Mimeographs from the Future

For a while, I’ve been “sur­viv­ing” with the iPhone ear­buds, and they are, to put it sim­ply, dread­ful. They aren’t the worst I’ve ever heard, but they’re def­i­nitely a tri­umph of style over sub­stance. Given I also own a pair of Ety­motic Research ER-6i ear­phones, why was I using the dread­ful Apple bits? Sim­ple … the ER-6i made my ear hurt, though not because of the design. No, it was the “sound”. It sim­ply was painful to lis­ten to them for any extended period, some­thing I didn’t learn until after hav­ing had them for a while. The boost in the 2kHz and up range made my head hurt — per­haps from hear­ing dam­age as a child — and I couldn’t lis­ten to them for more than 15 – 20 min­utes before hav­ing to surrender.

So, when I wanted to lis­ten to things, I returned to my ever trust­wor­thy Grado Labs head­phones, for­ever wish­ing that they’d finally release an in-ear prod­uct wor­thy of their sto­ried name. And, now, they have. In fact, they’ve released two dif­fer­ent in-ear mon­i­tor head­phones: the afford­able iGi and the more up-market GR8. Since what I was look­ing for was some­thing to wear dur­ing my com­mute, the gym and per­haps at work, I went with the iGi, which arrived this afternoon.

The ini­tial ver­dict? They’re def­i­nitely voiced like a Grado prod­uct. Right now, there’s a tiny bit of break­ing in to be done — Grado claims 100 hours — but already they’re lightyears ahead of the piti­ful Apple prod­uct and the tire­some Ety­motic head­phones. I’m look­ing for­ward to wear­ing them as often as I want, and now all I need to do is fig­ure out the best set of tips to use.

Tagged: apple, etymotic, grado, headphones, iem