I appreciate good music as much as anyone and I would always swap out the freebie earbuds you get with your average MP3 player for something decent. There is a point though where I start to think enough is enough.

Apparently Ultimate Ears don’t agree - they sell what has to be the most expensive pair of in ear headphones I’ve ever seen, except that calling these UE-10 pro in ear monitors mere “headphones” is doing them an injustice.

What makes them so special is that they’re custom made, specifically for you. You have a mould of your ear canal taken (really) and send it to UE, who will then embed some high end headphone drivers into it and send the result back to you.

You can see the logic, I’m sure the conversation around the watercooler went something like this:

“You know what the problem with heaphones is?”
“No, what?”
“Ambient Noise”
“But how do we make something to get rid of that?”
“Jam the noisemakey bits into your ear canals and seal the opening with silicone”
“That’s really uncomfortable”
“OK, so we’ll get a mould of the customer’s ears and embed the drivers into a custom made earplug”
“Now you’re talking…”

So that’s what they did. The result is the $900 UE-10 monitor. Used on stage by artists such as U2, Metallica and the Rolling Stones they feature -26db of external sound isolation. Which basically means you’d better not wear them on the road because you won’t hear the truck that runs you over (after all, these things were designed to block out the ambient noise of a rock concert).

Oh yeah, and they’re “Highly Recommended” by www.ipodlounge.com. At that money I’d be amazed if they were anything else (but I’m only jealous because they got to try a pair and I didn’t!)