Earphones V.S Headphones

I have wore glasses for the majority of my life. Nowadays I barely notice they are there save for the occasional cleaning. The same case is for my earphones. I can enjoy good quality music and sound cancellation. I was one of the lucky ones to have ear canals that comply with rigid one-size-doesn’t-fit-all designs. However I need to be in a state of deep meditation in order to keep the buds in my ears. On the contrary, headphones offer supreme sound quality and a wider variety of models, however they are big, ugly and not very private.

I have been using a pair of Skull candy Hesh-2 headphones for about 5 months now and I honestly miss my old earphones, but there is an upside to lugging headphones everywhere.

It is nearly impossible to forget that I am wearing my headphones. Visually, the peripheral screams ,” I AM LISTENING TO MUSIC!”.

When my headphones are not in use, they are harder to forget because of their impressive strangling power when I put them around my neck. It is of course not required to put a pair of constricting headphones around your jugular, but that is the biggest drawback of headphones, they can get in the way. Headphones aren’t as private an experience as earphones are. The speaker ports are a lot larger than that of earphones and they can distract other people who may be close by.

The upside is that I can enjoy theater quality music anywhere. The ear cushions are comfortable and not too tight. It is easy to keep the lightweight band on my head and the wireless capability is second to none. Considering that Apple’s new wireless earphones look like they were built to fall out. The Hesh-2 headphones have a mic and I often connect them to my phone and talk to friends. Both Skull candy products feature a play/pause button that tells my phone to play music when the app is not on, which is handy. I just can’t get over the burden of my headphones being too cumbersome. I am bashing my headphones a lot, but I do use them ritually at home with all of my media consumption needs. The point is they are just not as mobile as earphones are.

On the contrary if I were a fisherman, which I am not, I would be a fishing line untangling guru. That is because I have been training my whole life, every time I pull out my earphones,  to listen to music on the go I am involuntarily subjected to a Chinese puzzle!. The aux wire from my earphones is flimsy and there is an urge to treat them carefully.

I pull my earphones out to listen to some tunes and I am involuntarily subjected to a Chinese puzzle!

I like compact things. Smaller computers, smaller textbooks, and smaller music listening devices. So while on the go, I think I will rollback to what hasn’t failed me in a decade. However music is played, whether at home or on the go with clumsy excellent sounding headphones or covert efficient earphones. Music is the essence that keeps us all moving.