Shure E500PTH review

Spending about £30 will get you a pair of excellent headphones such as Sennheiser's CX 300s, so is there a good reason to splash out over a dozen times more money on these, the latest earbuds from Shure? Let's see.

Shure has enjoyed a superb reputation with professional musicians, so in the E500PTH, you've got the latest development from a company that has been producing super-high fidelity earphones for many years. They succeed the company's critically-acclaimed E5c line, and there's one important difference: while each earphone of the E5cs featured two drivers, the E500PTHs have three separate drivers for each ear - one tweeter and two woofers apiece.

That in part accounts for their bulk, but at least the finish - a rich, metallic grey, like nothing so much as polished hematite - is quite beautiful.

These are sound-isolating headphones, not sound cancelling. In most circumstances this is better - sound cancelling requires bulky headphones and batteries, and traditionally only filters out certain types of background noise such as the roar of an aeroplane. Here, sound is largely kept out to begin with, so you can play your music more quietly; mopeds swished rather than buzzed past on the street, so don't wear these when cycling.

The 'PTH' in the name refers to the 'Push To Hear' dongle; push a switch, and a microphone pipes in audio from your environment. This way you don't have to remove the earphones to carry out a conversation or check for traffic.

This is just as well, as fitting the E500s can be a bit of a palaver - don't expect just to pop them in. When worn, they're very snug in your ears, but the over-the-ear route the cable must take tended to tug down a little on the ears when walking.

The PTH system does a reasonable job, though the audio from the microphone has a slightly spacey quality, and it does need to be powered by a single AAA cell.

The earphones themselves do sound superb. We genuinely found ourselves hearing new details in tracks we thought we knew inside-out, particularly in lush, layered tracks such as from the Beach Boys. Reproduction is precise, though if you're used to the audio trickery of some cheaper buds which tend to boost bass and saturation, you may find it a little clinical. This comes at a price, though; you really can hear compression artefacts. Though for most of us, the iTunes Music Store's 128Kb/sec AAC files sound fine, a recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations - just one unaccompanied piano - was ruined by the tell-tale compression 'buzz' as the notes trailed off. Use Apple Lossless or a really high bitrate compression algorithm.

Yes, these are excellent headphones, but they do cost £125 more than a 60GB iPod video, and there are just a few too many niggles for us to be completely blown away. The build quality of the phones themselves is excellent, but the PTH unit was less well put-together than we expected. If you are a studio-based audio professional, these will serve you well, but if you just want a pair of headphones for your iPod, try them out first; the older but still-excellent E4c model is available for under £150, and similarly-priced offerings from Etymotic and Ultimate Ears are also very good.