys into the white tubes for safe keeping,

 

[olddude]

Try them and let us know how they sound.  

 

[HiFiChris]

The cylinders look pretty much identical to me but you will notice that there are different acoustic filters/dampers on the bottom (narrow end) of the tubes.

 

[Sound Eq]

Have you always used the Blacks? What is your set-up, (DAP, Tips, Cable, etc.)? Thanks. Just curious. I tried the Blacks for a Month. Liked them until the modded Blues

i like the black, I feel its really great with bass and warm maybe a tad more wam than the blues,
 
I used it with the chord hugo, and now with my ifi dsd micro and alo mk3

 

[JaZZ]

Neutral or not actually is in the ears of the listener. In my case the white filters have soon established as the most neutral. Still there's room for improvements – in the form of active equalizing in the digital domain, thanks to the FiiO X5's fine-stepped 10-band equalizer.
 
Think about it: The filters are passive equalizers of an inferior kind. An analogy would be speakers where you encase the tweeter with some sound-absorbing cloth for decreasing its loudness – instead of modifying the crossover network. Which means that you take away sonic energy which the transducer has to produce nonetheless, with useless voice-coil/membrane travel and correspondingly elevated distortion and inertia effects. Moreover the cloth may induce some reflections with corresponding transient corruption.
 
So the – theoretically – best solution would be to renounce the filter inserts and actively equalize a resulting frequency-response distortion in the digital domain. I haven't tried this yet, but certainly will. Maybe it's impossible to get a satisfying frequency-response curve that way, given the limited possibilities of a 10-band graphic equalizer; in this case I'll stay with the white filters.
 
Here's my EQ settings with the X5 and the SE846 with white filters (and Chord Hugo):    –1.6    –1.2    –0.8    –0.4    ––    –0.6    –0.6    –0.4    ––     +1

 

[olddude]

I hated the X5 equalizer (the way it was set up).  

 

[JaZZ]

  I hated the X5 equalizer (the way it was set up).  

 
Can you elaborate? I like it.

 

[olddude]

To get the eq set "as-is," you have to max out all sliders and then it will match.  Then you can reduce frequencies and push the volume to get it near where it was.  If you want to up the frequencies you have to move all sliders up to almost the top and then raise the frequencies you want up and, again, up the volume.  
 
Argh.  All I wanted was an eq setting that was the actual X5 setting, and then I could up or down sliders from there.  Much easier when all I wanted was to slightly change a few to fine-tune.Fiio's way just doesn't work for me.

 

[JaZZ]

  To get the eq set "as-is," you have to max out all sliders and then it will match.  Then you can reduce frequencies and push the volume to get it near where it was.  If you want to up the frequencies you have to move all sliders up to almost the top and then raise the frequencies you want up and, again, up the volume.  
 
Argh.  All I wanted was an eq setting that was the actual X5 setting, and then I could up or down sliders from there.  Much easier when all I wanted was to slightly change a few to fine-tune.Fiio's way just doesn't work for me.

 
You have a wrong unerstanding of digital EQs. All of them need to create a dynamic headroom as soon as you activate it to avoid clipping. That's why the gain is reduced. If you compensate for this by raising the main volume, you get identical sound to EQ off. In turn all sliders at maximum don't exactly correspond to a flat frequency response, at best by accident.

 

[olddude]

 Whatever.  I find the X5 eq clunky where some other devices have an easier (to me) eq functionality.  That said, I rarely use eq.

 

[JaZZ]

 

...That said, I rarely use eq...

 
...but prefer to swap filters...