I broke down and bought some new earbuds today to replace the ragged fifteen-year-old Awias I had. Best Buy had what I needed: a new pair of Sony MDR-EX51LP earbuds. They’ve just become my best headphones in the house.
The biggest thing for me is sound quality (naturally). A great deal of headphones at the store had frequency responses of 20 Hz to 20KHz, which in book is too narrow. Sure, you can listen to music in that range, but it’ll have all the charm of hold music. The Sony’s rock in that they cover a greater range of lower frequencies, in addition to some more high frequencies (which is a nice plus, but not critical for me). Total range: 6 Hz to 23KHz. They bested my trusty (and quite rusty) JVC headphones, hands down.
The headphone models at the store could do a bit better, but not by much. A pair of Aiwa headphones on the shelf boasted 5 Hz to 25 KHz. I decided it wasn’t worth paying the dork price of wearing coconuts on my head just to squeeze in a little more music. I’m enough of a dork as it is, thank you very much.
Comfort is another big plus to these earbuds. The Awia’s I’ve put up with had foam covers which quickly got lost, making the earbuds a bit tiring on my ears after a while. These Sonys have rubber cups which fit very snugly in my ear. They shut out outside noise in a way the Aiwas never could.
Now I’m rocking out with my Zaurus kicking my Ogg Vorbis-encoded music collection straight into my head. Yeah, I know I’m a dweeb, but at least now I have an excuse for silently grinning and staring into space.