I hardly bother with my unwieldy but much loved Grado sr60s anymore, since I picked up these little vmoda “remix” units. Pretentious sure, but they sound pretty damn good for the price. Nicely balanced across the spectrum and they can handle dynamics okay. No finely imaged sound stage or any stuff like that, but you can hear the pick-guard buzzing on that acoustic 6string at the same time as the singer sings and it all pops and hums along warmly enough for little pair of earbuds. I bought them for traveling this summer and I’m still using them now that I’m back in town and size isn’t such a big deal. Sokay. As with most consumer electronics, if you slut around on shopping.com for a while (and run whatever you find through resellerrattings.com lest you get burned) you can probably find them for less than MSRP.

And as for my first foray into quality headphones, the highly recommended Sony mdr ex81’s: blech. Uncomfortable, unwieldy, finnicky bits of plastik that sound clinical and bored even when jammed just-right into my tender canals. Like little robots singing songs they don’t like to me. Precise and detailed yes. Nice no. And if you ever lose the dumb little rubber ear cup flangey bits (which you will, if they don’t break off in your ears they will break off in your pocket) in Canada, Sony’s Canadian parts dealer will try and charge you $10 each for them, if you can find the parts number yourself since it’s not worth their time to look up, for a part the cost of which would require currency smaller than a penny to precisely quantify.