Quick Take: Don't plug into The Plug!
People love their iPods, evidently so much so that I'm far from alone in my quest for the ultimate sound-sweetening featherweight earphones. Yes, I'm still working on getting a pair of Etymonics for review ... No, I've yet to go south on my opinion of the Future Sonics Ears ... And, yes, I listened to those of you who implored me to try a set of Koss' "The Plug," the low-cost alternative to, um, higher cost in-ear earbuds.

As always, thanks for the email and suggestions. Keep 'em coming and I'll do what I can to fulfill them all ... That being said, and with all due respect, The Plug are A Bust. In a nutshell, don't waste your money on these puppies. The buds that come standard with an iPod churn out much better sound, and if you're serious about upgrading your $300 walkman, and you've got $15 to spend on a pair of these, you can at least wait until you've got $35 for a pair of Sony MDR-EX71SLs. It'll be the best "extra" 20 bucks you've ever spent, believe me.

The Plug follows the same design principle as the Future Sonics, Sonys, and other in-ear earbud designs: The speaker driver is housed in a removable sleeve that slips partway into your ear canal, providing sonic isolation and extra bass response by harnessing the acoustic and physical properties of your ear canal itself. Or something like that. The Plug uses the foam cap design, shipping with four sets of removable compressable foam sleeves designed to fit a variety of ear shapes and sizes. This is similar to the design much more successfully employed by Future Sonics.

Rather than waste too much more of your time (or mine) on this review, let's just say that The Plug provides slightly worse than average sound using a slightly less than comfortable design. On top of that, the first pair I bought were broken (one channel didn't work). Though I put the functional replacement set through their paces with several different styles of music, it was clear from the first listen that anyone interested in these earbuds would be better off keeping their current phones or buying a pair of "old school" headband-type phones at the 99 cent store, and dropping the leftover 14 bucks on a movie ticket and popcorn. High-end response from The Plug was tinny, bass was present but muddied, and the overall effect was less than desirable. Sure, they're cheap and block out some background noise, but in this case the background noise would have at least distracted me from the poor sound quality and the 15 bucks I used to have.

Yes, they're that bad. Stay away.