Fit and Comfort

This is a nice example of why I prefer silicone tips more often than not. The TinHiFi T5, with all the modeling the company claims to have done, might as well be a set of custom IEMs for my ears and that artificial ear mold that about perfectly represents my own experiences. This is especially true with the silicon tips, and either type was the same here, but the memory foam tips are harder to get right instantly and need more trial and error to where I personally just would not bother with them here. I have averagely sized ears, and the T5 fits my concha almost perfectly with balanced support on the antitragus at the bottom and the tragus on the side. Smaller ears may not fare as well, though, since this is clearly average-sized for IEMs and not smaller, such as the Ikko OH1S or Campfire Satsuma/Honeydew from before. Between this excellent fit and a weight of ~7.5 g per bud, I had no issues fitting the TinHiFi T5 in my ears and keeping them there. The vents work nicely in providing a good balance of comfort and isolation, and here too the silicone tips add symbiotically to the experience.

Audio Performance

Audio Hardware

This section is easy enough to talk about because there is not much going on inside. As with most of the recent IEM reviews here, TinHiFi is using a single driver system and has gone with the more traditional dynamic driver setup with an elevated bass response. The driver itself is fairly unique with the adoption of what TinHiFi calls a DOC diaphragm driver, though. DCL, or diamond-like-carbon, is one of the popular material choices for dynamic diaphragms, and this new 10 mm DOC Diamond diaphragm apparently uses "an enhanced molecular carbon atom structure and composition that more closely mirrors that of diamond." What that effectively results in is a sturdier driver that should not change much over time, thinner and up to 60% stronger than the typical ceramic drivers, and a bunch of marketing talk about the frequency response we will test for to be sure.

The driver is complemented by the shell design that has undergone more modeling to make the angular structure better reflect sound waves. Driving these will take more power than the average IEMs, with a rated total impedance of 48 Ω, so a portable DAC/amp or even dedicated DAP might be nice to have on the go, especially with the lack of a 3.5 mm jack on most phones today. If not on the go, space is less of an issue, but the cable length at 1.25 m might be a potential handicap if connecting to a PC as the audio source. TinHiFi also rates the signal sensitivity at 103 dB and a frequency response of 10 Hz to 20 kHz, but good luck making use of that!

Frequency Measurement and Listening

I will mention that I have a general preference for a warm neutral signature, emphasizing a slightly elevated bass and smooth trebles with detailed mids and good tonal separation. I also generally prefer instrumental music over vocals, with favored genres include jazz and classical music.


Our reproducible testing methodology begins with an IEC711 audio coupler/artificial ear that ear buds can feed into enough to have decent isolation similar to real ears. The audio coupler feeds into a USB sound card, which in turn goes to a laptop that has ARTA and REW running and the earphones connected to the laptop through the sound card. I begin with an impulse measurement to test for signal fidelity, calibrate the sound card and channel output, account for floor noise, and finally test the frequency response of each channel separately. Octave smoothing is at the 1/6th setting, which nets a good balance of detail and noise not being identified as useful data. Also, the default tuning was used for testing, and no app-based settings were chosen unless specifically mentioned. Each sample of interest is tested thrice with separate mounts to account for any fit issues, and an average is taken of the three individual measurements for statistical accuracy. For IEMs, I am also using the ear mold that fits to the audio coupler for a separate test to compare how the IEMs fare when installed in an ear geometry instead of just the audio coupler. The raw data is then exported from REW and plotted in OriginPro for easier comparison.


Now, after calibrating the sound card and accounting for the base floor noise levels, I am a touch more confident about the SPL label, but there is likely still a significant offset across the board owing to the overall resistance and impedance in the system and the operating volume/gain. I should also normalize the curves to a set frequency, but the IEC711 is such that you can't really compare these results with most other test setups anyway, just within our own library of measurements. What is really useful information is how the left and right channels of TinHiFi T5 earphones work across the rated frequency response, or at least the useful part of it. The left earbud was separately tested from the right one, and colored differently for contrast. I did my best to ensure an identical fit for both inside the IEC711 orifice, so note how the two are fairly close here. However, the right channel is consistently under-boosted, all the way from the lows to the mids and through the highs, but the difference is so small you won't really notice it.

The use of a single dynamic driver almost guaranteed an elevated bass response, and we get very good sub-base feedback to where bassheads might well be satisfied. The lows generally have plenty of energy, a touch more than I would personally like to where heavy metal fans will not be found wanting for that added punch. I have to say that there is more brute force and not as much clarity in the bass response than I like. Not once did I have to turn the volume past 50% on these, as the warm signature lends itself more favorably to hip hop and rock going towards the lower mids. The transition is smooth enough, but the mids generally have a larger dip than I would like to where vocals as a whole are unimpressive. In fact, this is where psychoacoustics played more of a role than I thought since the entire midrange was even worse to listen to than the curve might suggest. Yes, it does look like pop and rock music should be plenty fine, but it sounded even worse than the less expensive BLON BL-A8 to me.

Female vocals are worse than male vocals except when paired with any sort of house/electronic music where male vocals will be harder to distinguish. There is some shrillness going from the upper mids to the highs, but this is probably the best response region of the TinHiFi T5, with a much smoother follow through before the eventual dip. There is an even balance here, which adds positively to the elevated upper mids. String instruments and classical music as a whole sound fantastic, and that peak around 10 kHz will in fact result in clear tonal separation between various orchestral sounds, including cymbals and triangles. This helps elevate the soundstage to where I would classify it as more tall than deep if visualized in three dimensions as an imaginary earcup on your ears.


Here we see how the TinHiFi T5 tests when fit into an artificial ear mold to better represent reality. This also involves the fit factor, so the audio coupler typically is a better idea for comparisons, a truer test of the factory tuning itself. With the artificial ear mold of the test setup, I used a different color to show it is still the right channel but not directly fitted in the audio coupler (which remains there as a control). We see a near-identical bass response, but soon after, it dips further than the already depressed right channel compared to the left one. Notice that the treble response is also far more similar to the more ideal test case, including with minimal peaks shifts. Classical music is surprisingly a favored genre here, but I have to say that this might be the least impressive IEM tested to date overall outside of the TWS kind. I do not know how this compares to the other TinHiFi IEMs, so I can only hope this is not a true representation for the brand since there was a lot of promise, but it failed where it mattered the most.