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| Product: Ear Link HP-EL1 Headphones |
Company: Aiwa |
| Web: www.aiwa.com |
Phone: 201-512-3600 |
| Platform: Your ear canal |
SRP: US$30
Street Price: same |
Cred Rating: | Special Award: Road Kill |
I've seen some poorly designed technologies in my day, but these phones rank! When I saw the promo pics, I thought they looked kind of cool. I certainly liked the idea of personalized headphones, fitted to your ears. I've also always found the in-ear technology intriguing, but have never tried a good-quality set of such headphones before. Several minutes into struggling with them, I knew something was just not right.
The Ear Links come with three sets of ear rings, the snap-in plastic parts, in small, medium and large, that you use to custom-fit your phones. The set ships with the medium rings already attached. I've got a big-ass head and needed to switch to the large rings. So I pulled and tugged and I wrestled and I twisted and I couldn't get the bloody medium rings off the phones. I ended up bending one pretty severely in the process. Then, to put on the large rings, I pushed and I mashed and I shoved and I twisted, and finally got 'em in. Ah...now the moment had come to see how these US$30 headphones sounded. Lasso-ing each ear with a ring, I found that large was too large. Medium was too small, large too large.
The extra slop meant that the business end of the phones, the 15mm neodymium drivers, twisted sideways a bit inside my ear canal. The drivers are designed to fit inside of your ears facing forward (towards the front of your head). This may seem odd if you're unfamiliar with ear-bud headphones, but as you probably know, sound transference happens through vibration, exciting the cochlea hairs inside of the ear drum. This can happen in a number of ways. Remember the Bone Phone in the '70s? It worked by vibrating your collarbone, and then there are those lollipop holders that play music by vibrating your teeth. So vibrating the bone just inside your ear (as opposed to projecting the sound back into your ear drum) is a perfectly reasonable means of sound transference, IF the ear-bud fits correctly. With the Ear Links, the sound is terrible until I push the phones into my head so that the drivers are parallel with my ear bones. Let go, and the sound quality and volume drops dramatically.
I could say that these might work fine if the ear rings fit properly, but a) how would you know before you blew thirty of your dead presidents on 'em, and b) when I hold mine properly inside my head, the sound still isn't all that great. I've certainly seen plenty of thirty-dollar phones in my time that sound a hell of a lot better. The el cheapo push-in type of ear-bud phones that shipped with my son's MPFit CD-MP3 player don't sound much worse than these. Aiwa should have spent more time getting the mechanics of these phones right and less time trying to make them look like this season's high-tech fashion accessory.
- Gareth Branwyn [4/18/01]
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