Are you Shure?

I do my best work while listening to music. Particularly when I'm listening to cheesy techno music. I tend to prefer listening to music on headphones, as the isolating experience of headphones seems to help me focus on what I'm working on.

Since I spend so much time wearing headphones, I wear big, comfortable, and decent-sounding ear cups. Unfortunately these big beasts don't travel well. Hence I've been in the market for new headphones. The obvious choice would be some ear buds, but I've always hated the way the ear buds make my ears sore after a few hours of use. So I started looking for alternatives.

It wasn't long before I discovered that iPod users seem to be the most profilic portable-headphone reviewers on the planet. I can't claim to understand the cause of this phenomenon, but the effect is that there's lots of good info out there from people who have tried all sorts of headphones. My education-via-iPodders taught me about a type of headphone I hadn't heard of before: the ear phone. The defining characteristic of ear phones is that they go into you ear canal like an ear plug. This design leads to several advantages over ear buds: they are more comforatable than ear buds due to their soft ear-conforming contruction, they give better acoustic isolation from the environment, and they provide better bass response. All those advangates and they're just as portable as buds!

I quickly learned, however, that there are really only two players in the ear phone market: Etymotic and Shure. Both of these companies have historically made products for professionals, and have only recently dipped into the consumer market. Which means that their products are priced a bit higher than your typical consumer head phones. I wasn't quite sure that spending over one hundred dollars on a pair of headphones was worth it, so my heaphone quest was put on pause.

Until this weekend. I've been doing a fair bit of traveling recently, and each time I've tried to get some programming done while on a plane or in an airport I found myself wishing I had headphones. Then I found myself in PDX with a little time to kill, and I ended up in front of one of those places where people can rent DVD's for their flight. What had caught my eye was their selection of heaphones for sale, and lo-and-behold, they carried the E2c and E5c from Shure. I would've passed on them due to the high price ($99 for the E2c, and an outrageous $499 for the E5c), were it not for the demo pair of E2c's.

Once I slipped on the E2c's (admittedly after a bit of fumbling while figuring out how to get them to fit in my ears) I was transported. The airport dissappeared, and all I could hear was the Finding Nemo DVD that the demo was playing. And it sounded great. Really great. For a moment I forgot about the bustle of the airport and just settled down to watch the movie.

I was snapped out of my trance by the auto-repeat that they had set on the demo (damn demo!), and the woman running the DVD rental stand looked at me with a knowing smile: their demo earphones had snagged another one. I handed over my credit card and she handed over the earphones.

Flying from PDX to DCA was so much more enjoyable than I had hoped it could be. I was in my own little world for the duration of the flight, either grooving out to George Acosta mixing trance while I programmed, or falling asleep to Joao Carlos Martins playing Bach. When I think of all the flying that I have coming up in the near future, I'm thinking that this is one of the best 99 bucks I've spent. My only regret is not getting my hands on these things sooner.