S4i Rugged In-Ear Headphones

I ordered these recently when they were on one of the Gold Box deals. It was a great price and definitely worth giving it a shot, even if they turned out to be very mediocre. I tend to like to use earphones when I do a lot of solo activities like yardwork, painting, cleaning, etc., and I've done some damage to more than one set of Shure earphones as a result. A couple of qualifiers... I have extremely sensitive ears and am able to hear even minute differences in earphones, even when comparing two sets of the same model. So far, my preferred set is a pair of Shure e500's that I bought a few years back. They list for $500, so they had better be good. And they are. I also have a few pairs of lower level Shures that are very good as well as an Etymotic HF-3 model that has the microphone built in to use with my iPhone. I've been very happy with all of them. The biggest issue has always been price. For the money, I've never listened to a set of earphones anywhere close to as good as these are. No, they don't sound like the e500's, or even the e3c's, but then again, they didn't cost $300 or $500. At any price point under $100, I would rate this as an outstanding value. With no equalization they do sound a bit bass heavy and sibilants are a little harsh ("s", "sh", "ch"), however, by playing with the EQ settings on the iPod, I was able to get the sound in a place this is very, very comfortable to me. I guess part of a person's perception of the sound quality may be as it is compared to what they expected. For me, I expected something less than the old Shure e2c's which were very short in the midrange, not real full on the bass and a bit brittle on the trebles. This one put those to shame and I am at least as comfortable with these as I am with the Shure e3c and 310 models. They felt pretty well built.... like it would take a bit of effort to break them as opposed to all other earphones that I've had so far. If they are all weather as they say, that's a real bonus. The buttons work well, and I like that they are larger and easy to work by touch without having to feel whether it is the middle button or the top button or bottom button. I ordered the orange ones only because I'm constantly losing things and I've found that bright colors make it much easier to track things down when I misplace them. I did discover that I also had an issue with keeping them in my ears. I went through all of the various size tips and the largest ones seemed to work best, but even with those, my right ear had trouble staying put. Not wanting to admit defeat so easily, I decided to try an experiment. I had an extra pair of foam tips for my Etymotics. I grabbed those and amazingly, they fit perfectly onto the Klipsch mounts. I wore them for about 6 hours today while I was doing some volunteer work today and they were rock solid. Never slipped even a tiny bit, and sound isolation was terrific. I also checked and it would appear that the Shure tips will fit as well, so in reality, you're not limited to what comes in the box. It just means you have to part with a few extra dollars. But if you do, you end up with a really great-for-the-money pair of earphones. I'm getting ready to order an additional pair, just in case. I'm very pleased and highly recommend them.