My wallet says “SHUT UP!”
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Soooooo…y’all know I don’t get hyped easily and I shill almost never, and I’m Mr. Find The Cheaper Option.
But nah, FlipEars Legion is actually good enough to me that I can justify the cost for myself. I can try to make more words if you want them but I’d rather just listen to them, honestly lol
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That’s a sentiment I can always appreciate.
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The FlipEars Arsenal Collection or the Time I got Godfather 3’d
So guess who’s back, back again. Goober’s back, tell your friends 
. Hi there! Been a while, good to see ya. So let’s have a little talkskie, shall we. Obviously, I haven’t done one of these in a good long while, and the reasons for that are twofold: First, I haven’t been really getting my hands on a ton of IEMs the last 6-8 months. I’d only started to get sets from friends to demo in the last couple of months and I wasn’t hearing anything that was inspiring me. Most sets have gotten competent enough that they super passable but whether you’ll like them or not ends up being about personal preference more than anything. And who the heck am I to tell you what you will or won’t like? Secondly, I like to write these because they’re fun and I was not having fun with my writing. Lots of people will blow smoke up each set they listen to’s backside telling you how great it is, only to do it all over again on the next set. And I don’t think there’s really too much of a market for someone’s baseline to be “it’s probably fine. If you want it, great, but it’s not better than your current gear and if you pass, that’s probably fine too”. So with all that as a preamble, why am I here today?
Because just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in…
FlipEars, a Filipino boutique company, has dropped two very strong IEMs into the market. The $849 Legion with a 1DD/1BCD/1Electrostat setup, and the $479 Aegis, a 1DD/BCD setup. I personally bought the Legion and a friend in my tour group got the Aegis, and did me the solid of sharing so I could pit them against each other. I’ve had a good bit of time with them and I’m ready to report on what FlipEars is bringing to the table? Are they feeling themselves or are they off their rocker? Let’s discuss and find out.
Songs to Listen to and Follow Along:
As usual, I’m going to write my thoughts in generalities, but I’ll give you a sample of songs that I listen to, that will relate to the concepts I write about. Feel free to ask for specifics, if you don’t keep up with my thought processes.
Playlist
Swashers/Bubbles - Yosi Horikawa (For imaging/detail retrieval (:00-1:00 Swashers), general technicalities check (both), soundstage depth/dynamics/layering/separation (:00-:30 Bubbles))
The Speedwalker (Live at Madison Square Garden) - The Fearless Flyers (For bass elements, particularly sub-bass/mid-bass interplay, drum kits, soundstage/layering)
DISINTER MY HEART - TRAILS (For treble response and resolution, male vocals, midrange response)
Savior - Rise Against (For rock bass elements, male vocals, layering and imaging, treble clarity :38-1:30)
When I Fall (Outta Love) - Kevin Olusola (For Imaging/detail retrieval :00-:07, tonality, timbre, male/female vocal interplay)
Fundamental Elements of Madness - Dax Johnson (For soundstage width 1:10-1:26, piano tonality)
Purple Hat - Sofi Tukker (For vocal separation :40-:47, tonality, male vs. female vocal tonality throughout, sub-bass versus midbass response within mix 1:11-1:32, resolution check 1:11-1:42)
1 Thing - Sophie Powers (For sibilance, harshness/shoutiness, high volume listening check 1:28-2:01)
Wire & Guns - KID DAD (For general tonality (warmth vs. brightness) and note weight :10-:35, for high volume listening 1:34-2:08)
Dusty Blue - Charles Bradley (For soundstage width, imaging and layering :11-:45)
Hide & Seek (Rema remix) - Stormzy (For sub-bass check throughout)
Resynthesis 3D (Binaural Version - Headphones only) - Max Cooper (For bass elements, imaging/layering elements throughout)
THE SOUND
Let me introduce you to my madness, knock your psyche straight up off its axis; Breaking into all of my bad habits, I’m a good girl, but the darkness like a magnet
Voices - Hidden Citizens
(IEM Tuning Style: Both Sets V-Shape)
When listening to the Aegis and Legion, I can say right away that FlipEars is a company that has a consistent vision. They are not trying out multiple different tunings at their different price points. No, they are starting from the same baseline of a strong v-shape signature: Hearty bass, spacious mids with present vocals and treble. Those are the general similarities, but obviously these two sets have different dynamics they play towards, otherwise there would be no real point in having them both. So I’ll go one-by-one to walk through what each set is bringing to the table.
Aegis - Aegis has Big Booty Bass. Large quantity, large impact, but real quality. It doesn’t have obscene elevation (like a FatFreq Scarlet Mini) and that is to its benefit. Outside of novelty and “just proving you can”, you don’t need to go full FatFreq. Also, Aegis just does its mids better anyway. Basshead doesn’t have to mean dark and unmusical. The best basshead is balanced to let you play the music you want to play, just getting some dank extra bass to bump with. FlipEars understands this and gives it to you with Aegis. I also think that a lot of the Penon offerings that are bass/mids forward but just lack something, or don’t sit and stay with you, wish they were the Aegis. Sets like Penon Serial, 10th Anniversary (that I have heard), Quatro or Turbo (that I haven’t) have been good in their time but are outclassed by a set like Aegis. Where Aegis leaves a little on the table is in the technicals. They certainly aren’t bad, don’t get me wrong. Soundstage is a little flat though; you get a good amount of wide but I’ve heard better layering. Imaging is pretty good in that horizontal plane, though. To put it all together, if I was starting from scratch, and had $500 to buy one IEM to be my bassy-balanced set, and wanted the best I’d have Aegis on the absolute shortlist, if not being the outright choice.
Legion - Legion is a very well balanced, bassy set. It gives up a little bit of pure quantity of bass to have a responsive, dynamic, textured bass that is just excellent. Particularly in the midbass, there are scant few sets that are anywhere near the class of midbass I hear in the Legion. I could listen to nothing but kick drums for hours because these absolutely nail the power and feel. And they have a resolution bump, that just makes everything sound a little cleaner and precise. If Aegis sounds like speakers at a venue (big sounding but kinda analog and a tinge of fuzzy), Legion sounds like studio speakers (clean, reproducing everything and letting you get a grip on the elements of the sound). The technicals are just beyond Aegis and the soundstage is simply bigger and more immersive. Even the fit is a win for Legion: While it is absolutely a chonk set, compared to Aegis, the actual nozzle just glides in my ears. It’s not to say that Aegis is a bad fit, but Legion is absolutely the winner for my ear. So no matter what way I cut it, Legion is a pure upgrade for me, on Aegis.
THE GOOD
- (Both): Disgustingly beautiful IEMs. They put a lot of time and effort into the aesthetic and I fully approve for both
- (Both): Bassy IEMs done about as right as possible
- (Aegis): High bass quantity with impressive quality
- It’s not boomy or bloated, but very textured
- (Aegis): Easier listening of the two sets
- in some ways more of the EDC of the two, for just floating away with the music
- (Legion): Good bass quantity with amazing quality
- Outside of quantity, a straight upgrade on Aegis
- (Legion): Technical upgrade on Aegis
- Resolution, Soundstage, imaging all take a leap and makes Legion better for critical listening
THE BAD
- (Both): If the aesthetic isn’t for you, these would be a bit garish of a pair of IEMs
- (Aegis): Not nearly as technical
- Leaves meat on the bone in soundstage and resolution compared to Legion
- (Aegis): For me, the fit on Legion is surprisingly better. YMMV
- (Aegis): For me, the vocals are pushed a step too far forward
- Can have moments of sibilance at their worst
- (Legion): Is probably more unforgiving overall than Aegis
WHO IS THIS SET FOR?
- (Both): The bass aficionados out there
- (Aegis): Someone who wants more powerful bass and more forward vocals
- You want the Viest of V-Shapes
- (Legion): Someone who wants Bass-Balanced done to the highest degree
- You want a set that can compete with kilobuck plus priced IEMs for not kilobuck dollars
WHO IS THIS SET NOT FOR?
- (Both): Those who are more about the neutral or treble-centric sets
- If you want the cleanliness of a Blessing, Pilgrim, etc. then this won’t do it for you
- (Aegis): You want a more technical or balanced IEM with your bass
- I think this comfortably beats any Fatfreq set in the Maestro/Scarlet line I’ve heard but it’s not the last word on technicals
- (Aegis): Anyone who is shy with their volume
- You don’t have to blow your ears out but to get the best of them, you do need to be willing to push your comfort zone with volume
- (Legion): The budget conscious
- $849 is still a big ask
- (Legion): Someone who doesn’t look for the most critical listening type sets
- It’s more balanced but it still might be more than you want
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
Of the two IEMs, I’ll start with the simpler evaluation: I was listening to Aegis for a good 45-50 mins while writing this out and formatting. I was figuring out how I wanted to say what I wanted to say, and using that as eartime with Aegis to formulate fresh thoughts and ideas. A certain way in, I switched to Legion and the first (and only) real thought I had was “Wow, everything just got better”. Legion gives up a little in the sub-bass to be better basically everywhere else. The biggest caveat I can give is probably if you’d end up being sensitive to the high-end that Legion’s electrostat driver puts out, Legion might be a no-go. Otherwise, having my preference to all-rounder sets, I can’t think of a scenario where I’d pick Aegis over Legion. Full stop.
Moving on to Aegis, I still don’t know if I’ve fully come to grips with how I feel about it. Aegis is a really very good basshead set, and quite possibly is the best under $500. I want to give them their flowers first. That said, while I do recommend Aegis in a vacuum, I’m not sure how I feel about it in the market as a whole. If you don’t have your basshead set and want one piece to add to your collection (and have the budget for it) then yeah, go rock Aegis and do it happily. If you are a basshead and want the best (and this is in your budget), go crazy. My personal holdup is at the intersection of “I want a great basshead set”, “I already have good basshead IEMs” and “Do I want to spend $500 on a specialist set?”
This brings me back to Legion. I’d rather save up a little more and just get Legion. In my opinion, it’s better at almost everything IEMs do, is more versatile with my varied music tastes, it fits better for me, and more than being a one-and-done specialist, it’s a one-and-done TOTL challenger. For example, I know the Canpur 622B is a highly praised multi-kilobuck TOTL set, and it was really good but never grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. FlipEars Legion knocks my socks off for like a quarter of the price.
So what I got is two IEMs from the same family that are meant for different purposes: Aegis is your comfort food, thick and fulfilling, that will hit the right spot on the days you crave it. But it’s probably at its best when it’s not your main/only meal. Legion is a little more fine dining, but doing it on a relative budget. This is the one that is for when you’re feeling fancy and want to go a little over the top, in the best way possible. And that’s going to be it for this review. Enjoy your days, and take care till next time!
Rank for Arsenal Collection: Aegis - A; Legion - S
Rank With Personal Bias: Aegis - A; Legion - S+
Recommendation Level: Both: Highly Recommended
Rank As a Food: Aegis: Fisherman’s Platter
Legion: Happy Hour Oyster Bar
11 Likes
Great review. Legion is an absolute heavy hitter and one of the best balanced good for everything basshead sets I’ve heard. Quickly becoming one of my Top 5 sets to date. Can’t wait to demo Aegis and see if my comparison draws similar conclusions to you.
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oh hey, since you are here. iirc, you have an unraid server right? What specs do you have for it? Are you running powertop and if so what c state do you get on it and whats the idle power drain?
Currently trying out unraid on my old pc and i can only get to C3 and its idling at around 23W (no hdds) with my i5 4670k…
Really wanna ditch my synology for ethical reasons (they are self destructing over their decisions…) and for worrying what would happen if it dies.
Got a few potential builds:
^with this case:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007574782486.html
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Yes I’m om unRAID I’m running a x470 Mobo, 3900X AMD CPU, 64GB RAM and a P2200 for Plex Transcodes. With a 512 GB NVME in RAID for my Cache drive, a 1 TB SSD in RAID for a Pool and 42 TB soon to be 66 all stuffed in a Fractal R5 which can hold up to 16 HDDs. Using an HBA card flashed in IT Mode to run all the HDDs as my mobo doesn’t have enough SATA ports.
For the power supply I went overall at 1200w even though my draw only hovers around 130 according to my UPS. Choice to go overkill because it allows the power supply to run in silent mode never spinning up it’s fan. My drives are set to never spin down but, here in Florida power is pretty cheap. My rough estimates are that my server only cost around $4 a month for power.
Went to unRAID myself from a Synology. Got in before the new price hikes however, I love it despite the hikes. I’d easily pay the current price if I had to. The docker implementation with the app store is really the selling point for me along with the new Tailscale implementations in v7.
Heres some screenshots of my setup:
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Any particular reason for picking an HBA card instead of a controller? Like the ones you see here:
https://forums.unraid.net/topic/102010-recommended-controllers-for-unraid/
Since afaik HBA cards consume quite a bit more power AND doesnt allow the CPU to go into deeper C states, so even worse power consumption.
With your setup 1200W does seem like an extreme overkill and inefficient.
The psus I picked scored pretty well here under the 20-80w range which is where most psus struggle with afaik.
aa yeah, unraid has increased prices, actually twice in a year…although the second one is for old users.
https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/1kqj84z/wait_what/
Thats still nowhere near the scummy things Synology is doing…like removing support for 3rd party drives other than their “own” Synology drives (MUCH more expensive and its just rebranded toshiba drives afaik). This is the reason why Im considering moving to a new unraid setup even if I dont need an upgrade hardware wise yet. Because if my synology nas suddenly dies on me, i would need to buy a new synology but NOT the 2025 versions (where the hard drive lockdown is). So it wouldnt be an upgrade at all for me and it would still cost around the same money as on a new unraid server with MUCH better hardware.
Are you only using the built in docker manager in Unraid and not something like Portainer, Dockge or Komodo? Not sure I like the built in one for unraid, except if there are templates that can be installed in one click. And no system monitoring containers? Like Beszel:
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Like mentioned I’m not worried about power with the prices here. My server primarily serves as my cable tv/movie replacement so any money spend powering it on and for usenet services is already way cheaper than paying/rent tv and movies. I went with the HBA card for a few reasons. My mobo has enough for two of them and each can do 8 drives which would max out my case. Second the SAS to SATA cables are way more flexible than SATA to SATA cables. Got alot going on in my my case and I’m a stickler for cable management
Might be overkill but I bought it before the covid spikes on prices. Only paid $120 for it. It also has plenty of SATA connectors if I max out my drives.
I’ve been following the price increases. My current license on the server is the grandfathered unlimited drive one. Bought a second license, that is sitting dormant, before the price increases in case I decide to ever do a second server.
Yes I’m using the built in one. However, just because a docker isn’t in the app store doesn’t mean you can’t add it. You can make a template manually or via a yaml if there’s a prebuilt docker for it. My server is a mix of both app store templates and ones I manually made. The good thing is if you make one manually the template XML is saved to the flash drive which you can be backuped with a plugin. So if I were ever to setup a second system I’d just need to dump the templates in the correct folder and voila.
For monitoring the server I find the builtin function sufficient with notifications going to my discord server. As for monitoring dockers I’ve seen apps that will monitor and notify on log errors in the app store just never felt the need to use one. My server is going on five years soon and I’ve had minimal issues error wise with dockers other than on first setup. For the most part the server just chugs along doing it’s thing. I probably only actively have to do maintenance and check on things once a month and it’s usually around 15 minutes max.
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I’ve heard good things about the Jonsbo cases. It’s probably go this route if I were to built a smaller server than what I’m currently running. For the CPU just make sure that it has Quik Sync capability so in the event you want to run Plex or Jellyfin you have the capability to do hardware transcoding. When I started my unRAID journey I was unaware of this. If I were building a new server today I’d definitely go the Intel route for this alone. Though intel equivalent processors tend to run more expense by the time you add an NVidia card for transcoding on AMD the prices end up balancing out.
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Idk if this is allowed, but I put a post up in the selling/buying thread and saw people taking about Flipears here just now.
Selling my Flipears Aegis - brilliant set, could stop here but I’m going balls out for the upcoming Flipears kilobuck set.
DM if interested 
If Knights Templar used IEM’s then that would’ve been standard issue…a little too fussy for my taste though.
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Yeah, that’s why it’s a pro and a con. If you don’t like the aesthetic, I can’t say anything otherwise.
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aa right, I believe you need one of the plugins for that? That is where I prefer those 3rd party managers.
Tried it out with gmail notificatios like on synology, works as well as it does. Although just a bit more advanced to set up than just typing in your email.
what log errors do you mean?
Something outside of these?
(wonder what happens if it tries to send a notification to the browser and the browser aint open…)
Yeah its either the Jonsbo N5 with ATX support (the N3 is too small…only ITX boards which lacks a lot of ports and may not be good for “future proofing”, N4 sucks apparently) or the sagittarius case on ali.
^ with matx support which may be better for getting deeper c states and thus less power consumption.
Absolutely, that and the low idle energy consumption is why i am going Intel and not AMD.
I am honestly not sure if I need to add a dGPU…(I do have my old 1060 I could use but it lacks some codecs like AV1).
My only worry about intel route is that there may not be another generation of 1700 socket CPUs from them…while if I went with AM5 there should be more (they did promise support up to 2027 at least)…but from what I know even an intel 12100 is overkill for nas/server use…
edit:
on my synology i have a “docker” share where i put all my docker container folders. But on unraid, i think the standard is to put it in appdata instead?
I believe splitting up the ISO folder and the actual VM folder is how you should do it with vms though.
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No plugin needed manually just go to the docker tap and hit add docker then add the variables as defined in whatever project your adding.
Doscord Notifications are super easy to setup and a lot of apps use them ass well. I created a discord server just for my server and then channels for each app.
Yes. I was referring to docker apps that may have errors and are reported in their log. There is another docker app that monitors the logs of containers for key words you set. Then you can set notifications.
For the GPU it depends. You can have the GPU tied to either Dockers or VMs but not both. If I were you I’d use the integrated GPU for Dockers, like PLex Transcodes, and if you run and VM add a dedicated GPU like a cheaper 1660 for them.
Yes if done correctly all your appdata, mostly configs, goes in that location. Just make sure as you setup dockers you get the host and docker paths correct. You don’t want the data bing written to the appdata as that normally sits on a smaller cache drive. You want the data being written to the array. Can sort of see what I’m talking about here.
Lastly by default unRAID uses a preset docker image size. Once it fills up its a bit tricky to enlarge it. I recommend using the directory method as seen below and having it use an NVME.
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aa I get what you mean now. I find that quite annoying and prefer using portainer if i have to use yaml/compose files though.
(easy copy and paste.)
Do you mean this?
I do not have a setup for my docker logs on my synology atm, may give it a try on my oldpc/unraid for testing.
hmmm, do you mean like this?
Only got 2 SATA SSDs in this oldpc but with an actual server you want the HDDs to be in the “array devices” (with 1 or 2 parity drives) and the nvme SSDs in the “pool devices” right?
Shouldnt your “default appdata storage location” be set to “mnt/cache/appdata/”?
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