Turns out the most expensive isn’t always the best

I hate my headphones. I’ll say it loud and proud, I HATE THEM.

I killed my old iPod headphones and I just hadn’t gotten around to buying a new pair. So I bought a intermediary pair for $10 (yea, for that price how could I have thought it was going to be something decent?), and I figured I’d just buy a really fabulous pair a couple of months down the road when I was ready to upgrade.

Last week was the week.

I wanted to upgrade, I was sick of these headphones. So I bought the most expensive ones I could find (see right) – in ear bud headphones from Shure, at $200 originally but $150 on sale, AND it came with a 1GB iPod Shuffle worth about $50 (although I would’ve preferred the $50 in cash instead).

Anyway, I bought them, tried them on (they wouldn’t let me try on the earbuds in the store for hygienic reasons), and wore them that day.

Side note: Hygienic or not, that’s kind of messed up because I’m going to buy a BRAND NEW package, open it, try the headphones and immediately know whether I hate them or not, and return them, so in the end, you now have an OPEN retail package with nothing wrong with them, all because I only wanted to do was try how they felt in my ears, IN THE STORE before splashing $170 on them.

May have been smarter if they had like a BUCKET of earbuds with one pair of headphones, and they soak them in alcohol at night or something to really clean them before someone else puts them in their ears to try it out.

I hate buying without trying.

So I found that I didn’t mind the feeling of the buds in my ears, and it seemed to really block out the noise. But when I started walking, I could hear myself walk. Weird eh? I could hear the thumping because there wasn’t any open space in my ear to let in outside noise to muffle the sound of my walking.

Every step I took.

Thump, thump thump thump.

Here I am, listening to Sherlock Holmes’ mysteries (I know, I’m a geek), and all I could hear was Sherlock Holmes in between “thump thump thump”. Very annoying.

Then the headaches started. I guess I’m one of those types that CAN’T really block her ears out because I get a major headache like you wouldn’t believe without any outside noise to filter and make my ears feel ‘free and open’, for lack of a better description.

I had to return them. $170 refund later, I’m back to my old cheap nasty $10 headphones and looking for in ear headphones, maybe the ones that hook on, and NOT the ones that are noise cancelling.

*sigh*

They were fabulous when I was sitting down and not moving though. The sound and the clarity was IN-CREDIBLE. Totally worth it if you don’t walk when you wear them, which, unfortunately is 90% of the situations I’d be using