I try not to be an extremist and I try to give most products I review a decent amount of hearing before making any judgments on their quality but when a product reaches with a level of quality I feel very motivated to notify others as soon as possible so that they may avoid what I would consider to be a terrible purchase.
This earphone, as far as I can tell, was bundled with a bunch of other Sony hardware and I had heard and read good reviews about some of Sony's bundled earphones for their great quality. This specific model wasn't one of the ones that were praised by those people, including here on Head-fi but they were similar enough in appearance and even shared some products as either these earphones or other near-identical ones were bundled with the same products depending on the market.
I have my bias as much other people but Sony is a brand that I have a bit of loyalty towards. Two of the devices I enjoyed owning the most were Sony branded, specifically one of their Walkman and Minidisk Players and they provided me hundreds of hours of enjoyment. Although I usually picked Sony earphones to go with them, at a certain point I started trying out other brands and once I tried a cheap Sennheiser earbud I never went back to Sony earphones again. My recollection of them was that they sounded muffled, they lacked resolution and outside of deep thick bass that spilled over most minute details. This is of course regarding cheap Sony earbuds between the $10/$20. I had hoped that after a couple of decades they would have improved.
They didn't.
I bought these off of an Aliexpress seller so while there is a chance that these may not be of the same quality as some of the other similar bundled Sony earphones that earned a lot of praise, or just an imitation of them but the sound of them was so familiar to the old Sony earbuds I spent many years listening that I suspect that they may in fact be "the real deal" and just as bad as they actually are. I also ordered another earphone from the seller (the Vivo XE800 if you are curious) that was also very praised here on Head-Fi and that earphone lived up to all the descriptions I have heard about them. In fact when trying both of them out today, going from the other earphone I purchased to these Sony made me assume that I had they were poorly connected or had an issue somewhere because of how they sounded. Speaking of which...
Sound Quality
These earphones are every bit as horrible as the old Sony earbuds I listened with a veiled sound that sounds unnatural, a bass that is thick and bleeds over details and cymbals, high notes, instrument separation, decent clarity are nowhere to be seen.
They have these white filters on the tip that unlike other earphones I own hardly seem to have any ventilation, and the sensation I got while listening to them was as if there was a room in my ears with echoing bass emanating, but that room was closed to me and what little sound came out lacked details and any sort of nuance.
Because I had no intention of keeping these or even treasure them I decided to remove the filter and I have to say, doing so improved the sound significantly. They went from sounding abismal to sounding like the very type of bassy sound I was used to getting from Sony earphones of old. The sound improved, but it's not impressive. An uneducated listener would perhaps find them decent. Any person who has listened to any decent pair of earphones in their life would not find anything special in them.
Construction Quality
The cable is as horrible as they come. It's very thin and elastic, it retains its shape and is very hard to wrap without ending up with cable spaghetti. The cable does have nice strain relief at the plug and the earphones themselves but honestly I don't even want to keep these. Not even for a rainy day. I'd rather listen to my cellphone's speakers at close range than to listen to these, and I think that says a lot.
After the splitter which has a built-in microphone which, admittedly, I did no test at all, the cable splits in uneven distances with the left hand-split being less than half the length of the cable that runs to the right ear piece. This part of the cable is significantly thinner and flimsy, perhaps the thinnest out of any earphone I currently own. It doesn't inspire much confidence.
On each of the earpieces there is a circular textured Sony logo which gives the earphones their characteristic aesthetic which I admit is pleasant but the left ear piece in my model seems to have a small flaw as the fit has a small gap and any movement of it is very audible if you are wearing the earphones. Even with this in mind, there did not appear to any perceptible differences in terms of sound quality.
Conclusion
I never thought I would ever be reviewing a product as poorly as I'm reviewing this earphone but this is as bad as it gets. Just as some other earphones I owned set the standard for which I based future reviews upon, this one sets the bar at how bad an earphone can sound.
It has never been cheaper to acquire high quality earphones than it is currently. I've bought over the last couple of months roughly 10 of them, all at very affordable prices, some even cheaper than this one, and all of them unquestionably surpass it completely in almost every regard. If you want a bassy earphone with good quality, clarity at a sub $10 price point get something like the KZ ATR instead. It sounds like a million dollars compared to the Sony MH-EX300AP.
If for some reason you end up with these earphones, grab a small pointy object and carefully remove the filter. In some earphones this is unthinkable because it would make the sound too harsh but these Sony have almost no highs to speak of so removing the filter doesn't actually make the sound harsh, it just makes it sound less like they aren't being choked.
Should these happen to sound immensely different from your own, you suspect I may have a counterfeit unit (which is a possibility, though one I am skeptical of because of my experience with Sony earphones/earbuds for many years) please do let me know and provide a link or a means for me to see these differences for myself. For example, tell me to listen to a song, and ask me if I can discern a specific detail about them, and likewise I can also report back to you. By all means I do hope this unit is fake but these earphones, the ones in front of me right now, they are as bad as I described them, fake or not.
This earphone, as far as I can tell, was bundled with a bunch of other Sony hardware and I had heard and read good reviews about some of Sony's bundled earphones for their great quality. This specific model wasn't one of the ones that were praised by those people, including here on Head-fi but they were similar enough in appearance and even shared some products as either these earphones or other near-identical ones were bundled with the same products depending on the market.
I have my bias as much other people but Sony is a brand that I have a bit of loyalty towards. Two of the devices I enjoyed owning the most were Sony branded, specifically one of their Walkman and Minidisk Players and they provided me hundreds of hours of enjoyment. Although I usually picked Sony earphones to go with them, at a certain point I started trying out other brands and once I tried a cheap Sennheiser earbud I never went back to Sony earphones again. My recollection of them was that they sounded muffled, they lacked resolution and outside of deep thick bass that spilled over most minute details. This is of course regarding cheap Sony earbuds between the $10/$20. I had hoped that after a couple of decades they would have improved.
They didn't.
I bought these off of an Aliexpress seller so while there is a chance that these may not be of the same quality as some of the other similar bundled Sony earphones that earned a lot of praise, or just an imitation of them but the sound of them was so familiar to the old Sony earbuds I spent many years listening that I suspect that they may in fact be "the real deal" and just as bad as they actually are. I also ordered another earphone from the seller (the Vivo XE800 if you are curious) that was also very praised here on Head-Fi and that earphone lived up to all the descriptions I have heard about them. In fact when trying both of them out today, going from the other earphone I purchased to these Sony made me assume that I had they were poorly connected or had an issue somewhere because of how they sounded. Speaking of which...
Sound Quality
These earphones are every bit as horrible as the old Sony earbuds I listened with a veiled sound that sounds unnatural, a bass that is thick and bleeds over details and cymbals, high notes, instrument separation, decent clarity are nowhere to be seen.
They have these white filters on the tip that unlike other earphones I own hardly seem to have any ventilation, and the sensation I got while listening to them was as if there was a room in my ears with echoing bass emanating, but that room was closed to me and what little sound came out lacked details and any sort of nuance.
Because I had no intention of keeping these or even treasure them I decided to remove the filter and I have to say, doing so improved the sound significantly. They went from sounding abismal to sounding like the very type of bassy sound I was used to getting from Sony earphones of old. The sound improved, but it's not impressive. An uneducated listener would perhaps find them decent. Any person who has listened to any decent pair of earphones in their life would not find anything special in them.
Construction Quality
The cable is as horrible as they come. It's very thin and elastic, it retains its shape and is very hard to wrap without ending up with cable spaghetti. The cable does have nice strain relief at the plug and the earphones themselves but honestly I don't even want to keep these. Not even for a rainy day. I'd rather listen to my cellphone's speakers at close range than to listen to these, and I think that says a lot.
After the splitter which has a built-in microphone which, admittedly, I did no test at all, the cable splits in uneven distances with the left hand-split being less than half the length of the cable that runs to the right ear piece. This part of the cable is significantly thinner and flimsy, perhaps the thinnest out of any earphone I currently own. It doesn't inspire much confidence.
On each of the earpieces there is a circular textured Sony logo which gives the earphones their characteristic aesthetic which I admit is pleasant but the left ear piece in my model seems to have a small flaw as the fit has a small gap and any movement of it is very audible if you are wearing the earphones. Even with this in mind, there did not appear to any perceptible differences in terms of sound quality.
Conclusion
I never thought I would ever be reviewing a product as poorly as I'm reviewing this earphone but this is as bad as it gets. Just as some other earphones I owned set the standard for which I based future reviews upon, this one sets the bar at how bad an earphone can sound.
It has never been cheaper to acquire high quality earphones than it is currently. I've bought over the last couple of months roughly 10 of them, all at very affordable prices, some even cheaper than this one, and all of them unquestionably surpass it completely in almost every regard. If you want a bassy earphone with good quality, clarity at a sub $10 price point get something like the KZ ATR instead. It sounds like a million dollars compared to the Sony MH-EX300AP.
If for some reason you end up with these earphones, grab a small pointy object and carefully remove the filter. In some earphones this is unthinkable because it would make the sound too harsh but these Sony have almost no highs to speak of so removing the filter doesn't actually make the sound harsh, it just makes it sound less like they aren't being choked.
Should these happen to sound immensely different from your own, you suspect I may have a counterfeit unit (which is a possibility, though one I am skeptical of because of my experience with Sony earphones/earbuds for many years) please do let me know and provide a link or a means for me to see these differences for myself. For example, tell me to listen to a song, and ask me if I can discern a specific detail about them, and likewise I can also report back to you. By all means I do hope this unit is fake but these earphones, the ones in front of me right now, they are as bad as I described them, fake or not.
