5 tips to get the best out of your earphones
Not all earphones are the same, and neither are our ears!
Here are 5 quick tips to make sure you get your money’s worth with your new earphones.
1. Use the correct sized ear-tips for your ears
Most earphones will come with a few silicone ear-tips in different sizes designed to fit the ears of most people. It is very important that you select the right sized ear-tips to fit your ears.
When you push the earphone into your ear, you should aim to have an airtight seal form between the silicone ear-tip and the inside of your ear. An airtight seal improves the efficiency of the earphone, which also improves the bass and dynamics of the sound.
2. Listen to high quality audio
If you’re playing music from your phone, try to make sure the audio quality is at least 256kbps (if you’re listening to MP3 audio).
Even with super high quality expensive earphones, bad quality audio will always sound bad. It doesn’t matter if they cost £1 or £1000.
Lower quality audio does generally have a smaller file size, which is handy if it’s stored on your mobile, but the only way to reduce the file size is to remove information from the file. Generally, the information that gets taken away is that that makes up the cymbals and sparkle of a song, leaving your music sounding dull and muffled, like it’s being played underwater.
3. Set your volume properly
This generally only applies to wireless earphones, but some wired sets will have volume controls too.
Sometimes, your phone and the earphones will have two separate volume controls; 0% to 100% on the phone, and 0% to 100% on the earphones.
If this is the case for your earphones, we would always recommend setting the volume level on your phone to 100%, and then using the volume controls on your earphones to set the final listening volume.
This can improve the sound quality by making the signal to noise ratio of the signal better. If you take a quiet sound and boost its volume level, you will also boost any extra unwanted noise and interference. Setting your phone’s volume level to 100% will almost completely stop this from happening.
4. Make sure you put the earphones in your ears properly
Not all earphones are as simple as plugging them in to your ear canals and pressing play. You may need to position them carefully and wrap a wire over the top of your ear, or make sure a securing piece slots into the right part of your ear.
These things not only increase the comfort and stability of the earphones, but also improve the likelihood that you’ll make that airtight seal I mentioned in point 1.
If you’re not sure if you’re putting the earphones in your ears correctly, check the manufactures website to see if there are any pictures of people using them. Alternatively, there may be instructions in the manual.
5. Watch out for interference
This one only applies to Bluetooth and, less common, RF earphones and headphones. Although, sometimes interference can appear in wired connections.
When you’re transmitting data over the air from one place to the other, it’s possible for the data to be corrupted, slowed down, or blocked entirely by things in the environment.
Strong electromagnetic fields (such as those created by powerful WiFi transmitters and electrical transformers) can distort your signal and cause a noisy effect in your ear.
A thick wall between your phone and earphones can weaken the signal and cause stuttering or block it entirely and cause your devices to disconnect.
The further apart you move your paired devices, the more susceptible they become to interference.
Written by Jack Chapman