Quote:
Originally Posted by steviebee /img/forum/go_quote.gif
My tuppence - if you buy SF5P, you'll be always wondering 'What would Trips be like'...buy Triple Fi, and you'll just need to wonder about your source.
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I'll give a slightly different take on it even though I am someone who got SF5s last October and am now actively fund raising for TF10s:
It's going to depend upon your reaction to SF5s.
As an example, I'll use my SR60s. I love the Grado sound, I love my SR60s. One of these days, I'll get around to upgrading to a higher end Grado, but I am in no rush to do so. Why? The difference is just never going to make that much of an impact on my listening. I have limited opportunities for enjoying full sized cans, and when I do get to listen to them, I can't stand them for more than a couple of hours before my ears are begging for fresh air.
95% of my listening is on portable phones of some sort. Until the SF5s, I was very much in the earbud camp since I could match good sound with portability and comfort that lasted indefinitely. No IEM had ever done it for me, until the SF5s. Once I hit a comfortable way to wear them and maintain a seal, I had an "earpiphony". It was pretty much the sweet spot of all sorts of factors. Portability, comfort, clarity, extended value (replaceable cables rule) all rolled into a package that created the sort of audio immersion that I'd only ever found with earbuds that cost nearly as much but had to be in a very quiet environment to achieve the same transparency.
I was hooked, and I knew I wanted to take it further, with TF10s being the most logical choice.
However, in the absence of magically knowing what I know now, there's no way I would ever have bought the TF10s to start with, and had I bought them for some reason, I'd just be suffering the opposite of steviebee says, I'd be wondering if I'd have been just as happy with SF5s and the extra $150 in my pocket. TF10s cost roughly double what SF5s cost, and you won't be getting double the audio quality out of them. The improvements had better be worth that qualitatively rather than quantitatively to you, and the only way to be certain is find out what the SF5s mean to you first.
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I'm also going to point out something that no one else seems to want to ask: when you say Apple shuffle, do you mean one of the 1G shuffles with nice SigmaTel sound chip (that sadly has a bad habit of going to grave after less than a year) or one of the 2G shuffles? Because there's
no point in listening to the 2G shuffle with SF5s let alone TF10s. It's a very average sounding player with no equaliser or, well, anything.
