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| Greetings!
Most readers of this newsletter are hardcore business travelers, and we're always looking for the next great gadget to make our lives on the road more enjoyable. Read on to discover if the new Monster Turbine In-Ear Speakers are among those great gadgets...
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By Charles Thompson
OVERVIEW
My standards are high. I'm an unrepentant audiophile. Many a speaker, headphone, cable, or other component has swaggered its way to my system on the promise of being Closest To The Actual Performance, only to limp away, chastised and shamed.
I'm particularly hard on headphones, and even harder on their earbud cousins. Sure, you get music, but with most, you also get the bonus of a squeezed head, or a sore ear canal, or spitty treble, or nonexistent bass, or a rollercoaster EQ curve, or garden-variety harmonic distortion. Some also sport a dorky, cartoonish look out of place with your customary Tumi/Blackberry travel style.
With such low expectations, especially considering the bargain (relative to its competition) $149.95 that the spectacularly-named Monster Turbine High Performance In-Ear Speakers sell for, I was absolutely stunned.
Your lavish treatment by these babies starts with the packaging. We could debate whether a tiny product weighing a fraction of an ounce deserves a jewelry box big enough to hold 12 iPods, but we'd be missing the point of "lavish," wouldn't we?
Inside the lovely black box are the In-Ear Speakers, an ultrasuede-lined case with a magnetic clasp, and five sizes of sound-isolating eartips for an exact fit. The Turbines feel well-built and substantial in your hand, yet light in your ears. For a full technical background on the Turbines themselves, as well as the musical and design philosophies that went into their creation, head to Monster's website.
LISTENING TESTS
I broke in the Turbines for 24 hours straight, with an Internet Radio Jazz station out of Paris. Good stuff, much better than that smooth jazz crap we get here. Then I fit myself for the correct set of eartips. In the Anatomical Anomaly of the Century, I discovered that all five sets of eartips fit me just fine. But they don't all sound the same. For a good "seal," you need to insert the tips into your ear canal, even moistening them to shove 'em in real good. The object is to get the speaker close to your eardrum. I discovered, however, that if you get the speaker TOO close, the highs go all muffled. That ruled out the smallest two sizes of earbud. I settled on the ones that actually were pre-installed on the Turbines.
I listened on an iPod Touch 2G. My reality checks for accuracy and bass were the home system, with its two Revel B15a subwoofers; earbuds from Etymotic; and Monster's own Beats by Dr. Dre full-sized headphones. While the Turbines couldn't reproduce the openness of the speaker/sub combo or the Beats, they acquitted themselves nicely against them frequency response-wise. Compared with the Etymotic ER-4P, there was no contest.
I purchased the Etymotic ER-4P a while back (they retail for twice the price of the Turbines, but sell for $175 on Amazon) after a shootout with comparably-priced earbuds from Shure, which I promptly returned because they spat, wheezed, distorted, and farted on bass when fed a low-frequency diet of Groove Armada and Maxwell. The Etymotics were cleaner than the Shures, but I had to put up with their lightweight low end (at least compared to full-sized headphones)...until now.
Compared with the Etymotics, the first thing you'll notice from the Turbines is the completely unexpected, subterranean, canyon-carving bass. Prepare to be blown away. Dude. Seriously. Blown away.
I made my comparisons listening to stuff like Brooklyn Funk Essentials from the album "In the Buzz Bag." The song "By and Bye" is a massive kick drum and bass workout, with punchy low-end dynamic range. The Turbines delivered by far the best bass I've ever heard in earbuds, and this alone was enough to send the Etymotics into a drawer for good...but then I thought I'd throw on some Sinead O'Connor, with her excellent cover of Bob Marley's "War." At first, listening to the cymbals and tambourine, I felt that, while the Turbines rocked a smoother midrange, the Etymotics had more upper-end air. That's when I discovered the thing about jamming the Turbines too far into the ear canal, and how that squishes the treble. Switching to a more compatible eartip brought the air back, and now the Etymotics are indeed in a drawer for good.
Another bonus you get with the Turbine In-Ear Speakers is the excellent 45-inch cord, with its patented Magnetic Flux Tube. In my listening tests, the Turbines exhibited a tiny fraction of the Etymotic's annoying microphonics (when you move the cord, you hear booming sounds through the eartips). And the smooth cord tangles a lot less.
CONCLUSION
The Monster Turbine In-Ear Speakers are easily the finest product of their type I've ever experienced. At $149.95, blowing away similar designs at twice the price, they're an absolute steal. The sleek design, with its all-metal housing, looks and feels great in the ears. They play effortlessly at what I consider obscene volume levels. Now, back to that packaging. The big and beautiful black box is nice enough to display on your desk or bookcase. But if you don't want it, do the right thing and recycle it. Make the Earth a better place than you found it.
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Charles Thompson
Sell-Through Solutions, Inc.
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