Headphones mess

November 21st, 2009

Three broken pairs during one year. These earphones (well, previous model, but as far as I heard not much has changed) are way too fragile for my not-so-much sophisticated needs.

What needs, you may ask? Since solid few hours a week I spend sitting in a bus surrounded by old, sleepy and boring people, I gotta kill the boredom somehow. Music (combined with Instapaper, oh yes!) does just well. After that earbuds simply land in my pocket and suffer in there for an entire day. You may say every human on the Earth planet listens to music that frequent. Apple ones couldn’t handle that.

So when during one day at school one of the headphones simply stopped working I decided that this shit got way too far and bought something different. Worth mentioning, that way earlier pause/next song button refused to do stuff too. Limited budget sucks, so I had to stick with, still low-end, Creative’s EP-630.

So far so good.

Apple Earphones excellence

YES, correct. Excellence. These earbuds are awesome for many, many reasons.

First of all, design. Not much to be said in here – typical, whity Apple classic. They look good. Many manufacturers seem to forget about this point while realeasing earphones with mindblowing sound quality, yet horrible design.

Along with great design should come great overall product quality. Heck yes. Cable is solid and thick, length is perfect (seriously, I wouldn’t add or cut even a centimeter). Also, they do not tangle as much as others. You’d think those will last forever.

And a button with microphone in it! Sure, it’s far from innovative, since much of headphones supplied with phones have that, but most of the others are 10 times wider than the cable. In Apple Earphones, it’s not even noticeable and click works flawlessly.

If only their durability was longer than three fucking months and sound quality wouldn’t be so crappy, I’d literally marry them. Ugh.

EP-630’s!

Put them in, ran iPod.app and played epic Grizzly Bear’s Southern Point. Bass kills, deep sound gives you goosebumps and effect combined with Daniel Rossen voice is pretty sweet. YAY for awesome sound!

On Apple Earphones, you’ve always been missing out some sounds and when you tried to defeat it with making them louder, your ears were slowly dying, one auditory canal at a time. In Creative ones even if you set volume relatively small, you hear it all. And, among thousands of examples, awesome breakthrough on What She Came For is more than a shitty repertory of noise.

As you may expect, product quality is worse than in described above. Cable a bit too long for my needs, less elastic, et cetera. But generally they’re not that bad – also in a matter of design.

Both the problem and an advantage is sound isolation. It’s too good. When I put 630’s in, it’s set. I don’t hear literally anything beside my music. Obviously awesome thing in lots of situations, but far more worse while, for example, crossing the street. Who knows when some douchebag will hop out of a turn and hit you. You could hear stuff like with Apple earphones.

So, conclusion? Well, you need to make a choice whether you want a solid sound quality and totally isolated sound or awesome product quality, poor sound and a need to replace every free months.

I’d love to have both, but since I can’t… Creative EP-630 for the win!

And, well, I’m pleased. Let it stay that way.