Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Sennheiser PX-100 headphones
I had a nice pair of portable headphones that I bought from Radio Shack ages ago, but I seem to have lost them on my most recent plane trip. My "backup" pair sounds pretty good, but the foam on the earpieces has worn out enough that the headphones are painful to use for more than about 7 minutes. I tried finding replacement pieces of foam (did you know Radio Shack sells those?) but the earpieces are too big for the medium foam pieces and too small for the large foam pieces. I visited consumerreports.com and they gave a glowing recommendation to a nice inexpensive pair of Sony headphones. I looked at Amazon's page for them, and while some people really loved them, other people didn't like them so much. Granted, I can assume part of that is because of elevated expectations (a review or two talked about how consumerreports.com led them to expect more than they got), but I figured I might as well surf a little more on Amazon. I found a Listmania from
"Samuel Chell, professional musician", and his comments were clear and sane (two things I rarely expect from audio hardware reviews ;-). His short summary of the Sennheiser PX-100s is, "Unbeatable practicality, wearability, sound. Best all-around value." When I visited the Amazon page for the headphones, I found a lot of extremely positive comments, and not very many negative ones. I then tried surfing bestbuy.com and circuitcity.com to see if any of the local stores had them in stock. No such luck. I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and order from Amazon.
Well, my Amazon package just arrived 20 minutes ago (about a week ahead of when Amazon predicted; they know how to under-promise and over-deliver ;-) and so far the Sennheisers do indeed live up to their terrific word-of-mouth. I'm listening to the Once More, With Feeling Soundtrack CD (and yes, someday I really need to write up my feelings about "Once More, With Feeling") and I'm hearing details that my stereo didn't reveal. Indeed, I can hear that some parts of "Something To Sing About" were recorded in an echoey room while others weren't ;-).
If you need a not-too-expensive ($50 list, $40 from Amazon) comfortable pair of portable headphones that sound very nice and include a convenient carrying case (which I didn't expect!), you could do worse than the PX-100s.
"Samuel Chell, professional musician", and his comments were clear and sane (two things I rarely expect from audio hardware reviews ;-). His short summary of the Sennheiser PX-100s is, "Unbeatable practicality, wearability, sound. Best all-around value." When I visited the Amazon page for the headphones, I found a lot of extremely positive comments, and not very many negative ones. I then tried surfing bestbuy.com and circuitcity.com to see if any of the local stores had them in stock. No such luck. I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and order from Amazon.
Well, my Amazon package just arrived 20 minutes ago (about a week ahead of when Amazon predicted; they know how to under-promise and over-deliver ;-) and so far the Sennheisers do indeed live up to their terrific word-of-mouth. I'm listening to the Once More, With Feeling Soundtrack CD (and yes, someday I really need to write up my feelings about "Once More, With Feeling") and I'm hearing details that my stereo didn't reveal. Indeed, I can hear that some parts of "Something To Sing About" were recorded in an echoey room while others weren't ;-).
If you need a not-too-expensive ($50 list, $40 from Amazon) comfortable pair of portable headphones that sound very nice and include a convenient carrying case (which I didn't expect!), you could do worse than the PX-100s.
