Shure E2c Sound Isolating Earphones

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These things hurt my ear canal too easily unless I use the orange foam inserts, but they get gross and deform a little too easily.

Anyway, the sound on these was good enough for me to realize that my iPod had a pretty constant hiss. They also made it apparant that I could only listen with EQ off or the signal would clip. I never listen to these things with the volume up. I'm a quiet listener so I don't lose my hearing, and the iPod's shortcoming became very apparant. So I rated them quite good at first and told people how much I liked them... until I realized that there was no width to the sound. Clarity was missing all over the place in the spectrum and bass is WEAK. The isolation was only so-so, and I've since heard much better sound from products in the $50-$150 range. I use SRS HD Audio Lab on my laptop to try to compensate for its shortcomings, and so far I like it. Using HDAL helped me find out that the bass response, as anaemic as it is, goes down to about 50Hz, so that was cool.

As critical as I've been, I've had them for 4 years and I'm not planning to get rid of them.

I got these phones used with a broken plug which I had to fix myself, so I have no idea what kind of life they had before they came to me.  That said...

You can do better than these phones.  The sound is good, there isn't any particular strength or weakness upon which I will extol.  To my ears, these are jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none.  There isn't any particular facet of the sound which is outstanding but none which is awful either, they're just sort of...meh.  Unexciting, but fine if you just want a quick listen and aren't going to be paying much attention.

I'll address my the contradiction in my pros and cons first.  The earpieces are solid and the strain reliefs are good on both the earpiece and the jack.  The cable is thick and inspires confidence but something you won't know from just feeling it, is that it hardens and cracks after a while.  Comfort is good and isolation is well above average.

They have a fairly pleasant non-fatiguing sound signature that doesn't stand out for any particular reason.  Detail is average, bass is present but not prominent, it extends reasonably low but lacks punch.  Midrange is free of any unpleasant colourations and the treble is slightly subdued and rolls off early.  Normally this would be a huge negative for me but it works out to make the E2c well suited to most kinds of music and isn't sensitive to certain kinds of recordings.

Overall, a good all rounder apart from the cable issue.  If you are after absolute sound quality and isolation, comfort and reliability come second, you can do better.

I love these headphones and the way they sound, and I've been using them as my go-to travel headphones for over a year. Great mids and nice sparkling treble. They lack a little in bass punch, of course, as most IEMs do, but it's definitely there and it's enjoyable (I supplement by adjusting on EQ). They are extremely comfortable to wear and come with a highly impressive array of tips. The cable is the perfect length.

My only problem with them (and the reason I'm searching for new ones) is the isolation isn't good enough-it's quite good, but not good enough to really enjoy music when biking, on a train, etc, without blasting your ears out with volume.