I'm a bit of an authority on earphones and I wish I wasn't. Dear reader, rest assured that I bought every last man jack of these, a very expensive process of trial and error.  When my last but one pair of Panasonic (RP HX20 - more on them later) died, I decided after a LOT of gawking, exploring and reading the obvious and outrageous lies printed on the packaging to go in for a pair from Philips: SHS 3201 earhook earphones.  

Even as I was buying them, the good, sensible part of me (which I really ought to STOP ignoring - it warned me about 'Pipers at the Gates of Dawn 30th anniversary edition' as well) was saying "Hang on, fool! Philips hasn't made a good product since probably the mid-70s. The DVD player of yours that works, does so primarily because of luck and the fact that you barely use it. Don't! Noooo! OMFG You ARE Fucking Stupid!" Well Philips, as usual, lived up to its corporate philosophy of consumer rape and ripped me a new one. And ripped me off while they were at it. These are absolutely pathetic earphones with a tinny sound and no ability to render bass well in spite of their much vaunted and, I suspect, entirely fictional Bass Pipe. Something that the good folk at Philips probably came up with after many hits at a pipe of an entirely different sort.

The manual continues to demonstrate that Philips is better at imaginative fiction than product design: 'Thanks to an acoustically-tuned air channel that turbo-charges the bass notes, you enjoy fantastic realism and a truly involved listening'

The only 'involved listening' associated with this product is in trying to find EQ settings that make it seem even slightly tolerable. My test album, the rather well mixed Serenity by Kotipelto sounded like a bootleg recorded via a very inferior cell phone. At Rs 645,(well over the modest $8 that this pair sells for online) you'd be better off just setting the money on fire cause then you'll have nothing left to remind you of your stupidity.