Product Reviews

Shure is best known for its professional audio equipment, including headphones used by musicians to monitor their performance on stage. The SE110 ear-canal headphones are the latest addition to its consumer range.

These sound-isolating headphones come with a variety of detachable sleeves designed to shut out background noise. The most effective are earplug-style foam sleeves, which are compressed as you push them into your ears and then expand to fit the ear canal. Since this physically

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blocks outside noise, there are no undesirable audio artefacts such as the high-pitched hiss often produced by headphones with active noise cancellation.

When we wore the SE110s, the outside world was virtually inaudible, and music sounded incredible thanks to the high-quality speakers. Treble and mid-range tones are crystal clear, while the bass is powerful and well defined. The tight fit and excellent audio quality gave us a great listening experience even at low volumes, and we could easily hear subtle details in high-bit rate MP3s and uncompressed CD-quality audio.

The cables and connectors are thicker and heavier than those of other headphones, and the expanding foam sleeves felt odd at first. We also found it strange to have to loop the cable over the top and around the back of our ear, but after getting used to it we didn't want to go back to using normal in-ear headphones.

Although the SE110s are hardly cheap, these are the least expensive headphones that Shure makes, and the sheer quality of their sound makes them well worth the money.