Well, I seem to have misplaced my beloved Etymotic ER4-S headphones, these are In Ear Monitor headphones that plug into your ear canal and really offer amazing sound quality.
So here’s an update from headphone.com, “Head-fi.org ilounge and headphonereviews.org on the best in-ear monitors. In short, the ER6i seems best for just plugging into an iPod and has fallen in price to about $85 (expensive, but worth it!) while the ER-4S remains good, but has major competition from Ultimate Ears and Shure now for deluxe $200 headphones. These $200 headphones by the way with a good headphone amplifier like “Bithead”: rival $20,000 speakers.
I still have my ER6 which set the stage and were one of the first very amazing headphones and the :ER6i is the variant that has more bass so is perfect for the iPod, but the ER-6 is more accurate. These are about $120 from Headphone or $95 from Discountheadphones.com including shipping. Or you can goto Mpire and find it for $80 from Amazon which is an amazing deal.
The next is the ER-4 series, with the ER-4P if you mainly use it unamplified directly into an iPod and the ER-4S if you want the flattest response and use a headphone amplifier.
ER-4S go for$180 delivered according to Pricegrabber, Mpire+ shows auctions at $174 delivered for the ER-4P $214 from Amazon
As you can see from the reproduction chart both the ER-6 and ER-4S are amazingly close in reproduction, with the ER-6 having slightly less at the highend and the ER4-S slightlky more. The ER-6 is about $100 and the ER-4S is $200 so take your pick.
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1 response so far ↓
1 brucery // Oct 19, 2006 at 4:58
Rich, I had Etymotic earphones a few years back and couldn’t stand them. They were somewhat notorious for picking up/amplifying the physical sound of the earphone cables moving. I guess I fidget while I listen to music, and the loud rustling was enough to make me toss them and go back to my Sony headphones. Have they eliminated this problem, or does it not bother you as much?
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