Posted 03/09/09 at 03:19:20 PM by Andy Salisbury

Now that people wearing white earbuds has become the norm, it looks like inventor Kazuhiro Taniguchi is planning to make us all look goofy again.

With the announcement of some new earbuds that allow facial expressions to let you work your gadgets, there’s a small chance that we’ll be making funny faces for all the right reasons. According to Taniguchi, “You will be able to turn on room lights or swing your washing machine into action with a quick twitch of your mouth... An iPod can start or stop music when the wearer sticks his tongue out, like in the famous Einstein picture. If he opens his eyes wide, the machine skips to the next tune. A wink with the right eye makes it go back.”

While the idea of it is pretty neat, something tells me that most markets won’t be willing to go through this just to skip a track on their favorite playlist.

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Posted 04/16/08 at 04:56:33 PM by Michael Brown

We’ve tested a lot of earbuds over the past few years and invariably find ourselves gravitating toward products at the very high end of that market—we’re talking buds that’ll set you back more than the most expensive iPod. At $200, Future Sonics’s Atrio m8 earbuds certainly aren’t cheap—but they’re competitive with some products that cost twice as much.

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Posted 01/08/08 at 02:51:43 PM by Michael Brown

Creative goes B2B, Sennheiser goes gaming, and Whirlpool goes digital. Whirlpool?

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Posted 02/28/07 at 01:38:44 PM by Michael Brown

Thanks to Apple’s ubiquitous advertising, you can walk around town with wires hanging out of your ears without getting strange looks from passersby. Etymotic Research’s ety8 Bluetooth earphones shorten the wires, but these anything-but-discreet earbuds are guaranteed to draw a few sets of eyeballs your way.

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Posted 10/10/06 at 02:26:30 PM by Michael Brown

The relentless snare drum crack on “Jack of Speed” was enough to make some of the lesser earbuds beg for mercy, but the Etymotic ER-6 Isolators delivered it nearly perfectly. More importantly, they served up Beck’s bass with equal authority.

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Posted 10/04/06 at 02:35:29 PM by Michael Brown

It’s been our experience that you get what you pay for, more often than not. The ExtremeMac FS1 earbuds, however, fall into the “not” territory. The $150 for-sale sign hanging on these little buggers easily qualifies them as the most expensive earphones of the group, but they certainly didn’t sound like it.

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Posted 09/17/06 at 02:42:38 PM by Michael Brown

Even after finding a good fit, many people have trouble with earbuds inexorably sliding out of their ear canal. Sennheiser thinks it has the solution—it’s called Twist-to-Fit— but we found this invention to be far worse than the problem.

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