I'm amid my eight-week European tour (three weeks and two days left!) and I have to say, AirPods, knockoff K3003i, and Bose QC25 make a very good "triple threat" portable rig. I suppose the KSE1500 would be better, but it would also be much heavier, with the amplifier/battery and so on, and much more of a worry to lose. The thing is, I auditioned real and fake k3003 and they sound
so similar that distinguishing them was only possible A/Bing them, and then only in Harman's soundproof(ish) room. I also treat the k3003, I'll be honest, like schiit. I throw them in the outer pocket of my backpack along with a lightning cable, some napkins, a few pens, and so far at least they're fine. That said, I paid $312 for them shipped, which is far far below MSRP, but there it is. They also came with just one pair of silicone tips.
K3003/i's biggest weakness, and different tips that aren't so snug in my ear canals might solve this, is that I can't chew with them in. When I do, the chewing becomes so loud that the music is drowned out by bites. It's a terrible "user experience." In fact, even walking around London with them was unpleasant because the steps likewise were too audible to enjoy the music—the seal that the current tips have is such that their raison d'être is travel in cars (as the passenger), commuter/long distance trains, and in whatever rooms I'm staying in as my temporary residence. I find that I prefer the bose on planes and if I have long journeys on loud public transit (London tube especially). For quieter public transit, especially that requires a lot of moving, that doesn't bang around as much, the AirPods are fine.
I'm on the record as being somewhat skeptical (you could perhaps even say contemptuous) of people who clutch their pearls too much about having the very best portable rig. The ambient sound of subways is just so loud that only ANC and the most aggressively ear-canal-sealing IEMs are going to block out enough of the noise for their actual sound quality to matter much. Carting around a boutique high-res player, a chord mojo, a Woo WA8 in three different pockets for that HD800S you've got hooked up to an aftermarket cable is not going to do you much good as you whistle through the San Francisco Transbay Tube or uptown on a 3 train in New York. In fact, it's going to be rather comical.
All of this is to say that k3003i is very nice for what it is, and has a secure place in my collection, but its limitations (which may be in part to the tips I'm using), make it not my first portable choice. I have come around on bluetooth for casual and much mobile listening. Yes, it's lossy. Yes, there's degradation of quality. Yes, it makes my tidal subscription somewhat comical. (I do use it at home, though.)
The complement of features with which apple has outfitted AirPods have planted a flag in the ground. It may be supremely unfair that other OEMs don't have apple's control over the mobile OS (never mind a streaming service), or the deep pockets to design "W1" chips to help with easy switching among bluetooth-paired devices, infrared sensors to automatically pause when one earpiece is removed and begin playing when it is replaced, and accelerometers to detect one tap to pause, two taps to summon Siri, etc. I have no illusions about AirPods having a premium sound. They have an acceptable sound that give you some approximation of what a piece of music sounds like. Crap bass, crap mids, crap highs, blah blah blah, yeah, I know. (In fact, perhaps for his reason, I use them more for podcasts than music for this reason.) Nevertheless, their form factor is supremely wonderful and should be a challenge to everyone else to stop designing the head-fi equivalent of
Mac Portables—I'm looking at you,
Bose necklace—in 2017.
Since I've left the states, excluding podcasts as non-music, perhaps 80 of the music I've listened to has been with AirPods, 18% on K3003, and 2% on Bose. I'm happy with my trio.
