Flux In-Ear Pro Headphones – Review

Flux In-Ear Pro Headphones
Steelseries
$130 U.S.

If you are agreeable with in-ear headphone cables looped behind your ears, and if you require a delicious neutral audio response without obnoxious and overpowering bass, then save your nickels and dimes and put these new Flux In-Ear Pro Headphones at the top of your wish list. When they arrive, don’t look at them and try to figure out their quirky physical design. Insert them into your left and right ears, as marked, with cables over and behind, and enjoy the best sound for the money we have experienced.

Let’s abbreviate the product name to FIEPro. Their balanced armature speaker drivers are different than the dynamic drivers typically sold. You don’t need to be an audio or acoustical engineer to hear the result with these headphones.

Included in the package is an excellent zippered storage and travel case plus different ear tips for a variety of ear canals and comfort levels. An inline microphone allows for iPhone, Skype, FaceTime, and other spoken voice situations, with basic switching between iPhone music and phone calls, for example.

Play music into FIEPro from your portable device at medium volume in your sock drawer for a few hours to condition the sensitive speaker drivers before you listen seriously. Then crank up your favorite playlist and learn afresh how to hear those songs. You will quickly think different about the $130 you just spent on your precious new FIEPro buds.

The company advises users who want to use FIEPro with the tangle-free cables in front and not behind or over the ears to switch the L and R bud positions. I don’t recommend doing so. If conventional front position audio cables are a must, buy different in-ear headphones.

Rear-ear looped placement was not previously my preference, but FIEPro converted me. I can listen comfortably for hours to all genres of music at a variety of volume levels, forgetting quickly about cable placement or unusual speaker housing design. Here is Steelseries’ web site with additional information and specs.

The audio experience is immersive, clean, precise, and accurate from the sweet spot middle of the bass spectrum through the treble zone. Low bass presence is minimal (thank goodness!), so your brain won’t feel like it has been residing within a commercial trash compactor you might see in gangster movies.

User Report

I decided not to apply any equalizer (EQ) settings to test FIEPro, so as not to add any external coloration to the sound. For my listening test, I used MOG’s streaming 320kbps premium setting for the following variety of well-recorded selections:

Just One of Those Days by Tonic Sol Fa

Automatic by Pointer Sisters

Try by Pink

Somebody More Like You by Nickel Creek

Charlie, Woody and You / Study #22  by Bruce Hornsby, Christian McBride, and Jack DeJohnette

Summer of ’69 by Bryan Adams

Don’t Pick a Fight With a Poet by Madeline Peyroux

‘Round Midnight by Vocal Spectrum.

Classical music also sounds good, but the range of recording quality on classical tracks is so vast that classical fans will have to hear FIEPro for themselves.

There are a zillion different earbuds between $10 and $200. Flux In-Ear Pro Headphones are among the very best for discerning listeners who can accept behind-ear cable placement.

MyMac Review Rating is 9 out of 10.

Bonus — another reviewer’s 4-page rave, with extensive photos and commentary.