It doesn’t matter how good the earphones are…

When the music you are listening to is rubbish! However, as i found on my run on Sunday, if this is the case having the ability to turn the volume down without fiddling with my iPod is a great addition to the new Sennheiser range of sports earphones.

Almost exclusively since starting running a few years back I have been using Sennheisers. This pair is my third neck band pair following an incident with my first and a tree and my second set, whilst still functioning, have seen better days after being thrown numerous times to the bottom of the gym bag and squashed. I have always found the neckband earphones comfy and simple to use so when I got this new pair I had no real hesitations to ditch my old orange pair for the new black/yellow combination.

In a moment I’m going to wax lyrical about another great pair of running headphones but just before that I’m going to mention, very briefly, about the challenge that I had with the first set I had been given to trial. Trying out the OMX 680 pair I was a bit dubious about how they would fit and work. I had a pair of the over ears when they were green and back then I struggled. Whilst the sound quality when these things were stable in my ears was perfect – I spent most of the 2 runs I did with them pushing them back in as they kept falling out. Now, perhaps my ears are freaky, as I’m sure these earphones are heavily tested, or maybe I just need to play with them a bit more as they do need to be sculpted a little and  I just haven’t tried hard enough with this pair….

On with the review of the pair that I really wanted, the PMX 680′s. These earphones appear a lot more stylish than the predecessors. Gone is the bold and bright green and orange colours replaced with a black frame which is a lot slicker. As previously mentioned, a volume control has also been added which is quite a neat feature as sometimes, whilst I’m out, I do want to mute the volume or crank it up louder than the traffic by the side of the road. However, after a couple of runs I do have to question the position of this controller as its not long enough to clip to the top of a shirt and the extension from the volume to phones is not long enough to clip to shorts. When I ran on Sunday I found I had to leave the device flapping on my back so that it was out of the way.

The sound quality of these earphones are great. Due to the fact that they sit outside of the ear they aren’t noise canceling and for some of my London runs the noise of traffic can sometimes overpower the output of the earphones, although I believe this will be a problem for all sports earphones. There is a question to be raised whether hiding all noise is possibly a bad idea for safety anyway so this is possibly for the best.

The other great addition to the range is a protective case. I don’t know how my orange pair are still alive having been tossed into my sports bag and had my laptop, books, trainers etc thrown on top of them. I wonder whether some of the sound issues occurring now are thanks to the battering they have been given. The new range incorporates a protective case which should hopefully limit the damage. I possibly would have gone for a slightly harder case than Sennheiser have chosen to guarantee the safety of the earphones in the kit bags but then again, perhaps I need to remember that these are reasonably expensive items of kit and I should treat them with more care!

All in all – great pair of earphones and I can’t see what would stop me using them in the near future!

N