Sony MDR-E818LP

As good as Apple are at product design, they have yet to design a pair of earphones that a) last longer than a few months b) actually provide decent sound and c) are worth £20 :s When my last pair of Apple earphones started to crackle last year, even though I had only had the iPod since that Christmas, the time came to find some replacements earphones. I had previously tried Apples slightly better and more expensive earphones, which were about as affective as cheaper ones and more annoying. At the time I couldn’t afford £20 for a new pair of earphones, so I looked for something under £10.

I noticed that Argos had a set for £7- and they were Sony as well. Because I was skint I decided to get these and if they sucked, then later on I would get a better pair when I would afford it.

Now let me tell you something, the selection of decent earphones these days is pretty small. Every company seems to be obsessesed with making earphones with those rubber cushions on- which I hate. They always fall out of my ears and end up covered in ear wax, plus when the rubber went on the iPod ones the plastic parts were pretty sharp. Luckily these were good old solid plastic, so they stayed in pretty easily.

I know that earphones that come with gold plated tips are usually better because the conduct sound better than your average Nickel plated set. So usually I try to find pairs that are gold plated. Unfortunately these don’t happen to be such a pair but considering the earphones weren’t gold plated they were pretty loud. That is more than likely down to the bass boost. This provided advantages I didn’t have with the original Apple pair, obviously the increased sound but also without having to put the iPod on full volume constantly would decrease power consumption.

Unfortunately things started to go wrong a few months ago. One of the earphones started to hiss wuite noticeably when the volume was high. This carried on until finally- the other one cut out completely. This seemed very bizarre as I had had no problems with the other one, yet it cut completely out. So what else could I do but get a new pair. Now I figured it was because I had had them for a few months and had used them quite frequently that it was normal wear and tear. What I did was quite cheeky really. Considering I still had the box, and I’d had them since August, I returned them to Argos saying they were faulty- hey I figured since they were Sony they shouldn’t have broken in within a year.
Argos provided me with a new pair so I thought all was well and I could enjoy my iPod again.

WRONG

Within the week the hissing returned. Now this was worrying considering I’d hardly used them. Joe told me he had had his pair longer than mine and they still worked fine. Figuring it must be my usual run of bad luck, I decided enough was enough, and returned them again. This time I figured what the hey, and paid an extra £4 for the slightly better Sony pair with the volume control. Will they too fail? Only time will tell. Since getting with Laila I have not used my iPod as much when out now cause I generally have someone to chat with, but when I return to Uni- to be shunned again by everyone in my group, not doubt I will get some use out of them.

Would I recommend these?

Now it may just be the pairs I owned that went wrong, as Joe’s seem to be fine. I have fairly bad luck with things electrical so it’s probably just me. If anyone has iPod earphones- why? Get rid of them seriously. I’m not saying replace them with Sony ones, but hey anything is better than Apple’s own. I will say this though, besides the occasional hissing noise towards the end, they did occasionally go a bit funny when connected to the iPod itself, even going as far as to turn songs off. It usually happened when the plug was moved about. I figured this is probably down to the iPod’s connection itself as when plugged into my laptop they worked fine. It may be worth the extra £4 just to get the slightly better pair.

To Ciao Members-
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