šŸ”¶ Tin P1 - Planar IEM

I think no :grinning:

I love how this perfectly shows me how subjective audio is. My opinion is the exact opposite of yours. I LOVE the P1. The bass is good (with the front port covered) and I NEVER find sibilance unless the song is sibilant by nature. The tight, in your face sound is fun/exiting and the detail is just perfection. The P1 are the best fitting IEM I have (I only have 3) and even though I didnā€™t like the cable at first, after letting it sit out unwrapped over night I ended up liking itā€™s light and flexible (and admittedly ugly) weave. But hay, I love pineapple on pizza so I might just be a crazy person.

Also it sounds like you might prefer the IKKO OH10 from what people have said about it (I donā€™t own a pair yet).

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Yeah I do like the OH10 but they didnā€™t work with my outer ear so I got Campfire Comets and the OH10 and Comets are like brother and sister.
Everyone is strange but the in me and thee is a little bit odd. :crazy_face:

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I would definitely like to see reactions to this comment in the OH10 thread. :joy:

I would like to know the answer to this question as well. It seems that it is the same cable.

No theyā€™re different the P1 cable is simply twisted togetherā€¦

where as the LSC09 is braidedā€¦

Youā€™re right. I have checked the Amazon.com reviews and someone mentioned the type of the original cable. It is not the same as the LSC09.

So revelation time, P1 with power, minor bass boost, and Dirac Sensaround and doneā€¦The end of everything. Really impressed with this set now as they excelled with layering before, but now that you add depth they do sound way more speaker like. LOVE!

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Feel like Rose Mini 3 Pro is the real alternative for Tin P1. Similar sound signature, sound stage, lack in sub bass just like P1. Nice detail retrieval, and inside ur brain kinda feel. Easy to drive. 3BA setup, not sure what they are probably their own custom drivers or Sonions. Instant like. The pics donā€™t do justice for how small these really are. These with decent bluetooth mmcx cable should be a gr8. Treble is crips af but not fatiguing like Tape. Happy with the impulse purchase.

PS: Not by any means a P1 replacement or upgrage to it. Just the same taste in a different package.

Honestly I want to buy a rose mini just because of how small they are lol, it just looks so tiny

its sooooooo tiny. I had some ideas that it will be small, but to experience in person it really is tiny.

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So, adding the micropore cloth tape to the P1 did help the bass, good stuff! :smiley:

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cool, can u share pics. I am using it without filters and stock foam, iā€™ll experiment too

Thereā€™s one pictured on the Shuoer P1 threadā€¦ here it is :+1:

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Mine is not very pretty but ill work on making it smaller, may even try with different tape later, nothing wrong with having mod materials, or medical equipment around :wink:

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For substantial bass boost, Iā€™ve been using Final Audio Type E Tips with my P1ā€™s (along with medical tape thingy, although I donā€™t need it). Youā€™ll lose ALL of the mids and treble sparkle, but can get it back with EQ. These tips change the sound signature significantly, so I donā€™t recommend to those who donā€™t EQ.

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Hello, friends. First post here or on any audio-centric forum. I mostly just want to introduce myself here and the P1 thread seems the place to do it, for reasons noted below if youā€™re at all interested.

Sorry for the longpost (not an awesome way to endear myself to a new board, but ā€¦ well, it wouldnā€™t be honest to say Iā€™m usually concise), so hereā€™s the TL;DR: My old and only pair of IEMs broke. I discovered ChiFi and this entire world. Shit snowballed from there, and now I have a pair of P1s and what I think is a very nice set of accessories to make them shine on the way. Iā€™m looking for any recommendations on how best to make these shine, particularly by bringing up the low end. Iā€™ve covered the vents and have a powerful source on the way, and Iā€™m thinkig of pairing it wtih the Airist Rdac which seems like a good choice because it provides some warm coloration and hopefully will give the lower mids and the low end some more oomph. I know, I know: READ THE THREAD. Iā€™m reading it. But itā€™s like 340 posts long and that will take me time, and in the meantime, like I said, I wanted to introduce myself.

I only recently fell into this hobby. I donā€™t think I make a very good audiophile. I have severe tinnuitus and seruious hearling loss above 4 khz. Iā€™m one of those people who believes that a 20-bit / 48khz PCM recording most likely faithfully reproduces anything the human ear can hear. Iā€™ve never heard a DSD recording that I thought sounded perceptibly superior to what PCM is capable of producing, and Iā€™ve heard some that to me sounded very noticeably bad. And yet, Iā€™ve more or less reliably been able, as long as I can rermember, to tell the difference between, say, 256kbps AAC and raw 16/44.1 PCM. Or, at least, once I notice the difference, I have a lot of trouble un-noticing it. Iā€™m fascinated by the relationship between what physics says our ears, CDs, DSD, and vinyl records are and arenā€™t able to do with sound, and what many people, myself included, doggedly insist they experience to the contrary.

But mostly, Iā€™ve stayed away. Iā€™ve been on AVS Forum for over 20 years and the few times Iā€™ve waded into the audio-only boards, I felt like I was seeing some shit - the kind of feeling like when youā€™re at a party, and you think, hey, I already drink and smoke too much, maybe I need to go ahead and not try that coke, too.

Then my trusty old Klipsch S3s finally died. Within a month, Iā€™d discovered both Chi-fi and Massdrop. I found Tin T2s for a pittance, to which a couple of very authoritative-seeming strangers on the internet named Crinacle and Zeos had written love letters. They sounded great, blowing away my beloved S3s in ways Iā€™d never imagined possible.

Not long after that, I saw Zā€™s review of the P1s and became understandably very intrigued. Then I read Crinacleā€™s and numerous others and was fascinated by the controversy. How could knowledgable, well meaning people disagree this much on an IEM? Based on what I read everywhere, though, it sounded like these could be up my alley. I listen to a lot of very dense, production-heavy music (a lot of industrial/goth/metal material, trip hop, industrial hip-hop, I know Iā€™m aging and possibly also embarrassing myself), and the idea that a planar could resolve a million layers of otherwise wall-of-sound type textures into a spatially coherent soundscape was an absolutely tantalizing notion.

So, I took the plunge, and the second I listened to these things, I was hearing things Iā€™d never heard before, including in songs Iā€™ve listened to literally thousands and thousands of times over the course of the last 30 years. Love with at first sound with the dimensionality, imaging and separation (words I generally hate and may not be using correctly at all). The promise of bringing order and space to incredibly dense music was 100% absolutely realized. And the bass sounded like a goddamn cell phone speaker. But Iā€™m committed to these things, so now Iā€™m just trying to find the right ways to beef up that low end, my. I think Iā€™m getting there.

Iā€™m no bass-head, either. I was convinced those Klipschs were nearly endgame material for I donā€™t know how long. I got a pair of 1More Quads that I resolved Iā€™ll likely never use except for hip-hop, and even then, thatā€™s after EQ-ing the shit out of the lower midrange to get rid of what I was convinced was really obvious and substantial blooming of high-end bass. Thus my faith that I can get he P1s where I need them.

Iā€™ve done the outlet covering thing with tiny bits of electrical tape. Betweeen that and hours of listening (whether itā€™s really ā€œbreak-inā€ or just psychological habituation - Iā€™m genuinely on the fence on that topic - I donā€™t really know or care), I think thereā€™s been significant improvement. Thereā€™s some pointlessness to this endeavor right now because Iā€™m on the road for the holidays and that means my source is either a Samsung Note 8 or a Microsoft Surface Pro.

Iā€™ve got an Airist Rdac at home that is going to waste hooked up to my committedly mid-fi speaker set which is constructed entirely for my first love, home theater. I never, ever listen to music on it or any other speakers (Lots of Parental Advisory stickers - not compatible with my two little girls who are afraid of anything that isnā€™t Frozen). I listen to 90% of my music on a mobile or desktop-level device, mostly at work, where I spend an enormous amount of time. So I think Iā€™m going to stack my RDac with an SMSL SP200 which is on its way in the mail and just feed that with USB, and thatā€™ll be where my P1s live. I also bought some alleged bang-for-buck MMCX cables from a vendor I canā€™t pronounce on aliexpress.

Now I just need to try some tips. The larger of the two foam ones that came with the P1s are pretty comfortable, but they like the rest in the bundle seem to want to disengage from either my ears or the modules. Nothing has ever held a candle to the oblong Klipsch tips in my mind, but they donā€™t fit and I canā€™t seem to find third-party tips of a comparable design. I guess Iā€™ll try the Final Type Es.

So, thatā€™s the story of about I fell into an IEM and Chi-Fi habit and what Iā€™m doing to try to make my P1s shine. I will now return to making my way through the whole thread. Glad to be here.

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I appreciate you taking the time to post. P1 and bass will be something that will be talked about. Iā€™ll be curious once you power them with an amp rather than a phone/surface.

I do think they are a different beast powered properly.

Blockquotea lot of industrial/goth/metal material, trip hop, industrial hip-hop, I know Iā€™m aging and possibly also embarrassing myself

Not at all. A lot of what you mentioned are the kinds of music I listen to as a 22 year old gen z ā€œkidā€.

If youā€™re looking for portable amp/dacs for the P1 try the xDuoo xd-05 plus.
https://www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Turntable-Receiver-Headphone-Amplifier/dp/B07WNMZ27W/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?keywords=xduoo%2Bbluetooth&qid=1569285005&s=gateway&sprefix=xDuoo%2Bblu&sr=8-1&th=1&psc=1

Itā€™s usually about $230 on massdrop. The P1 love power and it has 1W per channel (a lot for a portable or small desktop) and a tasteful bass boost. Plus itā€™s a bit warm sounding with swappable op amps so you could add even more warmth with some burson op amps.
A good desk top amp to go with your R2R might be the Asgard 3 from what I hear. Itā€™s supposed to be a warm like all schiit stuff and has 3.5W per channel.

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Haha, thanks. Itā€™s hard to be both an audiophile and also primarily a metalhead or lover of mainly 80-90s industrial at the same time. The qualities prized by enthusiasts are kind of the opposite of what you hear in a lot of metal and industrial music, while the music itself often features production that is simultaneously highly challenging to equipment, but just as often was not produced with particularly high-grade equipment. Every now and then you get a production masterpiece like The Fragile or Mechanical Animals, but just as often youā€™re listening to something by Skinny Puppy that was produced on half-trashed equipment in 1985 and will not be getting any kind of loving restoration and remaster anytime soon, much less high-res or DSD release. I would love to hear what something like DSD512 sounds like, or native DXD, but the music I love most will likely never be targeted for release by blue-chip producers looking to issue the most pristine-quality recording possible for the hifi set.

Not sure if youā€™re familiar, but Iā€™ve actually found myself using a lot of PIG as demo material. One of my hands-down favorite artists overall, and if youā€™re not familiar, definitely worth checking out for fans of, say, Nine Inch Nails, Rammstein and/or KMFDM. Especially the 1995 and 96 releases Sinsation and Wrecked, which are probably the most accessible as techno-infused metal. They both absolutely run the gamut in terms of material ripe for testing whata system is capable of across the board.

Trying out new speakers, DAC, headphones/IEMs, even buds, my first listens are often ā€œWrecked,ā€ ā€œSave Meā€ and ā€œNo One Gets Out of Her Aliveā€ from Wrecked.

Theyā€™re generally well recorded and feature layers upon layers of instrumentaiton, loops, effects, and textrures of all stripes, as well as deep bass, wide open sound fields, and intricate details in the high end. At least as far as industrial-metal-style music goes. Those tracks give me a good litmus test for whether the system can reproduce the full range of sound with a high degree of precision and separation ā€“ the sound is so dense in spots that itā€™s very easy for the multitudes of layers to just collapse into an abrasive wall of sound, or for whole instruments to just be lost entirely.

I think overall this style of music needs equipment that is coldly clinicial and precise, that images brilliantly, and that can produce as much low-end punch as possible without too much resonance. Resonant bass begins to sound like distortion (a lot of distortion) very easily. The only speakers Iā€™ve ever heard do this music true justice were my dadā€™s Yamaha NS-1000 monitors, fed by his fire-breathing Yamaha CR-2020, which weighed about as much as the speakers did, back home when I was a teenager.

So far, the P1s are the only IEM Iā€™ve ever heard that have demonstrated the speed and precision to turn all the crazy instrumentation on something like ā€œNo One Gets Out of Her Aliveā€ into an accessible, 3-dimensional soundscape. On my home theater, the same track just collapses flat ā€“ and the Airist, I found, actually made that worse compared to my Oppo 203ā€™s DACs, which are a lot more clinical. Not particualrly surprising, as the setup is not at all designed for music - Iā€™m running old Polk RT-800i mains, with matched CS-400i center, CS-1000i surrounds and CS-25i back surrounds, with a Velodyne CT-120 sub, with high ceilings, and every surface is flat and unadorned (itā€™s an old Victorian we just moved into and we desperately need basic things like rugs, art, decorations of any kind, etc.)

My theory is that the P1s are so fast, clinical and incredibly precise that if I use the RDAC and the heaping ton of clean-ass power like you get with the THX-888 platform, together theā€™ll be able to warm the signature up, add enough of the right kind of harmonic distortion to make it a little less intense an attack and bring that bass up hopefully just to the point where itā€™s above the line.

Also, as an aside, when it comes to demo-quality metal, I gotta say: Donā€™t sleep on Chinese Democracy. I know many people canā€™t stand the thought or the metaphysical fact of that albumā€™s existence, but it is an absolute reference-quality hard rock recording. A real rarity in the 21st century, sadly.

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