Headphones, part 1
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010For the past year, we’ve been using in-ear headphones to listen to the music we’ve reviewed on this site. Now the time has come to review the headphones themselves.
Why in-ear headphones? Two reasons come to mind. Portability: these models tend to be much less bulky than their over-the-ear counterparts. Style: some of us simply prefer not to have bulbous, Princess Leia-style headbumps. Add it the fact that many of these in-ear headphones have passive noise-cancelling abilities, making them suitable for blocking out coworkers who eat, breathe and talk at 120 decibels.
And we’re not talking about the standard white hard earbuds that come with iPods and iPhones, which, if you’re lucky, will sit in your ears. For me, the standard earbuds tend to fall out, and the noise isn’t isolated from the sounds of the world outside. That means pumping up the volume, damaging your ears and annoying everyone else around you. Plus they scream ’steal my iPod!’ or whatever storage device you do use.
The models that we had chosen were the Shure SE530 Sound Isolating Earphones and the Westone 3 True Three Way Earphones. Both offer three drivers in each earbud (two for bass, one for the higher registers) and external noise-reduction capabilities. Both will set you back somewhere between $400 and $500. They each come with a range of flanges so that the buds sit comfortably inside the external ear canal, forming a seal, essential for blocking out distracting noises and concentrating the sound waves of your choice inside your ears. (When properly fitted, the flanges don’t fall off inside the ear; they adhere to the earbuds and never once have they been left inside my ear canals.)
Both sets of headphones require a certain amount of time to warm up (usually 10 hours or so). The sounds they convey are crisp and clear, and one no longer heads to fiddle with the equalizer to make anything sound better. Not only is the music easier to appreciate, but the other sounds of performance are there to enrich your experience: the acoustics of the recording studio; the breathing of the performers; clicking and squeaking chairs; the tap of a foot upon the pedals. In spite of the layers of recording and decoding equipment that comprise digital music, these earphones highlight music as a human endeavour: music requires the performer and the listener to fulfill its purpose.
Yet, alas, even the most perfect earphones cannot be perfect all the time. The Westone 3s gave up first: the casing for an earbud fell apart. These were under warranty, and were replaced after a couple of weeks. The replacements worked for a while before they, too, abandoned their task, with one side fading in and out of commission. The Shures held up for over a year of steady use before the right earbud inexplicably weakened and finally died. Fortunately, these pair too are under warranty (one of the benefits of an expensive product, I suppose) and will be sent out for repairs.
Even with these issues, I wouldn’t give up on earphones; their sound-isolating quality is a relief for the audiophile in this noise-polluted world. Over the ear headphones give a similar experience too, but require batteries; maybe we’ll give those a try at some point in the future.




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