Those buds aren't for you.

Hey, Jason Toon, here, taking over this space to get something off my chest. Or out of my ear, maybe. Or call it a bug up my ass. The point is, I am bothered and now you must listen to me complain.

When we sold these headphones back in March, they got good reviews from those of you who bought them. But one comment in particular jumped out at me:

“Didn’t used to own headphones. Lots of ear buds. Now I have two headphones thanks to meh…808s and these. Both are great…didn’t know what I was missing…”

Not to pick on @eeterrific. Or, for that matter, the poor deluded souls you see in offices everywhere, sitting at their desks listening to earbuds. It’s not their fault that earbuds (or earphones or whatever) have become so ubiquitous that they’ve obscured, in the public mind, an obvious truth:

Headphones will always sound better than comparable earbuds.

The explanation is simple, but you don’t even really need an explanation. Think about this: have you ever seen a soundman wearing earbuds? Can you imagine a recording engineer working with earbuds? What about, like, on a movie shoot or a news crew, the sound guy with the boom mic - do you think he wears earbuds? What do these guys know that you don’t? Oh, just thousands of things about sound reproduction, that’s all.

It’s not just that earbud speakers are smaller, and that it costs money to make small speakers as loud and full as big ones. The bigger point is that for a pair of headphones and a pair of earbuds to have the same guts, the earbuds are going to have to have miniature versions of those components. And miniaturization is really, really expensive.

So if a pair of headphones and a pair of earbuds cost about the same amount of money, you can be sure the earbuds have inferior materials, inferior construction, inferior drivers, inferior frequency response, inferior dynamic range, inferior everything.

Same deal with the mic. This mic doesn’t have to be that good to be better than that tiny thing clinging to the cable of the earbuds that came with your phone.

OK, sure, earbuds might be more comfortable, if you prefer having something in your ear to something on it. They might be more practical in some situations, like running or falling asleep. Earbuds are more compact and convenient, absolutely. But they also sound worse.

Look, I’m not trying to get all Neil Young on you with some boring rap about sonic purity. I listen to regular old MP3s on the cheapest headphones Sennheiser makes. Whatever the opposite of an audiophile is, that’s me.

But I’ve wasted enough of my life on shitty earbuds. I’m on a mission. This. Stops. Now.

These Able Planet headsets, as a look at our forum confirms, are at least decent. Read those reviews. Look at that price tag. Then imagine the garbage you’d expect if you bought two pairs of earbuds for 18 bucks. And think about the difference between the two. Unless you’re running or sleeping, that’s what you’re missing.