Klipsch IMAGE Noise Isolating Earphone

For the past two years I have been using Shure E2C earphones and have been very happy with them. But they broke three times on me (Shure did a great job of replacing them each time) and with the warranty ending I decided that I would retire these as my main earphones and use them as back ups for whatever earphones that I upgraded to. After looking and reading reviews I decided to get the Klipsch Custom 2 isolating earphones.
I am in love. I must, however, confess that I did not fall in love instantly. It took a while. When I bought the Shure E2Cs, all I had to do was pick out the right size of sleeve, pop them into my ears, and love the sound. The Klipsch earphones, on the other hand, are far more sensitive to placement within the ear and far more difficult to fine tune. The Shures are very tolerant to the angle you place them in the ear; the Klipsch have to be "just so" or they will not work well. It was also pretty difficult to find precisely which sleeves I should use. After three days of experimentation I landed on the large sleeves and it has been nothing but joy since then.
The sound of these earphones is infinitely better than that of the Shures, but the improvement is not as large as the jump from the earphones that came with my iPod (which are, I'm sure we can all agree, are pretty much crap) to the Shures. Going from Sony's earphones to the Shures was a titanic leap in quality. The jump to the Klipsch did not represent anywhere near as extreme an improvement. That being said, there is a definite and sharp improvement. I tested a number of songs ripped at 320 bps (using EAC rather than iTunes) and in every case the Klipsch earphones brought startling new levels of detail out in the music. For instance, if I played a song at a rather high volume over the Shures there was a fair amount of distortion. The same song played over the Klipsch resulted in nothing but clarity. On many rock songs, for instance, there is a presence to the bass drum that is entirely lacking on the Shures. I couldn't be happier with the sound. And because there is so little distortion I find listening to my iPod even less tiring than I did before.
There are a couple of design details that I really love. For instance, the wires are wrapped in cloth mesh rather than rubber or plastic. Living in Chicago, this is a very big deal. I mentioned that I had to have my Shures replaced three times. In each case it was because of a short in one of the wires. I believe that each time the short was caused because of inflexibility in the wires when the covering material became very brittle during extreme cold. But with the Klipsch's cloth mesh covering, this simply will not happen. I don't know if I will have to have these replaced at some point (and let's face it, one of the real problems of earphones is that they are fairly delicate), but there is no question that these are much more sturdily constructed.
The comparisons I have been making between the Shure E2Cs and the Klipsch Custom 2s isn't entirely fair. After all, I paid just under $100 for the Shures two years ago (the price has since dropped further) while I paid $199 for the Klipsch. A truly fair comparison would have been with the comparable Shure product, which I have no doubt is very fine. But I don't have the kind of cash that would allow me to be fair. I can say that for the money both earphones are outstanding. I was a bit hesitant to double the amount of money that I was going to spend on earphones, but am very happy that I did. I can enthusiastically recommend these earphones, though I urge patience in experimenting to see which pair of sleeves is best suited to the user's own particular ears.