[evilking]

I bought my Sony XBA-3 last September and it was faulty from the beginning. After 2-3 hours of continuous play, the right side would fade out and eventually go silent. I put up with this because my commute is ~2 hours and there are no IEMs allowed in the office, maybe once a month I had so much free time that I could experience the problem, everything was otherwise fine. I would give the earphones a couple hours "rest" and the sound would be back as normal.

Well, the problem got a lot worse over the months, until a couple weeks ago the right side cut out just 1 hour into a carefully prepared playlist on my way to work, having to listen to the rest of the world was just too much and I sent them back for a full refund.

I've been looking around for a week trying to decide which IEM to buy next, I got the XBA-3s for ~£150 (Amazon.de), but my budget isn't much higher than that (theoretically up to £175-£180), since I have some other audio purchases coming up. There really isn't much going on around this price range, at least not over here in UK (customs fees and sales tax add 25-30% to US/JP imports), I'm thinking I should go with the XBA-3 again and hope it works this time. Although there are a couple people with the exact same problem in the XBA-3 Appreciation thread...


Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks