This afternoon, I came home to find a package from Sweden waiting for me. It was a pair of Urbanears “Plattan” headphones that I had ordered a few weeks ago.
Urbanears is an upstart headphone company; they say that
Urbanears is a collective out of Scandinavia, motivated by a common interest in global relationships and shared involvement in the relevance of the living brand. Urbanears promotes a deeper connection to color, form and people while providing the freedom to transcend individuality and unify the sound experience.
High ideals, certainly, and they’re certainly eye-catching, but how do they sound?
I’ll have to admit that my very first impression wasn’t good. I had been listening to my $349 Bose QuietComfort 3 headphones at work, and my initial impression was that the sound was very flat with the Urbanears. After flipping between several songs on my favorite playlist, I soon decided that these weren’t flat; the Bose headphones were indeed very muddy, with artificially-enhanced bass and poor quality high tones.
Having spent some time in a recording studio, the best analogy I can make is that these sound like a set of highly-balanced studio monitors, with an extremely flat response. I can hear high notes better with these than I ever had with the Bose. The clarity is amazing, at least to my aging ears.
I don’t think these are for everyone. If you live for the thump of the artificially-enhanced bass lines in some music, you probably won’t like these. If you like classical, jazz, or more complex music, you’ll probably appreciate the clarity.
This is just my initial impression, so I hope to report back in a few weeks to see how they stand up to repeated use.
Do you remember dial-up Internet access? It was terrible, especially if you were on a laptop: connect the phone card, start the dialer, wait, enter your ID and password, wait some more, and then, finally, you’re on.
On Saturday, an online friend of mine opened 
At the suggestion of many, I’ve setup a