I just got these headphones after finally taking the plunge and buying some decent headphones for my 4th Gen iPod. You see I was on my 3rd pair of iPod headphones by this time, all previously have been replaced through the warranty, and the ones which I had were buzzing in the left ear AGAIN! Although the iPod headphones are exceptionally good for bundled headphones, they are susceptible to damage, especially if you keep them in your trouser pocket all day, every day!
So as I said, I went and splashed out £55 on these Shure headphones, expecting them to be immense for the amount of money I was paying. At first, I was pleasantly surprised with the packaging, especially with the carrying case for the headphones and all of the different sleeves for the tips of the earpiece.
It took a while to work out how to get them in properly, in the right ears (the instructions must have been wrong or I must have misread them as I was putting them in the wrong ears for the first few days!). Shure’s website has a great tutorial for putting in the headphones and getting them to function properly.
Once I did have the headphones in, the effect was immense. It instantly cancelled out pretty much all noise, except for the low drone of the train that I was on, even though I had no music playing through them at that time! When the music was playing, aside from not hearing any external noise whatsoever, the quality was superb, these headphones really define crystal clear sound! I have even noticed parts of songs that I do not normally hear when using the iPod headphones, for example, in Whole Lotta Love, the repeater on all of the vocals!
The included sleeves for the headphones, yellow foam ones that expand in your ears to create a seal, black soft rubber sleeves and colourless harder rubber sleeves (all in 3 sizes) all work really well, but overall, although I preferred the yellow foam sleeves as they created the best seal, therefore producing the best sound, they did get rather mucky and take a while to put in and out, so in general, I use the soft black sleeves.
In general, I am extremely pleased with these headphones, having completely changed my music listening experience by producing immense sound quality and noise reduction from such a tiny headphone! If there were any disadvantages, I would have to say that they are rather fiddly to put in at first and although they are so good, I do not feel that good spending this much on headphones, although now that I have been using them, I wouldn’t change back. Bear this in mind also, they come with a 2 year warranty and if these are the cheapest headphones that Shure make, what are the most expensive ones going to sound like?
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