Sound Advice: Bad earphones sound like a manufacturing snafu

I need to is­sue a fol­low-up to a re­cent col­umn on Modern Port­able HiFi Pro Sport ear­phones.

I re­cent­ly re­ceived a hand­ful of e-mails from read­ers ex­press­ing dis­ap­point­ment with the sound qual­i­ty from the ear­phones. I checked Ama­zon and the re­views were eith­er 5 stars and pur­chas­ers were very hap­py, or 1 to 2 stars and they were very dis­ap­point­ed. There was no mid­dle ground.

Hav­ing rec­om­mend­ed the ear­phones as a great deal at the price ($19.99), I found the neg­a­tive re­sponses both con­cern­ing and sur­pris­ing, and some of the e-mails I re­ceived re­al­ly stung. Not only did the ear­phones not sound good, read­ers wrote, they ac­tu­al­ly sound­ed bad.

No prod­uct is per­fect for ev­er­y­one, but such a po­lar­ized re­ac­tion is ex­treme­ly un­com­mon. I start­ed to won­der if the re­view sam­ple I had been sent was dif­fer­ent from the prod­uct the con­sum­ers were get­ting. I was pret­ty up­set when I con­tacted the man­u­fac­tur­er about this.

Modern Port­able said they had re­ceived some de­fec­tive units in the first ship­ment and were work­ing to re­solve the prob­lem. They also men­tioned there were po­ten­tial Blue­tooth sound qual­i­ty is­sues with cer­tain An­droid phones, due to the phone's Blue­tooth im­ple­men­ta­tion, not the prod­uct it­self.

This isn't the first time I have seen some­thing like this. Not long ago I wrote about how Dayton Audio got some B652 speak­ers with bad tweet­ers. Pio­neer also had Blue­tooth prob­lems with some sam­ples of their TV speak­er base. In both cases, the manu­fac­tur­ers iden­ti­fied the prob­lem, owned up to it and took care of the cus­tom­ers.

While this took away some of my con­cerns, I felt bet­ter af­ter an e-mail ex­change I had with read­er Gary Soots of Mo­ra­ga, Calif. The day af­ter send­ing me an e-mail tak­ing me to task for sug­gest­ing peo­ple buy the ear­phones, he sent me a se­cond note. "I told you that I bought two of their head­phones based on your rec­om­men­da­tion, and that I was not hap­py with the pair I tried," he wrote. "Af­ter you said they might have a so­lu­tion to make them sound bet­ter, I de­cid­ed to try the oth­er pair, which I had not even both­ered to open. They were much bet­ter! I went back and forth lis­ten­ing to each pair using the same mu­sic source. There is a dis­tinct dif­fer­ence in the sound qual­i­ty of the two sets of head­phones. Es­pe­cial­ly when con­sid­er­ing the af­ford­a­ble price and Blue­tooth con­veni­ence, I am to­tal­ly satis­fied with Set 2."

A few days later he sent me a third e-mail: "The re­place­ment head­phones ar­rived today and they sound fine. Thanks a­gain."

Modern Port­able said audio plays a big part of their fu­ture plans, and prom­ised they are going to get this right. I will be fol­low­ing the sit­u­a­tion close­ly. If you or­dered the ear­phones and the sound is poor, con­tact the man­u­fac­tur­er at modernportable.com.

Send ques­tions to Don Lindich at donlindich@gmail.com. Get rec­om­men­da­tions and read past col­umns at www.soundadviceblog.com.