The Joy of Earphones
About 1.5 years ago I bought a top of the line Dell XPS M1730 laptop for work. It still works just fine for programming, etc.
It came with a set of (no name) earphones. At first I thought "oh I have 20 of these already. Woo, another set!" However, these were the first earplug style earphones I'd owned (the ones that sit in your ear canal and actually block outside sound). The sound quality was (and is) very very good. Perhaps not QUITE as good as the Sennheiser Studio 270 headphones I bought for music mixing back when I was a gigging live musician, but damn good.
I guess if you spend $3000 on a laptop, the free stuff with it is also of high quality.
I have had an iPhone for about 6-7 months now - I didn't have a portable music player, and I had an ancient Nokia 6100 with no battery. Of course, I want quality sound out of the thing, and so I used those XPS earphones. A little while ago, I found the Griffin SmartTalk microphone adapter, which is an iPhone mic with a standard headphone jack, so I could use these earphones as a headset. This worked serviceably well until the adapter broke, and they don't seem to sell them anymore.
Today I spent $100 on a new Sennheiser MM50 headset (mic+in-ears) after trying some god-awful $25 piece of junk and being sad-faced. When I got home, I wanted to soundtest the difference between my beloved XPS ones and these, and was examining them both closely. Amazingly, the earphones were EXACTLY the same design. And sure enough, the sound was EXACTLY the same awesome quality I was used to. Obviously I had been using Sennheisers the entire time! The quality of the product shone even without the branding.
It is hard to express how happy that made me. Kinda embarrassing, actually. ^^; As a bonus, sefieslj gets the XPS earphones to block out people at work. Don't worry, I put brand new clean rubber seals on.
TLDR: If you really want amazing quality sound in an in-ear headset, splash out for the Sennheiser MM50, I've been using them for 1.5 years and loving them without even knowing it!
It came with a set of (no name) earphones. At first I thought "oh I have 20 of these already. Woo, another set!" However, these were the first earplug style earphones I'd owned (the ones that sit in your ear canal and actually block outside sound). The sound quality was (and is) very very good. Perhaps not QUITE as good as the Sennheiser Studio 270 headphones I bought for music mixing back when I was a gigging live musician, but damn good.
I guess if you spend $3000 on a laptop, the free stuff with it is also of high quality.
I have had an iPhone for about 6-7 months now - I didn't have a portable music player, and I had an ancient Nokia 6100 with no battery. Of course, I want quality sound out of the thing, and so I used those XPS earphones. A little while ago, I found the Griffin SmartTalk microphone adapter, which is an iPhone mic with a standard headphone jack, so I could use these earphones as a headset. This worked serviceably well until the adapter broke, and they don't seem to sell them anymore.
Today I spent $100 on a new Sennheiser MM50 headset (mic+in-ears) after trying some god-awful $25 piece of junk and being sad-faced. When I got home, I wanted to soundtest the difference between my beloved XPS ones and these, and was examining them both closely. Amazingly, the earphones were EXACTLY the same design. And sure enough, the sound was EXACTLY the same awesome quality I was used to. Obviously I had been using Sennheisers the entire time! The quality of the product shone even without the branding.
It is hard to express how happy that made me. Kinda embarrassing, actually. ^^; As a bonus, sefieslj gets the XPS earphones to block out people at work. Don't worry, I put brand new clean rubber seals on.
TLDR: If you really want amazing quality sound in an in-ear headset, splash out for the Sennheiser MM50, I've been using them for 1.5 years and loving them without even knowing it!