OTHER TECH

ULTIMATE EARS

UE-11 Pro In-Ear Headphones February '08

You won't find the boutique brand Ultimate Ears in too many stores, and you sure won't be able to just walk in anywhere and buy a pair of UE-11 in-ear headphones off the rack. That's because this $1,150 flagship model is a custom-fit product intended for use by performing musicians as stage monitors - or by music listeners hoping to extract the very best sound from their iPods. To be fitted, you pay a visit to your local audiologist (that is, hearing-aid expert), who takes a mold that gets sent off to UE. Your 'phones come back as the perfect earplugs: Imagine 26 dB of noise reduction with no active circuitry, and four tiny transducers with a crossover-on-a-chip crammed into each earpiece. I've tested four of the best noise-reduction 'phones on the market over the last 18 months, ranging in price from $200 to $450. None of them could match the UE-11s for sheer clarity and transparency of the midrange and high frequencies, nor for the quality of the bass, which was deep, taut, and extremely well defined. That, coupled with their superb ability to block background noise, has catapulted the UE-11 to a place at the top of my reference heap, with nary a contender in sight. ultimateears.com -Rob Sabin

DEFINITIVE TECHNOLOGY

Mythos ST Stereo speakers July/August '07

From down in Terrapin country, Definitive Technology sent its latest Mythos model, the ST towers ($3,598 a pair). Electing to evaluate these in straight-no-chaser stereo (the Mythos line does include center and surround options), we figured the STs would be good because, well, they're DefTechs. But just how good? Real good. These incredibly slim floor-standers will look smashing astride that new on-wall flat-panel (that's pretty much the Mythos-line concept), but unlike so many made-for-plasma designs, they'll sound smashing, too. A "power tower" with built-in active low-bass sections, the Mythos ST yielded a depth and weight of sound that was hard to fathom from a speaker barely a hand's breadth across, with smooth, detailed mids and highs to match, as well as real audiophile-level imaging, depth, and detail. The essence of elegance, both visually and sonically. definitivetech.com -Daniel Kumin