gents.. I gotta pass this on.

I'm always looking for decent listening devices, and beings as i'm good with cans for now, i need cheap in ears for work 'cause i'm always walking around, and big honkin things on my head look absurd out of context.. and as i fix machinery and such for a living.. i also don't wanna bung up good headphones doing it.

having been through a string of nice, but FREAKIN TERRIBLY made 'higher end' IEMs... i about gave up on the whole deal. then i bought some cheap sony ones, and rethunk. if SONY can get it right, or at least APPROXIMATE right, theres gotta be someone out there doing it well.

so i dug round and googlified, and came up with Logitech who makes these Ultimate Ears things. more i dug, more it said 'mid-centric and decent'.

THEN- i got a message from new egg. UE 200 in ears-- $12.99



SOLD.

got 'em. positively absolutely nothing to write home bout in the looks department, but yep. right on the money sonically. good detail. VERY mid centric-- but not v30 midcentric-- like CLEAR mid-centric. not super extendoid fakey top end. no super boom shit bass. just freakin' right on the money, honest to god midrange loving music. THIRTEEN BUCKS. they usually go for somewheres like 20-- but shit... who really cares at less than 20 bux?

the isolation on them is fantastic, and with the right sized ear-thingy-- they could make REALLY good live recording 'cans'.. that're way less bleed-y than most headphones... would work well for tracking vox, 'cause they don't end up in your mics. hell.. i'd use 'em on stage if i had any such reason to do so or the infrastructure to use them, which i don't... but i could..

really seriously good cheap tools, and if you're needing some for the bus or train, or whether you need inexpensive monitoring cans, or recording in ears... take a peek! if they get better up the line.. holy shit.

Snagged 'em. I'd like something slightly less cumbersome than big honking studio cans now that I have a portable media player again.

I may give these a shot as IEMs live; I'm sure I'll try them out for tracking vocals.

This actually makes tracking sessions super-easy for me. Nothing to bring I wouldn't have on my person anyhow. Use the in-ears, dump the WAVs onto my phone as a temporary hard drive to bring 'em home to mix. Bam. Spice Weasel.

Innnnnteresting.

I will put them on my list of things to remember and purchase. I have liked almost as many things that Logitech has produced, as i have of things that Yamaha has produced. Both companies just seem to have a knack for 'good enough + cheap enough'.

excellente! lemme know if I've lost my mind..

for shits and grins, i just plugged mine directly into the ipod's headphone out ( i usually use the amp)-- it sounds a little less refined.. but not enough to cry about. still stupid loud, but less clean bass. make sure you get the right fit with the rubber thingies... hell.. they give you FIVE different sizes.. so it's pretty easy. but you'll know you got it right when you stick 'em in your ear canal straightway and you hear bass..

man-- J &R has their single balanced armature in ears for $60! http://www.jr.com/logitech/pe/LGI_985000118/

argh.. very curious, but i'll enjoy the cheapies a while pretty happily..

i gotta agree-- i have some logitech compu-monitors that have the same degree of 'WTF? this sounds great for plastic?!' factor. i thought of you pretty much as soon as i threw these on, as i know you're as much a bang for buck junkie as me! i thought my beyer in-ears were the best thing since sliced bread for recording... until they disintegrated.. but these, i don't suspect will blow up.. they're just too.. well.. i dunno.. pedestrian? they're completely unostentatious and NOT high endish.. and thusly, probably prone to last forever.

in all seriousness, though-- despite these dumb earbuds not being mammothian in bass-ness, they kinda have the same sonic footprint as a little english studio monitor-- clear, warm, and pretty damn gratifying in the registers that're necessary without seeming overblown anywhere- a lot like those sennheisers-- but with nicer midrange!

So true. See: everything Yamaha and Peavey make.

These just arrived. I'mma listen to something on my lappie and try to get the hell to sleep because I've been up for over a day at this point.

Initial impression- a bit bassier than I like (but you like HD280s? Those don't register to me as bassy 'cause of the hole in the low mids/mid-bass even though they extend sooooooo low) but I get what Dan is on about when he e-mailed me about them and the overall response being similar to the Grado SR80s. I hear that. Narrower soundstage, but that's sorta a given- in-ears vs. open back. I can trust these, I think. They have the critical bits.

At the same time, agreed on the not super-fakey uber-extendo bass and top. This is mids. Fat mids. Depth is decent. Put some '90s rock on me phone and am listening to Load and Superunknown. (Also put Tomahawk and Travels With Myself And Another on here re: hardrawk once I finally sorted out getting the thing to work,)

Midsy. Not for everyone. Sounds like the rawk musics though. The stuff I'm on about is there. This is worth the whatever the shitcheap I spent on them and then some. No, it's not gonna have the speakers-on-my-head feel of the Grados or sound like my Adam or Polk systems. So what? The detail and frequency response is right for how I like to listen, which is on pretty unhyped systems.

I am actually surprised at the level of detail going on here too. After a bit of break-in, these would I assume get better. I can hear rooms and reverb tails and all that good stuff nicely. Bass seems to be clearing up too?

I am very familiar with how this stuff should sound, and these sound like the songs I know.

I just plugged these into my Presonus HP4 running out of my Focusrite at 88.2. These are actually quite good. Part of the narrowness is the shitty headphone amp on my phone- which, to be fair, is the headphone amp on my phone. Will A/B with the Sennheiser 201s after burn-in.

oh heck yeah-- i think they develop, for sure. mine seem to've taken about a week of pretty loud driving, and the bass fills in-- but not from the bottom, weirdly. it's more of a midbass/low mid thing. the top end, at first, was a little fakey-- but i think with the bottom filling in, they just become less tizzy just due to better balance. seriously-- leave 'em overnight with some loud bassy bombast stuff playing, throw a pillow over them, and just walk away.

for me, i think the clarity is the hook-- no bullshit hyperblatt or top end extension to batville. JBL clearly had nothing to do with the R&D here... they sound like very adequate studio monitors minus the hell top end to me.

oh.. meanwhiles-- i really DON'T like 280s. too much bottom, too much top, not 'nuf midrange. their house sound is a litte too dry-- except for the 202's, which i like because they utterly neglected the bottom octave by leaving it out.. so the midrange/midbass is actually in balance with the top end.

...as the guy who likes to listen on their monitors, I, well...

But you know I have weird taste.

Maybe it's the ribbon tweeters though. I find the Grados and Adams translate very well- the latter cost 10x as much and is "better" but y'know it's not really 10x better.

Put these little guys through a real grown-up amp that people actually buy to amp things 'cause it's lotsa clean gain, and they shine.

I'm talking in the third person as the person who likes 280s,

naw-- i actually enjoy listening to adams as well- you're not THAT weird-- well... yeah, yer weird, but not due to your sonic tastes ;) i put them side by side with those mackie mr5's, and they both have a pretty pleasant character to me-- but the adams were cleaner and had a nicer midbass. i've been using the mr5's in my living room of late with a turntable hooked to 'em, and y'know... its pretty alright with the tweets set 2db down.

anyhoo-- hopefully they just get better. there was a day or two, where i actually thought they sounded WORSE for a little while.. that was why i pounded 'em overnight... seems to've fixed it, or i was just hearing things or fitting them weird. god knows.. seems to've worked itself out though. the amp seems critical to getting them REALLY good though-- my fiio can drive them so painfully loud-- but at a decent clip-- they really do sound great. i gotta give 'em a whip through my denon 50w headphone amp..

DOH... gotcha.

They sound a lot smaller through my portable device than my... Fixed emplacement. It's quite interesting, actually, as the detail is still there, just not the size. I'll probably just leave them on all night with some slamming industrial through them on loop. I fear the HP4 could hurt them if I really blasted it- it is very loud and very clean.

These are like 107 dB efficiency, right? I should recommend them to my drummer. They are super-cheap and we've discussed getting him his own HP4 for live work. He runs off a wired IEM system we've only now really sorted out, and he needs the click louder than god, basically, and has other shit running in there too- his samplers, for one; the actual volume of the acoustic drums is a non-issue...

The soundstage is a lot wider and everything is just plain bigger through a good amp though.

I also, apparently, have narrow ears. For whatever that's worth.

i found the same thing-- a girthy amp really bigs stuff out and an ipod has to be pretty much dimed to get it sounding pretty OK- even though they are ungodly efficient. im pretty sure he'd get more click than humanly necessary with a good canamp.. but they seem to want to be played like room-volume loud. definitely not geared for the polite library peeper crowd.. they're made to be played pretty loud-- which really makes sense given the IEM minded engineering.. you gotta hear 'em over your amp and drummer! give 'em voltage, and they get breathing for sure.

Agreed, from memory, re: iPods. I haven't had a portable device in a good long while until just now again. The amps, well, suck. They just do, and I don't see them having gotten better. Whatevs; unless there's an audiophile portable media player out there- which I doubt- it's not even gonna touch "prosumer" audio gear. My so-not-anything-special headphonemap I got off CL for forty bucks (okay, that's a steal, they're like a buck thirty new) trounces the trousers off of anything else I own or have ready access to re: quality headphone amplification. It's kinda sad, really. But I suppose it's a dedicated unit in place of something that's probably a fifty-cent chip and an afterthought most of the time, if that.

When Chris-from-Garda and I were talking about how, exactly, to rig up the live system, he jokingly suggested pulling our QSC PA amp from the rack and running it bridged mono to feed our drummer's 'phones if all he needs is his samplers and the click. That should be enough? (Anyone here read the whole Mixerman Diaries? )

They like loud. The amp on my phone suxx, but that's to be expected. Crank it and I have the detail- it's really quite surprising what these reveal, having had "nicer" in-ears (Etymotic ER6is, which my band uses for in-ear systems.) I honestly think these might be better, at least for listening, and they are a hella lot cheeper. If they are not, they are at least playing the same game on the same field. These are shockingly good.

Update: after some use now, these sound mighty fine. Oddly, it took some break-in to get the low end right. They opened up a lot. Shocking clarity in the bottom octave- I am not minding the bassiness so much. Blast them with some good volume and you get good results. I think they are well-balanced (for my tastes) with good clarity and a wider soundstage than I'd expect from in-ears.

These are insane for the price. They even sound good running off my laptop.

oh rockin'! glad it's not just my ears being weird.. i absolutely love mine for 12 bux.. it's just absurd. i saw a place that had them for 10 bux yesterday .. i'm seriously considering surplusing three pairs for armageddon. you KNOW they'll stop making them because they outshine all the high dollar shit for basically free

it DID take some time driving them to get them to sound quite right-- they went through several stages of weird until they settled in ( or maybe my ears did?).. but they never sounded BAD- just kinda bright, then thin, then they sorta started getting good, and eventually just stayed good. it took a little figuring what earpieces worked well- and for me, i hadda go smaller than usual and jam 'em way in my ears- that sorta maxes detail and really gets the midrange right. i'd gotten used to having ones so bright i'd leave 'em way outa my ears just so i wouldn't bust my teeth..

I ran into the same thing with the earpieces. Either that or I have narrower ears than I thought.