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.
