Donka's Mobile Rambles

As an iPod owner, one of the first accessories I would look to purchase is a new pair of earphones. The supplied pair are competent but the iPod is able to deliver some very good audio quality, especially at high bit rates, and these earphones just can’t do it justice. So what do you do when you want to get the ultimate in audio quality for your ears? Well Ultimate Ears sounds like a great place to start!
This earphone follows the in-ear canal design that is popular for offering a better sound than standard style earbuds as well as a certain degree of noise cancellation making them great for listening to music on a flight or crowded subway. The first thing you will notice with these earphones though are the surprisingly thick cables employed here; typically in-ear canal style phones use thinner, lighter cables to reduce the cable thump issue when tapping of the cables will travel up the cable and be audible in your ear. This is an issue for the Metro-fi and to my ears, slightly worse than others of a similar design. This heavy duty cable does however give an air of durability to these earphones and that is carried over to the rest of the construction as they seem very well made.
It would be wrong to compare these earphones to the standard iPod delivered variety as they are two entirely different beasts and you will soon discover where the premium for the Ultimate Ears has gone – they simply sound far superior!
These phones are quite loud, somewhere between the standard earphones and the loudest on the market. One area that many people look out for is bass response and it is good here although not excellent. It is well delivered with a good solid thump as opposed to a less well defined rumble that some other brands seem to provide but it can’t quite live up the bass levels of the best I have listened to if heavy bass is your thing. Across the rest of the soundstage however, these earphones do sound excellent for consumer level phones with very accurate delivery of mid and high ranges. Listening to the guitar intro to Texas’s ‘I don’t want a lover’ encoded with Apple’s lossless codec reveals very high levels of detail. Slowdive’s superb ‘Avalyn I’ sounded equally as impressive with its dreamy guitar interspersed with the light beat of the drum and cymbals ringing through the highs. There is one drawback to this clarity of detail though; these phones will show up poorly encoded or low bit rate tracks so ensure your audio source is well produced to start with you owe it to earphones as good as these!

Included in the package are a stylish aluminium storage tin and choice of four sizes of silicon ear inserts ensuring a good fit. I found these earphones very comfortable to wear for extended periods of time and with the good seal of the correct size of insert, good bass response and little intrusion from outside noise. There is also small slider on the cable that lets you adjust the physical separation between the two ear pieces and this may help to eliminate some of the cable thump by securing the cable when worn. These earphones really do offer a full step up in audio delivery over the standard earbuds and probably rank among the best sounding in ear canal style earphones in the consumer range. This seems like a great purchase for anyone looking to get maximum audio quality for a relatively inexpensive investment. Two words of caution though, bass heads may be served by slightly more bass heavy earphones if they are happy to lose out on over all audio quality and cable thump could be an issue for those already troubled by this such as when jogging. If these two points don’t put you off, the Ultimate Ears Metro-fi 2 earphones could well be your perfect companions unless you are looking to enter the world of high end earphone solutions.
Head on over to the Ultimate Ears website for more details.