The Shure E500 seem to be the highest end earphones that one can find, so we wanted to test them and see how they perform in real conditions. Fortunately, I have a sound expert at hand with my buddy Eugene D. We tested the unit and here’s what he has to say:
It took some time to get used to putting them in. The manual recommends wrapping the cables around your ears and I found it took 30 – 60 seconds on average to put them on the first 10 times. Then I got quicker at it but Hubert still think that wrapping the cable around the ear isn’t very natural. Talking about cables, the extender cable is a nice touch as the default cable is too short for use with anything that you don’t carry close to you (like with a computer or stereo).
Sound isolation
For $500, I’m surprised by the absence of noise-cancellation. I was confused about this for a while: what you do get is “sound isolation” in that the head phones act as earplugs. It did cancel most of the noise of my noisy PC at work. To be clear, these are NOT noise cancelling headphones (nor do they technically claim to be, but “noise isolation” could be misleading to some). I couldn’t get the microphone to work (it’s supposed to help you hear the outside world without having to remove the phones, a nice touch, but it makes the cable heavy, because there’s a section with the on/off switch that requires a AAA battery, and has a volume control (I assume which is for the microphone) which is embedded so deep into the plastic case that none of my fingers were small enough to make it move.. I needed a pen). The on/off switch is a good idea, but if I’m carrying an iPod or a CD player, it’s no harder for me to just reach and hit the pause button than it is to find the on/off switch on the phones. I guess it’s all about location.
Sound quality
Comparison headphones used in this review: the white earphones that come with IPOD (cheap!), Sennheiser HD570 ($150) and HD600 ($300).
The Shure E500 sound quality is very good for earphones. It’s easily ten times better than the supplied iPOD ones. In some ways, the sound is also better than the HD570 headphones: I heard new things in familiar songs that I’ve never heard before. However, the high-end lacks air in the very high frequencies. Also, hihats and cymbals seem to disappear a bit in the mix, where they stick out with the Sennheisers.
The E500 are extremely loud headphones and noisy devices like my crappy work PC and my iPod have a huge amount of hiss that is very noticeable when songs aren’t playing. I verified with my Behringer DDX3216 mixer (which has clean conditioned power from a monster power center pro 5100 and avs2000) that the phones themselves don’t generate any noise: they were quiet through the Behringer.
But I personally would only want to use earphones with portable devices, which typically have noisier signals, especially when the volume controls need to be so low. A problem you don’t have with studio headphones like the HD600s through an iPod: you can crank up the iPod volume and the noise floor is gone. Another issue with having the phones so loud is that digital devices that have discreet step-wise volume controls don’t have enough resolution to get the comfortable volume you’re looking for. One setting can be too quiet, and the next is too loud. And if the device is doing volume adjustments digitally, you’re turning your 16bit audio into 12bit or worse when you listen with the volume super low. The low frequencies are generally very very good sounding for earphones, but sometimes, certain low frequencies shake the phones a bit in your ears which feels a little uncomfortable and disconcerting at first.
Conclusion
The Shure E500 seems to be the best sounding earphones money can buy. If you really need a $200 studio headphone sound in the format of earphones, then these $500 phones will practically give you that. However, with portable devices, they are very loud which often means very noisy and hard to control (volume-wise). The cable is a little short, very heavy, and it unintuitive to put them in, at first. If you are willing to spend $500 on a great pair of phones for both iPod and home/studio use, you’ll need quality power conditioning and a great/quiet headphone-amp to eliminate the noise floor, and then you’ll start to notice the high end lacks a little air.
I’d rather carry my HD600s and my iPod on a plane. For the price of looking like a dork, you can save $200 and have better, more comfortable sound.
Filed in . Read more about Hands-On.