You tuck them into the intertragic notch (ie perpendicular your ear), with the front of the earbud (where the sound comes out) facing forwards and the back of the earbud facing behind you. This allows the sound to go right into your ear canal.
When you wear an earbud the “normal” way, all of the sound hits the inside of the ear, (dissipating in multiple directions), before making a 90 degree turn to travel down the ear canal. That’s like facing your full size speakers directly towards a wall, and you standing besides them to listen. It makes no sense because so much energy is lost bouncing against the wall.
Think of the large 10mm driver on the i-into i8 and it will make sense.
If you still can’t picture it, I can post a photo.
This is how I wear earbuds as well, driver facing forward not towards my head. I actually think that 90% of earbuds have a fundamentally flawed design and I don't get why big earbud manufacturers didn't adopt Apple earpod design (probably because it uses a relatively speaking small 13.5mm drivers and no one wanted to battle the issues of making it larger to fit regular 15.4 drivers). It's a shame given how good earbuds are and how much value you get IF your ears allow you to extract the most out of buds.
(Might be going slightly off topic but the things that I will mention here are all from China and well below 100$.)
I tried quite hard to make my own Final Audio Piano Forte, bought the shells and tried all kinds of drivers in them (EMX500, Vido, MS16, RY4s...) with a million of different tuning configurations and I could never escape the bass-low mid range just overwhelming other frequencies. Earbuds are tuned to compensate for some leakage and once you force it into canal bad things happen, mostly because drivers end up having way too much pressure to the front of membrane resulting in a massive change to frequency response.
Last edited: