Review: Shure E500PTH high-end earphones

Some sounds have an uncanny knack of boring right into your brain; snoring, noisy neighbours and roadworks are all excellent at disrupting your peace and quiet.

If you prefer to avoid such noises, one solution is to pop in a pair of earplugs. With the doors firmly shut, your headspace is your own once again. This is also the ideal state for listening to your favourite music, of course.

Shure’s sound-isolating design is a seemingly contradictory combination of earplugs and high-quality music. Each earpiece is fitted with a sleeve which, when placed in the ear, blocks out almost all exterior sound, while injecting pure music directly into your head.

There are three tiny speakers packed into each of the bronze-coloured, teardrop-shaped earpieces that you wear with the connecting cables passing over the ear and down the back. The use of separate drivers ensures that both high and low frequencies can be reproduced accurately and clearly at the same time.

So effective are the E500s at blocking out the outside world that attempting to hold a conversation, even with the sound turned down low, can be very difficult.

The PTH (Push-To-Hear) adapter combines a small battery-powered microphone with a switch that reduces the volume level of the music, while mixing in the ambient sound around you and enabling you to hear speech, traffic and other sounds without having to remove the earphones.

Unlike regular headphones, you can’t just slip them off your ears and back on again (something we’ll get to later), so this is a really useful accessory. Two different lengths of cable are provided along with a volume control and a lapel clip.

At a whopping £419, the E500PTHs represent the pinnacle of a range of sound-isolating earphones starting at £79. The obvious question is, do they sound £340 better? The answer is yes, they do.

While the lesser models provide excellent reproduction, the sound emanating from the E500PTHs is nothing short of astonishing.

It’s simply amazing that devices as small as these can do what they do. Earphones of this size often have difficulty reproducing convincing bass, but no-matter what nasty, low-down sounds you may throw at the E500PTHs, they'll cope.

They’re not just good for earphones, they’re also good compared to large high-quality headphones and even decent speaker systems. In short, bass-heads will absolutely love them.

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