 The Fractal Design Define R4 case gets featured on the WAN Show Build Logs of the Week section more than any other case. Click now to learn more about it. To start with, I want to be very clear about how I'm approaching all of this. I've got lots of nice headphones and I had some Klipsch S4s for a while so those weren't bad. My daily driver IEMs for the last few months have been SteelSeries Fluxeiner Pros due to their excellent comfort, but I've never owned pricey audiophile-grade earphones before. So this is as much a first impressions of expensive IEMs as it is a review of the IE80s from Sennheiser. So we'll start with initial impressions. The packaging feels very premium and comes with an unbelievable number of ear tips to choose from, which is good because the dynamic drivers with their fancy neodymium magnets are very large and I actually needed the smallest possible silicone tips in order to get these babies into my ears comfortably. The carrying case that's included is super nice and totally irrelevant for the vast majority of people who buy IEMs I think. There's good news though, the IE80s have, other than the scratches that you'll see in our macro footage of them, survived very well in my pocket with my phone and they're extremely easy to untangle. The removable Kevlar reinforced cables are quite stiff out of the box, which was a concern because the IE80s actually wrap around the top of your ear before being inserted and while the cable was brand new, I found that the wire would often slip off of my ears like this. Sennheiser does include a little cable routing sheath in case you want to use it, but I actually found it more comfortable to wear them without it and in a week or two, I didn't have that problem anymore anyway. As far as looks and comfort are concerned, the earphones look kind of heavy and bulky, but they're actually so comfortable and low profile that I'm able to sleep in them without them falling out during the night. This combined with their solid noise isolation has made them a definite keeper for me. They have a very subdued style to them with an all black and silver color scheme that I quite like, but while it might feel silly and superfluous, an eye-catching design might help them get attention from mainstream customers the way that brands like Beats and Skull Candy do. And finally, through an informal poll of a couple of my less techie friends, I found that they had never even heard of Sennheiser, which depressed me a great deal. Moving on to the reason it might depress me that someone's never heard of Sennheiser is the listening tests. In my listening tests, I used a variety of different sources including an O2 and ODAC from Mayflower Electronics and a Zonar Essence One from ASUS, and other than this being the first time that I've been able to hear the noise floor of my Essence One as a hiss during the quiet part of certain tracks, I really felt like a strength of this product is the fact that they sound great with pretty much anything from cheapo MP3s on my iPhone 4 all the way up to flax on my Objective 2 and ODAC. Before we go any further here though, is my usual disclaimer and apology about the kind of music I listen to. I'm a top 40 listener just like lots of people. I love Bieber and Miley and Pink and well, not Bieber so much, but you know, JT's definitely better. If you want reviews of these from folks who listen to classical music, those are abundant. This is my review and that's the kind of music I listen to so there you go. Truthfully, having requested the IE 80s on the recommendation of Edzal, my editor, I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. I saw the adjustable bass port feature on them and I went, oh, how quaint. If folks want more bass, they can turn that adorable little dial with the included tool. Well, there's nothing adorable or quaint about it whatsoever. With or without the knob, the bass experience with these is truly skull rocking. It really feels like the bones at the back of my head are vibrating when I really let them loose and it's an experience unlike any that I've had before. Highs are both loud and clear and mids are also clear if a fair bit quieter and more subdued. This made mid-range vocalists feel a bit far away, especially during busier parts of a track with a lot of background music. After some discussion with Edzal, I found that his love for the IE 80s, which are very similar to the IE 80s, comes from finding it easier to take a clear detailed IEM with very strong bass performance and tame it somewhat with software equalization than it is to take a reference sounding IEM and try to boost the bass unnaturally through EQ. It's a great point. But I found myself quite liking their bass heavy sound signature after a while and three weeks later I am no longer using EQ on them at all. They sound great loud and this is unusual for me but with these I often find myself not reaching for the volume dial nearly as much as I did even though they do sound great loud. The isolation is good without me feeling like I could probably get hit by a train without hearing it coming and in spite of the strong bass performance I can hear every last detail in the music without cranking them so I have the option to listen to them quietly or turn them right up and feel the skull vibration. One way the IE 80s surprised me a little was their openness. Once while I was sitting in my house listening to them I actually had one of my baby songs come on. It has a car horn in it and I actually looked outside thinking it was in my driveway before I realized it was part of the track. This is unusual and many IEMs really make you feel like the sound is coming from between your ears but not so with these. My wife had a very similar experience with them. She's no audiophile and I think the word she was looking for was soundstage but her way of describing it was this. Instead of hearing the sound from here and here it's like it's here here here here here and here and I thought that was kind of cool coming from someone who doesn't know all the terminology but is definitely still having the same experience. So we're down to the part of the video where I say whether I'd recommend them or not. Well they're over $300 on Amazon so if you're going to buy them you'd better be sure you won't lose them and once you get past that hurdle I would say if you want something that delivers a strong bass heavy sound signature like many mainstream products but actually does it well with tight thumping low frequency performance and clarity in the mids and highs then get on board. These are for you the discerning bass head. I think the IE 80s can be best described for you as fun to listen to and you're going to absolutely love them. If you're looking for reference IEMs for studio monitoring and you want a flat frequency response curve then I think you'd better move along. There are products out there that are designed for you this is not one of them. My personal closing thought on the IE 80s is this they're expensive but at the end of the day I've got a literal pile if you guys are following me on Instagram you'll know about this already I've got a literal pile of audiophile grade headphones next to my PC and most days when I'm sitting down and it's time to listen to some music I still take these out of my pocket and plug them in instead. I haven't done these yet but I probably should mention a couple of popular upgrades there's a version of the detachable cable with a mic that you can buy so that's kind of cool and in spite of the wide variety of included ear tips the ones that I actually liked best are third party comply soft foam ear tips they improve the isolation even further if that's what you're after and they're also very very comfortable and I think that's pretty much it. Oh wait no I've got something else that's fun for y'all we're going to be giving away an Asus transformer book T100 in a special live stream on the 12th of December 2013 with a special theme. I want you guys to click the annotation or on the link in the video description and post your best holiday gift ideas for geeks and techies for us to discuss on the stream it's sponsored by Asus so definite bonus points if you can come up with cool Asus gift ideas and there now we're done. As always guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and in the comments I'd also like to do a bit of an informal poll what was the most you ever spent on a pair of earphones or headphones and at what point did you feel like it stopped being worth it to spend more where you got to the point where okay I spent twice as much but this only really sounds 10% better than the other one to me I'm really curious and I'd love to hear what you guys say as always don't forget to also subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos. Okay there that was short.