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Articles and Reviews
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Shure
E2 Ear Buds
Indeed, these CAN $60 headphones may look like refugees from the 1980s (which they actually are), but they do indeed rock with still the best bass oomph I’ve heard from any headphones including the much more expensive Sennheiser HD580 and HD650, full-sized cans I have for home use. The bass is astonishing given how compact the PortaPros are physically. Inklings of other portable headphone options subsided as I grooved with the PortaPros until that fateful day when after taking my seat on the bus ride back home from work, I pulled the sliding headband too hard and snapped the plastic holders that kept the metal band together. Longtime readers know that I despise plastic when used inappropriately in high-stress parts of photographic equipment, and I did a silent “Argh!” in my mind when I discovered what broke was indeed a small piece of plastic. But then there’s a silver lining in every dark cloud isn’t there? Broken PortraPros meant that I could legitimately purchase a replacement set of cans that could be even better and perhaps address the sonic assault on my ears from the roar of downtown traffic and the diesel engine in the bus. For you see (or rather hear, or not hear), as decently good as the PortraPros are, you lose a significant amount of the sonic quality due to everyday noise that we cannot shut out when using open-air headphones. There are two primary types of headphones, open and sealed. Most people, when headphones come to mind, or head, use open-air headphones that do not seal off external noise. The sealed type, well, they do seal off external noise and usually have ratings for how many decibels of outside noise they cut out. Why there are not more sealed cans used I don’t know, but I suppose in these fast times, we want to know when we need to connect back to reality and hear the telephone ringing, or baby crying. Open-air designs are also where the best headphones hang out, but that’s not to suggest that you cannot obtain excellent sound quality from sealed cans. I briefly thought of the Sennheiser HD280 cans that are sealed, are considered good, and are not priced too highly at about CAN $150. However, they look full-sized and walking around downtown looking like Princess Leia of the 1970s does not groove with me, even if I, ahem, do have a tiny amount of 1970s disco tunes on my iPod (yes, I will survive J Thoughts of the ear canal buds came to mind and I wondered if I should take a shot at the Shure or Etymotic options. Actually, the only viable option for me were the buds from Shure, since those are easily available in Canada, meaning no border hassles, duty, and currency exchange rip offs by the credit card companies to be experienced. I mentioned all this to my coworker, who I must point out, is to blame for me getting involved in all of this headphone listening business (real audiophiles only listen to music through speakers and don’t play disco music in our Funky Town). He pointed out that my legitimacy in seeking out options to replace the PortaPros was misplaced and doused my Saturday Night Fever by reminding that Koss offers a lifetime warranty…I ordered the Shure E2 buds anyway.
The Shure E2’s arrived on time and they look promising. Beefy little buds that seem to have some bullocks with cable that isn’t as thin and as tangle-happy, as is often the case with other ear buds. The E2’s come equipped with mid-sized rubber inserts installed, but these did not fit in my ear very well. Moving to the smallest size worked for my right ear, but it still seemed too big for my left ear. Aha, I finally discovered why it is that my left ear always gave me fits with the common ear bud; the ear opening is too small. I moved onto the smallest foam insert instead of using the rubber insert and now I could have some relative comfort with the E2’s in-ear.
I’ll point out now that I don’t like these wax guards that require the steady hands of a surgeon to place on the tube opening and will hardly stay in place after a couple of usages. Too fiddly and probably designed by an engineer with nary a thought to real world usage. Get rid of the stupid wax guards and make some rubber or foam inserts that come with a built-in filter. My thinking is that this wax guard is stupid enough to compel an upgrade to one of the other Shure models that don’t require a wax guard sticky, like the E3’s, but then you would have to pay double the amount for them and you still have to clean them regularly if your ears have too much wax. Once you get past the little idiosyncrasies of the E2’s, it’s time to start rolling the foam between your thumb and forefinger to compress the foam enough to shove into your ear. When the foam expands, it will seal off the outside air just like safety foam earplugs do.
Comfort wise, the foam definitely helps and while I always know I’m wearing the E2’s, they are much better than my cheap Panasonic buds with their rubber inserts. I can live with how the E2’s feel inside my ear, but the E3’s could be even better as they look smaller with less bulk than the E2’s. Sound Quality First time I listened to them I could immediately hear that they offered more resolution and refinement than the PortaPros, just as the PortraPros offered better sonics over the stock Apple earbuds. They sounded good right away with most tracks listened to, but superior resolution also means being a little less forgiving of tracks that have been recorded poorly, or perhaps just revealing the limitations of the MP3 compressed format. Bass output did not match the PortaPros, but overall tonal balance is more neutral than the warm sounding Koss cans. The Shure’s seemed to offer much of the “just sounds right” kind of sound that my big Sennheiser cans provide when compared to other brands. Perhaps it’s just what I’m use to after having used Sennheiser cans for a decade. With the drivers firing right into your ear canal with external noise quite effectively sealed off, your listening volume is going to be much lower than with open-air cans. I find that I’m down about 40-50 percent of the volume I use to set when I used the PortaPros, or the big Senns. For $100, the Shure E2’s sound pretty good to my ears, but given that these are entry-level buds, I can only imagine how much better the Shure E3 and E5 buds are. If you’re into running a portable amp for your listening pleasure on the road, the E2s will benefit with a little bit more oomph and finesse, but you’ll do just fine if you want to run them direct into your player’s headphone jack. Plugging them into my main headphone rig of the Musical Fidelity X-Can V3, powered by its companion X-PSU, and fed by CD signals processed by the Benchmark DAC-1, fed into the Musical Fidelity X-10 tube buffer (also powered by the X-PSU), I could certainly hear more refinement than listening to the same tracks direct from the iPod. However, there seems to be a ceiling of just how much more the E2’s can provide even with good ancillary equipment upstream. Talking about soundstage with headphones seems a bit silly given that most of the sound is supposed to come from inside the middle of your head, but not so with certain cans. My Sennheisers can give me the illusion that sound is emanating from spaces outside of my head. It’s subtle, so I’m not going to make a big deal about it, but it’s feature I get from both the HD580s and HD650s (more so with the HD650s juiced by the MuFi X-Can V3/X-PSU rig). The E2s don’t offer such an illusion of outside the head sound. Everything is pretty much inside and extreme left/right imaging is not as broad, or as obvious as with the large, open-air cans. Listening
to JS Bach’s Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins by the
Bass response is good and I don’t feel cheated, but again, it doesn’t have the same impact as the PortaPros. I’ve been groovin’ a lot lately to the Age of Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine medley by the Fifth Dimension from the Forest Gump soundtrack (I know, I know), and what really gets the toe tapping and the booty shaking is the bass guitar playing from Let the Sun Shine. It’s really funky and more or less takes over the song to lay the foundation down, almost as if it were the lead guitar instead merely a supporting bass. Every set of cans I’ve used to listen to this track has given the bass guitar that lead prominence, but only the PortaPros do justice to the drum playing that is also really good and funky and matches the bass guitar. With the E2s and even with the Sennheisers, the drums are more recessed into the background. Playing it back on a fully juiced up X-Can rig really lets that bass boogie though and gives it proper separation from the other instruments. While I wouldn’t call the E2s forward they do offer a more immediate presentation of sound than the HD580s and HD650s. It’s not the thin and very lean Grado sound though (SR-100s), as the E2’s have more balls in the low end than these elderly cans and offer better sound. Conclusion
While the sound isolation is not absolute, it dulls the roar of the bus engine enough so that I can listen to jazz vocals and hear all the delicacy and nuance of Ella Fitzgerald. There have been times when I was pleasantly surprised to hear details with the E2s that I’d not heard before with the PortaPros because of the outside noise. Definitely recommended for sound quality, but for ergonomics and usage, I’d suggest getting the E3s if you can afford them and avoid the hassle of the little filter dots required for the E2s. You still need to clean the E3s of any wax build-up, but I’d prefer doing that than fussing with those damn little filters. Plus, the E3s are supposed to be noticeably better and more refined than the E2s for sound quality. Whichever set you decide on, I recommend buying a bag of extra foam inserts at the same time because you’ll need to replace them once the foam gets compressed, dirty and tattered. If you choose to use the rubber inserts instead, they can be cleaned with a bit of alcohol. If you’re really hardcore, you can go to a professional audiologist to custom mold the E3s or the top of the line E5s for your ear opening for the best comfort. I’m not that hardcore and the E2s are doing just fine for now. Recommended. |
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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Shortly
after buying 
I
couldn’t recall where the Shure buds could be bought locally,
so I ordered them through Axe Music in the neighboring
Before
getting too comfortable though, one must place a tiny little dot
of a sticker, called a wax guard, onto the tip of the cylinder
tube that the rubber or foam inserts are installed on. The little
dot is a filter to keep earwax out of the cylinder that leads
to the drivers. If you don’t clean your ears regularly, the in-ear
style buds will certainly compel you to do so, if not for personal
hygiene then to keep the limited supply of filter dots intact
since you only receive five-pairs. In-ear buds are definitely
not for sharing 
The
ear buds have a particular orientation to them for proper insertion
with the cable pointing upwards instead of down, as with regular
outer ear buds. The cable hooks over the top of the ears and then
down behind the ear. I’ve seen ads for the 
For
$100, the 