Brent Butterworth

To most people, a high-end in-ear monitor costing hundreds of dollars doesn't look much different from the $10 IEMs you buy at Walgreens. But usually, the difference is huge. Perfect example: the $199 Klipsch Image X7i.

Just three years after the iPod ruled the audio industry, manufacturers are starting to look on it as a quaint “legacy device,” one they have to accommodate for customers who just aren’t with it. The iPod’s being replaced as our primary music source by all sorts of wireless stuff, like smartphones, Bluetooth-equipped computers, and routers connected to network-attached storage (NAS) drives.

In my career as a reviewer, I've always focused totally on home and portable products, because other speaker categories seemed so different and I figured I couldn't be good at everything.

We’ve learned one thing from our past investigations into the new wave of headphones made by speaker companies: Headphone engineering has little in common with speaker engineering. Because the physics of headphones are so different from the physics of speakers — and because few, if any, speaker companies actually build their own headphones — it’s rare for a company’s headphones to mirror the sonic character of its speakers.

Tougher still for MartinLogan, which built its brand on 5-foot-tall electrostatic speakers.