When it comes to personal portable music, you have one choice: buds or headphones. If you’re in the buds camp, I’ll make a couple of assumptions about you: you need your gear to take up as little space as possible, your might be jogging or hitting the gym, and you like your portable music extra portable. If that’s on the money, then say hello to zipbuds.
Here’s the primary conceit: the cord is bundled inside a zipper. Don’t want to give the two branches of cord a chance to tangle in your bag? Zip ‘em up. Time to listen to some tunes? Unzip. Easy-peesy.
If you’re perhaps seen the idea before in some inexpensive buds in Chinatown, rest assured, these are different. Key factor: the zipper is metal, not plastic, which is what we’ve seen before. Also, the parts of the cord not encased in zipper are covered in fibre, and the accents are chromed aluminium. Put together, you get a pair of ear buds made of the best possible materials.
Having travelled across country and back, I will say that the zipper feature does indeed seem to banish tangles. Simply, it’s harder to tangle a zipper. The sound fidelity is nice and full, especially for ear buds, and the only real problem I’ve had with my set of zipbuds is that they tend to pop out of my shirt when I tuck them into the neckline when I need talk to someone for a minute. Of course, since they won’t tangle, I can just stuff them in my pocket—problem solved.
I’ve been trying out the pro mic zip buds ($40), but they also have a more inexpensive model, juice 2.0 ($25). The main difference is that the pro mic has an inline microphone.
All in all, I’d say that if you travel regularly, jog with music in, or are the type of person who doesn’t like buying disposable gear, consider a pair of zipbuds. Life’s too short to be untangling cords.
