Why You Can’t Get Good Earbuds for Under $100

You know what really grinds my gears? When someone claims that music is their life, but refuse to purchase a good pair of earbuds or headphones, and instead stick to the free pair that came with their MP3 player. If you are truly passionate about music, and listen to it often, then it makes all the sense in the world to care just as much about the audio quality as the music itself.

I’m no audiophile, and I’ve made that clear in the past, but I do appreciate clean sound, and it’s for that reason that I believe quality equipment makes the music-listening experience a whole lot better. Upgrading to a worthwhile set of speakers, headphones or earbuds, can pretty-much prove the difference they can make. Music becomes more accurate, subtle tones become more noticeable and even the vocals become richer and more in-your-face.

That said, I’ve always hated earbuds and have found them entirely useless. I know I’m alone here, and I admit that I haven’t tried a truly high-end pair, but I’d like to soon after reading an article posted last week at Gizmodo. My problem with earbuds is this… their clarity and total lack of bass. As this article points out, though, higher-end earbuds do actually improve on the lower-end ones, as they feature more than one driver, allowing for finer and more accurate audio, and far improved bass.

Just how high can you go? Well believe it or not, Shure offers a pair of $500 earbuds, called the SE530, while Ultimate Ears offers their UE-11 Pro’s for, wait for it… $1,150. That pair in particular offers a staggering four drivers in each ear, which is why the price is so high. It’d be an interesting feat (and needless) to have 10 drivers in a pair of headphones, but four in a bud so small is undeniably impressive. If you ask Shure and true audiophiles where the “sweet-spot” for earbuds is, many will say that at $100, the men begin to get separated from the boys. Under $100, it seems that most of what’s focused on is the style, and not the audio design.

The law of diminishing returns tends to kick in above that point: The difference between $300 set of buds and a $400 pair is nowhere near the jump from $20 to $100. Even smaller is the difference in models between generations. The best value on the market might be a previous-gen version of Shure’s 500 series buds at a cut rate ($290), but if you can find $100 earbuds for 70 bucks, it’s even better.