Sennheiser's tiny white earbuds promise a noticeable upgrade to your iPod headphones' paper-thin woofers. Are they worth the extra coin?
Review summary of the Sennheiser CX-500:
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 Ultimately, these earbuds are designed for use with portable media. They don’t benefit much from lossless audio like the FLACs and CDs we listened to, with minimal difference between those tracks and high-bitrate mp3s. They’re a little pricier than Shure’s low-end single-driver earbuds, and they lack the superior modular system, but they’re still a solid option at this price point. Release: February 2008. Price: $60.
Pros: Good value, solid set of included accessories, better sound from low bitrate music
Cons: Doesn't benefit much from lossless audio, short cable
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Full Sennheiser CX-500 Review:
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Design - Very Good
The first thing we noticed about the CX-500s is the color. Completely white from the earbuds to the 3.5mm jack, Sennheiser makes no bones about their target audience: iPod owners. The 3.5mm jack won’t fit with an iPhone, but otherwise these were made with Apple mp3 players in mind.
The cord, especially once it splits, seems a little fragile, but we tugged and pulled on it pretty well and it showed no signs of falling apart. We did think the cord was too short, though, as it was barely long enough to reach down to our jacket pocket, and was definitely not long enough to reach our pants pockets. This made the included shirt clip useless to us, as our problem was not an unruly cord that would get tangled, but that there wasn’t enough cord to get tangled in the first place.
We were worried about the volume control slide located halfway down the cord. It is extremely convenient, especially when someone was trying to talk to us and we had our music too loud to hear, but usually any volume control on headphones means a separate amplifier, which is almost always bad. However, Sennheiser reps assure us that it is merely a volume attenuator, and doesn't alter the audio signal at all when set to the "MAX" setting.
We liked that there were six pairs of earpieces to choose from, and found the medium-sized double flange to fit the best. We would have liked to see a foam earpiece, which from our experience tend to give the best sound isolation, but the rubber ones worked well enough for us not to lament their absence too much.
Sound - Very Good
We listened to a lossless, FLAC-encoded digital music playlist to test the limits of the CX-500s. Listening to everything from The Cure to Dr. Dre to Bjork to Elliott Smith, the Sennheiser’s performed well, although the improvement from listening to compressed music on our iPod was minimal. Inversely, our low-bit rate tracks, like The Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” ripped to 128kbps, sounded significantly better than they did on a cheap pair of headphones (e.g. iPod earbuds).
The earbuds seemed a little overwhelmed by lower notes, especially noticeable on acoustic songs like Elliott Smith's "Between The Bars." We heard staticky fuzz in the background of softer songs, which on better headphones is usually replaced by an extremely soft, almost unnoticeable hiss. We think that the headphones handle digital recordings a lot better than analog ones. For example, the same background fuzz we got on both (admittedly lo-fi) the Elliott Smith and Iron & Wine tracks on our FLAC playlist was gone when we listened to the computer-generated sounds of Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights.”
The lack of foam earpieces hurts the CX-500s the most in sound isolation. The sound was excellent with no outside noise, but when we took them on the subway, we found ourselves having to turn the volume up to completely block out ambient sounds.
Accessories - Very Good
The CX500s are bundled with a decent set of accessories, including: an alligator clip for clipping to a shirt or jacket, a rubber cable winder with wells for each bud and two sets of S/M/L earpieces, one regular and one double flange, and a carrying pouch to stuff it all in. A modular system or foam earpieces would help the CX500s here, and it also would have been nice to see an airplane adapter, especially since we have a nice convenient pouch to carry it in.
Price and availability
The Sennheiser CX-500 will start selling for $60 () in February 2008.
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