Etymotic Research Ety8 Bluetooth Stereo Wireless In-Ear Earphones

Up front, I have to say, if you have no patience, don't get these. But if you're willing to give yourself a little bit of a curve to get used to them, they are worth every penny. You'll never give them up.

I've played music all my life, and sound fidelity is important to me. When I first got the ETY 8 earphones as a gift, the form almost overcame the function for me. It took some getting used to the in-ear placement of the earphones - you really have to get them placed deeply into your ear, which felt odd at first, and took some practice to be able to do quickly. Then, there was the sort of odd feel of the two pieces hanging off my ears. Plus, they look a little bit odd. OK, so I got over the oddness. The earphones are actually very light, and once you get used to the feel, you forget they're there. Because they'd been a gift, I kind of felt obligated to use them, so I powered thru the initial getting-used-to it period, and then I started to understand what these...Read more

I just auditioned these at Macworld and they sound great. Same hi quality sound as the ER4 but no cord. They are also very light so you feel nothing pulling your ears down at all. As for the comment about what you might look like wearing these headphones, who cares. You enter you own world of hifidelity with the sounds of the outside world gone. Thus only where these where you will be safe not hearing the outside world because you will not. Enjoy!

Was surprised to see these show up before Xmas. Still not sure if $300 is worth it for cordless headphones for my iPod. Initial tests with the iPod adapter on a 60gig Video iPod were impressive - automatically paired, excellent quality and volume levels...similar feel to my ER-6s. Of course much of this initial benefit was offset by the fact that when you wear these things, you look like a total uber-geek.

I also was able to pair the headphones to my Motorola Q and leverage AD2P with reasonable quality (the volume level on the Q sucks with Media Player...).

Where things started to go wrong was range. I decided to try and leave my ipod on the car hood while I did some yard work listening to the headphones (no more than 10-12 feet away). I got major cut outs on the music until I got within 5 feet of the ipod. I thought it might be the range of the iPod adapter so tried the same test with the Q....this time cut-outs occurred at about 12-15 feet. Not...Read more