VWTim said:
For some decent and amazingly cheap phones check out the Koss KSC-75's Radio Shack puts them on sale regularly for under $20, or Amazon.com has 'em for ~$15 normally. They really do have the sounds of $60+ headphones.
Yes, the Koss KSC-75s are good headphones. They are clip-ons, but otherwise the speaker elements are supposedly similar to those in the PortaPro. (I don't have a PortaPro to compare with them.)
They need more power to produce the same sound level than some other little headphones, but the nice sound makes up for the reduced battery life. In quiet surroundings I set the volume on the MP3 player at about one third, and in very noisy places at two thirds of the way up.
They don't need much bass or midrange equalization to sound good, either. (I have quite a bit of hearing loss at high frequencies, so everything on the highest band of the equalizer on my MP3 player is missing for me, when I describe anything here.) They don't sound quite as good as my Grado SR-60s, which also take less power from the MP3 player to drive, but those are bulky and cumbersome and aren't the thing to use out of the house.
Each side has a separate eyeglass-like wire-reinforced nylon piece that fits behind the ear. There is no headband. Wearing them with glasses isn't a problem, at least for me. Wiggling them onto my ears wasn't very easy at first, but after a little practice they are pretty quick to take on and off.
The clips have snapped out of their gimbals under stress a few times when I've carried them in a coat pocket, and skittered around on the pavement and almost got lost. They snapped back in place and seemed no worse for wear afterward. One of the clips was fairly easy to bend back into shape after I stepped on it.
I've had them for about a year and they've held up well.
To see whether I could hear higher frequencies a little better with these, with the equalizer already at the highest level on the second highest frequency band, I took the pads off and listened to the headphones without them. The sound was harsh and unbalanced, but I imagined that a sound halfway in between what I heard with the pads off and with the pads on might be about right. So I placed a dime in the center of each foam pad and traced around it with an X-Acto knife to make a donut hole, and then put the pads back on. That was almost it. Tracing around a nickel made it a little better. Removing more foam than that would have left some of the pointy bits of my ear whirlies unsupported. Afterward, to me the sound seemed improved, but that might not be true for others.