Bass

If you think, due to the title of this post, that I’ve been fishing rather than shopping then you’re very much mistaken.

Over the last two days I’ve done five mystery shops. They’ve included walking through possibly the largest council estate in the entirety of Yorkshire (if you don’t include Hull itself) and nearly got run over in the centre of Leeds.

However, I’ll be frank, these two days have been fairly dull. My ipod was still unwilling to negotiate terms by which I could start listening to it again, and so I threw my earphones away. However, upon arrival of a store in Crossgates, (somewhere east of Leeds) I found some for sale.

‘Fantastic’, I thought as I sifted through reams of earphones, differentiated on packaging but barely on product. For this is the odd thing about earphones, or paper, chewing gum or envelopes; it is that the product is basically the same across the board. Simply, the package should just say: “sounds great in your face”, because that’s what earphones are supposed to do. It’s the marketing and packaging on the front of the product that makes you gullibly go “oh I need ultra bass quality balance”. (I haven’t got a clue what I just said there)

So, looking at the earphones section of the store, I was confronted with basic, in-ear, hooked, clip-on, bass balanced, airflow-equal, crystal clear, and dynamic. All different packages selling basically the same product. What astounded me is that the price ranged from basic: £2.47, to ultra bass quality balance: £45.

How can earphones cost £45? And who would buy them? OK so I wouldn’t buy the flimsy £2.47 ones that look more like a cheese wire than an audio aid, but come on, there’s no way you can walk down the street with your £45 earphones and justifiably think ‘yeah, I can see where this extra £40 goes.’ Bass simply isn’t that important.

Anyway I went all-out and bought some £5.60 ones. They stood out from the rest of the field as they had ‘double air flow’. As the package says: ‘Extra bass – acoustic air-flow channelled to twin vents for balanced sound.’

Now, I have never, in all my laborious years of listening to my ipod, at any time thought: ‘oooh, this is a bit unbalanced.’ I have also never needed the help of ‘air-flow controlled vents’ for me to continue listening to those great George Formby tracks.

The reason I bought it was because of the price, and because it had ‘Philips’ on the front. Cheap, good quality, and of course, extra bass.