Earphones are just earphones to me once upon a time until about 2 years ago when I purchased these ones. For years I'd spent the odd tenner here and there on earphones mainly because my children always nick them and the cables end up getting broken. A colleague of my told me to try out the Sure SE215s but warned me they were much more of a heavy price tag then I'd been used to before.

I've always trusted the Shure brand so I was very keen to give this par a road test. All of the cables leading to the earphones were clearly reinforced enough to withstand abuse for any child. The first thing that blew me away was how comfortable and soft they felt whilst in my ears. When putting them on ensure that you have the thicker bit of the cable pointing upwards and then bend it over your ear like an ear hook I guess, and it tends to mould itself you your ear better. They come with a variety of six interchangeable sleeves which you can experiment with to ensure that you choose the most comfortable one for matching with your ears - afterall, no two ears are the same. It comes with a cleaning device which will clean out the phone tunnel which is a welcomed touch, I've never considered using one of these before. Usually I can't bare earphones in for more than an hour or so as they become very painful for me. The quality of the bass was superb, along with the warm, rich tones that shouted out 'detail' in all of the tracks I tested them with.

Shure realise the fact that people go through earphones all the time and that's why I think they designed the removable cable system on these, which is brilliant. The plug has a thick coating of rubber to protect it so it will take rather a large amount of abuse before it breaks - mind hasn't broken as yet.

For the audio buffs out there the earphones frequency response is 22 Hz - 17.5 kHz, and the microdriver is the brains behind producing the great sound quality of the bass. As far as sound isolation goes the design and build of the earphones means that 90% of any ambient noise is filtered out. Although this is very difficult for most of us to measure, I'd have to agree that they do in fact filter out a massive amount of noise in comparison to ear phones that I've used in the past.

I'd certainly recommend these entry level ear phones to anyone wishing to use them to listen to their MP3s, CDs, radio etc. These ones are built to last a very long time indeed.

Purchased from Amazon for £86 including delivery 2 years ago.