To kick off my headphone review rant once again I will begin with the Nuforce NE-770Xs. For $18, I've gotta say that these are some really good headphones. They also come in 3 different colors so if you don't like blue or white, they also come in a funky what looks to be purple-y grey color. Now that price is out of the way let's get onto the important stuff.
Let's start with accessories as accessories are much more important on in ear headphones than others. The Nuforce NE-770Xs come with 3 sizes of tips: small, medium, and large as per usual for this type of headphone. However, the nice thing is that it comes with duplicate pairs so you get 6 pairs of tips, 2 pairs each of each size which is quite useful as it's not that hard to lose a tip here or there. It also comes with a white Nuforce pouch to hold your headphones in which is quite nice so that's a big plus in my book.
Next up is fit. With in ear headphones, canalphones, or IEMs, whatever you want to call them, fit is of utmost importance. When talking about over the ear or on ear headphones comfort is really important, but fit for in ears is even more important. This is because fit encompasses comfort but also affects the sound you'll end up hearing. The tips you use affect this somewhat in that when the tips you use are too small they might go deep but not form a good seal. Without a good seal you get poor bass response and poor noise isolation which are both things that in ear headphones are meant to do well, assuming a good fit. Personally, I went with the small tips and they fit really well. It took a bit of getting used to as the actual casing is a bit on the larger side, but I find them quite comfortable and pretty easy to get in and out which is always good.
Now fit is a thing that takes time to get right for in ear headphones but sound is inherent to the actual in ear headphones. For $18 they are really quite good. My immediate reactions were that they were a bit too bassy but that disappeared as I both got used to listening to them and they had time to really get going. For reference, this action is called 'burning in' your headphones. While it might mainly be a psychological thing, sometimes when you get new headphones, especially ones with a foreign sound signature to what you're used to, they can sound worse than they are. The act of burning in new headphones is to play a variety of music on the headphones for usually 2-3 hours, some people go crazy and do it for 24 hours, while not listening to them. I think a big part of it is the time away allows your body to adjust to the sound and understand it. The other part is perhaps that since the headphones haven't yet been used they need time to have signal go through them which changes the sound by some amount. My belief is more the prior than the latter but that is neither here or there.
After the burn in, I find them to sound quite good. The bass is pretty clean, not amazing but definitely present, perhaps a bit too much but that's mainly a taste thing, and not too muddy. The mids and highs are pretty good overall, there are hints here and there of some not so great sound, but overall they're good. The only real downer is the sound stage. Being in ear headphones, this is to be expected somewhat but still the sound stage is quite small. What this means is that a lot of the sound is just dead center and that there's little variance. With better headphones you can tell that the drums were more to the right or left. More than just left and right though you can get a sense of distance and literal space. While not the worst in the sound stage department, they definitely aren't great by any means even for in ear headphones.
Overall though, I do recommend these headphones and for $18 they're completely worth it. On a scale from 1 to 10, I'd probably put them at a 7.5 or 8, maybe 8.5. I really enjoy them and think they're pretty great with a good amount of personality for a really low price. However, I won't put them as my best under $30 headphones, which will be coming up in a future post. We continue this series of reviews tomorrow, so I hope you enjoyed this review as another one is coming up soon.
--CsMiREK
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