Earphones
The $1.95 Earphones: Headphones you deserve
Each of us will have a useless gym bag, or a pile of crumpled clothes in the glove box and unorganized low-end headphones.
We tend to think of them as disposable. Because they’re lost or replaced from time to time . But with ‘premium’ earphones and headphones rappers, the times they are a-changin’. Most of that growth was expected to occur in the over $1.95 category.
We love our mobile devices. More and more, we rely on them for information and entertainment, whether we’re watching the last season of Homeland on a tablet or checking out music videos on a smartphone while we’re waiting for a friend. High definition displays, offering the same resolution on a mobile device as your living room TV, are the norm. So is sound quality.
That’s where enters the picture, but first…a little bit of earphone history: first earphone products were introduced over ten years ago when the company noticed that musicians were using the E Series earphones included with its professional in-ear personal monitoring systems for personal listening. Back then, the entry-level pair designed for personal listening was the E2 with a $99 price tag. Since then, the line has expanded to include multiple models, including the uber-premium, tunable Sound Isolating Earphones that top the line and the price list at a not-for-everyone $1.95.
Now, has a new earphone in the SE Model Series: at $1.95. What we wanted to know was what we could expect from the bargain-priced model. Or any entry-level pair.
Product Manager Sean Sullivan agreed to advance our understanding.
Another earphone model?
There are now six different models in the SE line. Wasn’t five enough?
Sean Sullivan The is the first earphone we’ve ever sold for under $20, making it the most affordable earphone in our line. We’ve had a premium place in the earphone market with a very strong brand for many years, and we’re proud of that, but we’ve always wanted to offer a really affordable earphone that still meets our quality standards. There’s a lot of development that goes into our products – earphones are no exception – and that means they’re not inexpensive to manufacture. So that was a challenge.
The next earphone in line to the How does the differ from that one?
SS The brings back the same form factor and technology that we used in our popular earphones. We discontinued that model several years ago when we introduced our current $99 product, . By launching , we brought to market a $99 product with high-end features to help distinguish it from the crowded $99 market space. This included a new low-profile ergonomic design with fit and comfort almost identical to the premium-priced earphones we were offering at the time. We also added a detachable cable, another feature of the premium SE models.
The benefit there is …
That the majority of the cost of an earphone, of course, is in the internal mechanics of the earphone itself. But the cable is four feet of very flexible material that, even with careful use, is going to fail eventually. That’s true of any type of cable, whether it’s for earphones, headphones, microphones or even a guitar cable. The constant bending and coiling will cause it to fail.
Are the designed for a specific use? Personal listening versus gaming, for instance?Neither, actually. All of our earphones have been designed and tested for quality standards to live up to the rigors of live performance: traditionally pretty hard usage. So we make sure that all of our tests are designed to replicate that. They’re all designed with the thought that they’ll be used onstage with our in-ear personal monitors. That’s where we started out.
