“Shure I2C-MP Stereo Earphones / Headset (iPhone Compatible)” $19.99 at Amazon.com

I bought a pair of these earbuds when they were marked down to $40 and have been using them for running. They’re very high-quality earbuds that are cheap enough that I don’t worry about destroying them with sweat or excessive wear and tear. These produce better audio than any earbud or headphone sold for under $50, probably better than any under $90 but I may have lost track of the market a little and am being conservative in my superlatives.

I wrote a little review of the i2c’s the last time they were on sale, gushing over what a great deal they were at double the current price. $19.99 is ridiculously low, I wonder if these have been discontinued? The previous review is worth a read if you’re considering this purchase.

If you do purchase these earbuds, I’d also recommend getting foam sleeves for them as it makes a huge difference in audio quality. The earbuds don’t ship with foam sleeves, but thin silicon sleeves that just hold the earbuds in the ear and provide negligible isolation from ambient sound. There’s also markedly more¹ bass when listening with foam sleeves.

Here are links to a few options for replacement foam sleeves:

• The Shure Black Olive sleeves work well, though it takes a little work to fit them onto the earbuds.².
• A slightly better sounding, but uglier and quicker to wear out set of foams are the Shure orange foam sleeves. They’d probably suck for running as they’d get saturated with sweat and are not easily washable.
• The fancy ‘comply’ viscoelastic foam tips might be the most expensive and highest quality option, I’ve never tried them.

I’ve linked only to the large sizes of all of these foam sleeve options, as I figure the larger they attempt to expand the better seal they’ll make in the ear canal, leading to more sound isolation and better sound. But if you’re not sure you’ll find the large foams comfortable, they’re all also available in medium and small sizes if you poke around those web sites.

1. but not excessive or muddy [↩]
2. The tubes in the black olive sleeves are slightly too narrow to fit, but can be momentarily stretched with a set of mini needlenose pliers just before installation on the earbuds. The tubes then shrink and hold the sleeves very tightly in place, which I think is a positive thing [↩]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 1:10 am and is filed under Audio, Deals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.