Headset Surprise

I have an MP3 player I like quite a bit. It is a 2 GB Samsung Z5. I wish I had gone with the 4 GB version. I have tried a variety of headphones with it. The earbuds that came in the box sound OK but are slightly too big to be comfortable and secure in my apparently infantile ears. I tried a pair of inexpensive Sony earbuds that came with rubber ends of varying sizes for a better fit. The fit was good, but the sound was not great. Recently, I came into possession of a pair of Shure E3c headphones that cost almost as much as the player. It took me a bit of fiddling to get them to fit properly but once I did, it was a revelation (in the non-liturgical sense). They have excellent outside noise isolation and the sound from the player reveals details and spacing I had never heard away from the pretty decent sound system in my living room.

Today, I was unlocking the door to the office while listening to music. OK, it happen to be Neil Diamond singing Cracklin' Rosie. Leave me alone. My eclectic (or is it eccentric) taste in music is not the point. I could not hear anything outside my head. At one point, the background singers chime in. I swear the audio was so good that I was startled and jumped a bit because I thought three women had crept up behind me to sing harmony.

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