Originally Posted by major-giggles:
“Sennheiser CX300 have crap sound quality”
I have to completely disagree with you there. I ordered a pair of CX300s from Amazon a couple of days ago after getting completely fed up with my earphones (also Sennheiser) falling out of my ears at the first opportunity, and they arrived this morning.
It took a couple of attempts to get them to fit into my ear (I've never used IEMs before, only regular earphones and headphones), but now getting them in isn't a problem at all. They have to form a complete seal inside the ear, otherwise they sound tinny.
I've tried them on both my MP3 player (a Creative Zen Micro) and my PC via a pair of expensive Creative speakers, and the audio quality blew me away on both counts, especially the bass reproduction.
On hip-hop and rap tracks, the bass was the most powerful I've heard on any earphones I've ever owned, and the low bass (<40Hz) that most earphones fail to reproduce to any great degree came out blasting into my eardrums - It was like hearing a whole new layer of sound I didn't even know existed. Even my 8" subwoofers on my stereo system seemed to be lacking it in comparison. In fact, on my Zen Micro, I actually had to turn the bass down a bit - something I've never had to do before. Something this small shouldn't be able to reproduce bass that powerful.
On mid to high frequencies, audio reproduction was pretty good as well, although I have to admit that some higher frequencies seemed a little quiet. However, there was a distinct lack of sibilance on the higher frequencies, which made the listening experience far more comfortable even with the volume turned up. My Sony Fontopia (which were always my choice of earphone) earphones used to suffer a lot from sibilance which sometimes made them uncomfortable to use and my previous Sennheiser earphones (bought a month ago when I needed to replace the Sonys) also suffered from it as well.
I've also tried them out with rock, indie and dance tracks. Putting aside the awful mastering of recent tunes (with the heavily clipped treble), the CX300s performed well, and once again, it was possible to pick out instruments that I didn't even know were there. A lot of this was probably down to the way the CX300s blocked out external ambient sounds.
I'm going to try them out later today with a couple of DVDs to see how they perform there, but overall for £18 they seem like excellent value for money - If you can get them to fit into your ears of course.