It’s a busy month for Klipsch. The company recently announced its pricey Icon W series of home cinema loudspeakers, and now at the other end of the scale (sort of), come the S4i iPod upgrade headphones. Actually, it’s not an ordinary set of upgrade headphones, but similar to those which come with mobile phones – there’s a music cut-out switch, microphone and remote built in, allowing you to take calls on your mobile without the need to yank the ’phones out of your lugholes.
Aimed predominantly at iPhone users, Klipsch claims it’s among the first such headphones to be fully compatible with the Apple VoiceOver feature on the display-free third generation iPod shuffle, which announces playlists, tracks and artist names. Klipsch has clearly had a think about how mobile phone manufacturers do these things – the microphone is placed at the yoke where the two cables meet at chest level, which should feel better than having the controls dangling next to one side of your face. That’s if it can pick up your voice at that distance, which Klipsch assures us it can. The S4is feature oval ear buds which Klipsch claims should better fit the average ear canal, blocking out ambient noise and so requiring less volume for the music to be heard clearly.
Mark Blanchard, senior acoustic design engineer for Klipsch, said: “Once you have the right fit and seal, these headsets are virtually impossible to feel. We couldn’t believe that no one else had yet considered the anatomical shape of the ear canal when designing in-ear headphones.” Audio is taken care of by a moving coil micro-speaker with controlled damping and a dual neodymium magnet motor structure in each of the 8.5 mm drivers.
The Klipsch S4 headphones are certainly a lot cheaper than the four-figure Icon W series, but they’re still fairly high up the earbud price scale at £90 for the pair.