I thought it would be good to give props to products that I think deserve some attention. I buy head phones a lot. I like to carry music or podcasts with me, either with my iPod (3G), my laptop, or whatever. I used to buy the on-ear (OE) headphones (the kind with the pillow of material to form a seal with your ear) for no more than $30 — so cheap headphones provide me with the quality of sound that I desire pretty much by filtering some of the ambient noises around me. Unfortunately these things keep breaking and it’s usually a tiny part that breaks so I can’t glue it back together.

The OE headphones have consistently failed me because I’m too rough with them, which led me to look for some ear buds that would fit my noise-filtering needs. Initially I looked at the Bose In-Ear Headphones, but they were just too expensive for me. I don’t want to buy $99 (they were $249 at the time, IIRC) In-Ear (IE) phones just to yank the wire out later and be left with nothing. I kept looking…

In a fit of audio starvation, I went into a Staples or Office Depot while in Burlington, VT on business and checked out their selection. They had a bunch of Griffin Technologies gear, which I usually associate with iPod, but there were these TuneBuds that caught my eye. I bought them for $29.99, took them back to the hotel room and immediately liked them. They fit inside the ear and seal with the inner ear (or ear canal? I don’t know), creating the external noise filtration that I want and they have a soft casing to keep them comfortable inside the ear. I don’t really thump a lot so I don’t know if the bass is good, but I don’t think you want too much bass pumped directly into your ear canal and it doesn’t seem weak to me. If any bass-connoisseur out there has a chance to review these things, let us know what you think in the comments section. The main complaint I have is that the cord is too short, but that’s corrected with something like this extension cord.

All-in-all, I’m very pleased with my purchase so far and I recommend the Griffin TuneBuds to anybody in the same situation I was in.