Bose TriPort IE headphones Review
Categories: Reviews, BosePosted on Monday, January 8, 2007 by Ian S
Last month, Pocket-lint reviewed Bose’s new TriPort IE headphones and awarded them an excellent 9 out of 10.
The great rating is mainly due to the sound quality of these in-ear headphones which the review describes as “perfect and even better than the eShure’s we’ve got. Sound was crisp and clear if not a little bassy”. In fact, a slightly heavy bass is about the only criticism they can come up with.
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February 10th, 2007 at 10:51 am
I was looking for a pair of headphones for my SonyEricsson W950i to replace my Sennheiser CX300 when I came across the aforementioned Bose at an airport duty free shop. Mostly out of curiosity, I decided to purchase them and may I say what a big mistake that was.
At this stage I should perhaps say that I am lucky to own a pretty good range of headphones including Shure, B&O, Sony, Sennheiser, Etys, Grado and now the Bose.
Build quality: The build quality is not as good as the pictures imply. They are made of poor quality plastic and the logo is just another piece of plastic glued on. The cable is of regular quality on par with the CX300 but keep in mind that the Bose are twice the price.
The pads, although good quality silicon, keep on popping out. This happens very regularly indeed and some point I thought I lost one them.
There is one good quality item though; the little leather case. Other manufacturers should take notice of this little case.
Comfort: I found the IE are very very comfortable with the largest silicon pad fitting my ear perfectly but take note: these are not in-ear as the name suggests; they sit outside the canal like regular earphones.
Sound quality: Where do I start? As soon as I hit play on my w950i I was shocked; the track was Her Voice Resides by Bullet for my Valentine encoded at 256Kbps VBR. The only thing I could hear was incomprehensible base completely overshadowing everything else. I promptly changed the EQ settings to Treble Boost to no avail; there was no treble to speak of.
Given the fact that the w950i is not the greatest sounding MP3 player, I plugged them in my HD5 player. There was a marginal improvement on Judas Priest’s Hellrider encoded at 256Kbps ATRAC3+ but the improvement was really rather insignificant and came after a lot of tweaking the player’s sound preferences.
In general, the sound lucks detail and clarity. There are no highs, overwhelming lows but with no detail. I thought of giving them a chance in case they needed burning-in but no, after a week of 4-6 hours of listening they really sound bad – certainly not as good as the £70 tag implies.
Conclusion: Poor build quality, poor sound quality, good fit and good leather case. The Bose TriPort IE are seriously overpriced and seriously over-rated by pocket-lint.
I have since replaced them with the Sony MDR-EX90LP which I am quite happy with.
February 24th, 2007 at 12:06 am
Quite simply put…you don’t know what you are talking about. I also have a great number of headphones to chose from including sennheiser, shure, sony and others but these are very good headphones. They ARE a little bassy…but in a good way and some albums you listen to need the extra bass that these provide! I am always very saddened to see that some people have an unbelieveable hatred of anything Bose…let go of your hate, you’ll find that some of their gear is actually quite good.