My plug in (earphones) baby....... (Philips SHE8500)

Member Name: djwhite1982

Product:	Philips SHE8500
Date:	21/08/09 (116 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, plug style

Disadvantages: Wire design

These headphones are a very basic "plug in" style earphones from Phillips. The item is available for around £10 on Amazon, which is just about as cheap as you can find a set of earphones in the plug style.

The plug style earphone is slightly different to the traditional in-ear headphones as they are supplied with small rubber plugs, which literally plug into your ear. This style has a couple of major benefits, the main one I have found is that it is a lot easier to keep them in your ear. I have always found it very frustrating with the original style of earphones falling out of my ear as soon as I did anything that involved moving slightly, like going for a walk. Since using them whilst being mobile is the main reason behind having earphones, if I'm stationary I'll use speakers! The other major benefit of the plug style is that it will (somewhat obviously) act as an ear plug and blocks out a lot of external sound. Its clearly not going to completely block out the sound but unless you are a real stickler for zero external noise you will probably be happy enough with the results.

So if you have similar issues and frustrations I would definitely recommend purchasing some plug earphones, whether you purchase these particular ones comes down to a few other points.

As mentioned above, these earphones are pretty much at the bottom of the price range in terms of this style, and as with anything this will obviously mean a sacrifice in some quality. I actually think the sound quality is pretty good, provided you don't want your music blasting through your head. At a reasonable level of volume the sound is quite clear and the bass is decent. If perfectly crisp sound quality is a major factor for you, then you're going to need to spend a bit more and get a better range, if you don't want to spend a fortune and are happy to sacrifice a bit of sound quality, these are perfect.

A couple of negatives with the earphones are the wires. The adaptor that plugs into your MP3 player is a little bit flimsy, and I could imagine that if you didn't take care of it then there might be the possibility of problems here. My other complaint is with the length of the wires. I've noticed recently that for some reason a lot of earphone manufacturers have started producing items with different length wires at the split to right ant left. The wire to the left is about 10 cm, and to the right about 25cm, so you end up with the join hanging of the side of your head as opposed to sat nicely in the middle of your neck. I'm still waiting to understand the pint of this, as I find it a little bit uncomfortable and unnatural.

Generally for not a lot of money, this headphones are good value and assuming you're happy to put up with the few negatives above then they're definitely great for a pair of cheap earphones.

Summary: Worth a go, especially if you want to test out plug earphones.

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