They were supposed to be so bloody cool. They look cool. They have a little thing that does “noise reduction” and volume control right in the middle of the cord. Wow! They fold up! They come with a pleather case! Wow! At first glance, they are coolness defined. That’s certainly what the dude (and, if ever someone would self-describe as a “dude” it would be this man of blond hair and surfer parlance) at BestBuy told me: “Ah, they’re cool, dude. No problems there. Totally worth the clams.” Seventy clams, it should be noted.
Surfer boy was a no-good bastard liar. He’d never tried these headphones before. I’m absolutely sure of it. If he had, he’s bordering on legally deaf from all those crashing waves and accumulated sand in his ear canal or he’s just plain mean. Either way, he should not be someone to sell me some damned headphones. They sound terrible. When I first got them home last summer, I wasn’t immediately blown away. They sounded tinny, unbalanced, and any mildly-palpable bass would make them distort. “A ha!” I thought. “I just didn’t put the battery in the funky noise-reduction doohickey. That’ll fix it. It’s trying to reduce noise with no power!” I put the battery in. I pushed the “Noise reduction” button on the guitar-body shaped, soon-to-be-bain-of-my-existence pill in the middle of the cord. It got quieter. Indeed, the brilliant engineers at Phillips had managed to reduce environmental noise. The noise was just the music I was trying to listen to through them.
I took them off, the pill clattering across my desk. I didn’t understand. I still thought I was doing something wrong. I unplugged them, and put them in my drawer. “I’ll experiment again tomorrow.” And I did. Same result. I put them back in the drawer and thought about it for a while. I went through every possible variable. I put them in all different sources: iPods, computers, TV’s, a 1988-era Walkman that I found in my room. All of them sounded like crap, though the Walkman did sound just like I remember it sounding. I tried to see if any of the cords were loose. I read through the instructions sheet a few times. I even read the French version of the instructions, just to see if Phillips had hidden some secret recipe for good sound where only Quebecois and the French could find it. I glanced at the Japanese version, as well, but, really, context is everything in that language. 
You know how it goes: you walk into a liquor store. You know nothing about the specific wine grape that was requested of you to buy. You see three bottles that sound and look like they’re the right thing. The liquor store you’re in speaks English as a third language, and you think you’re both a man’s man and pretty damned smart, so you’re not about to ask for help. So you look at the three bottles you’re trying to impress with and, assuming it’s not an egregious price difference, you get the most expensive one. Higher price = higher quality, right?
Wrong. There are some amazing wines (and apparently headphones) out there that are fractions of the cost of others in their category that blow them away in quality. The rule of thumb, in terms of these items anyway, does not hold.
So, no, I didn’t return them. By the time I really got up in arms about the whole thing (and despite some rumors to the contrary, I’m very difficult to actually make angry) Brown started back up again and there was the deluge of class-picking, parties and a surprisingly front-loaded semester of work. I didn’t have time to listen to music on headphones, really. I should have gone to the Rock and read while listening to headphones, but that really didn’t happen much last fall. I took the time to both give my headphones one last (I thought) listen
and find my receipt. “Yes, definitely, these are crap and I’m taking them back,” I thought as I went through my file cabinet for the receipt. I checked the date, on a whim, and realized that that day was the 60th day after my purchase. It was 11pm. BestBuy was closed. I had officially just wasted my money.
I can’t really explain in words how annoying this is.
In the 21st Century, your music is your soundtrack to life. You can literally choose your own theme music. What song really expresses the mood that mega-star Brian J. McGuirk is in as he walks to the library, a warm breeze flowing at him, his thoughts filled with thoughts of the pressing issues of the day, the week, the month, the year, the century and the whole human race? Bohemian Like You, by the Dandy Warhols, of course. He rocks out, he struts down the street. The last few minutes, just as he’s feeling down and feeling the temptation of pessimism, he hears the voice of Winston Churchill:
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender…
And with that, that last touch of inspiration, he smiles, opens the door, and goes on. The scene ends. (And yes, I know a great speech isn’t exactly music, but it’s part of a soundtrack nonethless, and is on my iPod.)
Now, if your headphones (at LOW volume!) distort like crazy with every drumbeat in the first song, and the second crackles more than radio listeners in 1940 would have put up with, the scene is totally different. The whole scene is one man walking down the street swearing and shaking his headphones as if they’ve personally offended him.
Do you want that to be the movie of your life? Don’t buy these goddam headphones.