Martin, I have 4 brand new in the box batch 1 AP14's and can say without a doubt that sleeving is not normal. I know for a fact that P-PC's sleeves fans without the customer asking (you also have little choice in the matter), two of my AP14's came from there and are sleeved (and put back in the package backwards), and the other two came from FCPU a few weeks later and those are not sleeved. I also have some AP13's from FCPU that are going in my current mini-ITX HP build and those came unsleeved as well. FCPU will sleeve it, if you pay extra for it.

Weird thing I noticed is, I have AP15 and AP14 that have the same sticker as your AP14 but the housing of your AP15 and I know both of these are batch 1 fans.

The blades on that Cooler Master fan look a bit like the blades on the Akasa Apache and Viper fans, both of which I just got. Apache Black (maybe a AP13 or AP14 competitor) is a little bit weaker but fairly quiet and the Viper (seems to be in AP15 territory) is a good bit stronger (than the Apache) but also a good bit louder with kind of a higher pitch whine to it. . .I'll be sticking with my GT's. The Viper just seems to be a souped up Apache with different colored blades as noise and flow (all subjective test methods used) seem to match up RPM wise.