Product Reviews

We all know that the first thing you should do after buying an iPod is chuck away the included earbuds and buy a decent set instead. And while spending £130 on a pair might seem excessive, the rewards more than justify the wince-inducing expenditure.

Despite the rather odd name, these Q-Jay earbuds are superb. For one thing, they sound fantastic. Bass is reproduced with just the right amount of enthusiasm, the middle ranges are bright and breezy and the treble is crisp and detailed.

The only complaint that you'll have will be that the inbuilt flaws of poorly encoded and compressed tracks housed in your iTunes library, which have been masked by the inadequacy of most earphones, are exposed by the Q-Jays. However, if you're prepared to

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pay £130 for a pair of earphones, you're almost certainly the kind of person who cares enough about how your music sounds to make sure that it is encoded at a high bit rate with a decent codec and so won't be troubled by flaws in your favourite songs.

We had no trouble with music that we had ripped from CD ourselves or even tracks which had been bought from iTunes. The Q-Jays come with lots of extras. We love the fact that the cable is only 60cm long and that there are two 90cm extension cables in the box - one with an L-shaped connector and one with a straight plug. There are also five sets of silicon sleeves of different sizes, meaning the Q-jays should sit snugly in your ear canal no matter how big or small it is. And there are adaptors for aeroplane-style output sockets and for sharing your iPod's music with two sets of earphones. Finally, there's a zip-around leather case to carry the Q-Jays.

There's a great deal of choice in the earphones market and Q-Jays' competition comes from no less well-established brands than Shure, Sennheiser, and Denon. Regardless of that, they are a match for anything in their price bracket. If we were being really picky, we would say that we prefer the aluminium housing of Denon's AH-C551, but that's a very minor point. The Q-Jays Dual Micro Armature Earphones really are very good indeed.