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You are here: Home / Featured / Stop wearing those cheap headphones!

Stop wearing those cheap headphones!

October 17, 2009 By Katie Lee

Katie_thumbnail_profile1When I was little my sister and I were given our first walkman. It came with some 80s style headphones – the ones with the metal hairband and the fuzz-covered speakers that neither covered your ears like cans or latched on like earbuds. The sort that are probably due an ironic revival any day now until everyone remembers that they were rubbish.

Anyway, our headphones were *especially* rubbish. The fuzz discoloured, the speakers snapped off the headband and the headband could never be adjusted to fit our tiny childheads. And most importantly, the sound was terrible.

But it didn’t matter that the sound was terrible. All that mattered was 1. we finally had a walkman and 2. we didn’t play the music loud enough for my mother to be able to hear it.

My mother was convinced that using headphones would send us deaf, and if she could hear the music then we were playing it too loud.

Skip forward to today, and even now I’m genuinely shocked at how loudly people listen to their music on headphones. Clearly, I’ve lead a very sheltered life; I always assumed that everyone got the same parental lectures as my sister and me.

And yet, there they all are, on the train listening to their crappy music on their crappy headphones.

My mother would definitely not approve.

It’s not just that people who listen to their music too loud are always the people with the very worst taste in music, it’s the fact that they have paid all that money for a music player and then they’ve just gone and used whatever useless headphones it came with in the box. It drives me spare.

Being a thrifty sort (clearly, I get that from my mother), I would never normally advocate the wanton spending of cash, but if you’ve paid good money for your iPod, you should pay good money for your headphones.

After all, the headphones are the bit that make the most difference to the sound quality – and they’re the bit that you are shoving in your ears.

Yes, you have every right to expect that manufacturers would provide you with adequate hearing aids with your magic box of songs, but sadly that’s not the case. If your headphones are leaking noise all over the place, they’re not very good headphones and it’s time to treat your ears – and the people in your train carriage – to some decent ones.

Some decent headphones include:

Etymotic Hf2
Shure SE Range
Sennheiser Style Range

If you’re buying yourself an iPod, check out the Apple Store for much better headphones than the ones that come with the player as standard.

Katie Lee

Dork Adore's Editor! Katie started out life as a tech journalist and blog obsessive, launching the UK's first and biggest blog publishing network, Shiny Media. Favourite dork things: knitting, crochet, Press Gang, Buffy, Battlestar, Doctor Who and lifehacks.

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Filed Under: Featured, Opinion Tagged With: Earbuds, Etymotic, Headphones, iPod, Sennheiser, Shure

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Comments

  1. AlSki says

    November 6, 2009 at 7:19 am

    Is it me or are iPod headphones the worst offenders. Come on Apple, its supposed to be a quality product.

Trackbacks

  1. Tweets that mention Stop wearing those cheap headphones! | Dork Adore -- Topsy.com says:
    October 17, 2009 at 12:37 pm

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Katie Lee, richardbaxter. richardbaxter said: Agree with (RT) @shinykatie: Little rant by me > @dorkadore Stop wearing those cheap headphones! http://bit.ly/2Mqt7q […]

  2. Dork Review: Roxy Earphones | Dork Adore says:
    October 22, 2009 at 3:04 pm

    […] 22, 2009 · Leave a Comment  Did you read Katie’s recent piece on the tragedy of cheap headphones and find yourself nodding along in agreement? Me too. I particularly hate it on public transport […]

  3. How the internet is *totally* changing punctuation | Dork Adore says:
    October 29, 2009 at 8:40 am

    […] Stop wearing those cheap headphones! AKPC_IDS += "985,"; […]

  4. Dork Review: Audio Chi’s W-Series can headphones | Dork Adore says:
    October 29, 2009 at 12:01 pm

    […] sound does start to leak at the higher volumes. This means there’s a potential for you to be one of those annoying people on the train. However, you have to crank up the volume quite high (I would never have the volume that high, but […]

  5. Four of the best headphones | Dork Adore says:
    September 17, 2010 at 4:10 pm

    […] Regular readers of Dork Adore will be aware of our aversion to cheap and cheerful headphones. In fact, Katie wrote an entire post on the matter. […]

  6. Sennheiser MOMENTUM On-Ear Headphones Review | Dork Adore says:
    December 19, 2013 at 7:29 pm

    […] Adore readers may be aware of the fact that we’re not too keen on cheap headphones. Katie wrote about it a few years ago, and urged us to stop buying them and go for something more worthwhile and […]

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