Ear Phones for Audio Books

[Ludmilla]

I downloaded an app for listening to audio books to my iPad and thought I'd take advantage of some of the free Librivox recordings out there. I've been using the earbuds that came with my iPad, but I'd really like a better set without paying a fortune (in other words, I really don't want to pay over $100 for a set). What ear phones do you use that work well for clarity of voice? As I understand it, what's best for listening to music may not be best for listening to voices. So many ear phones out there cater to the music audiophile. I don't need that.

My hearing isn't so good anymore, and it's important that I can understand the voices. I started listening to Gaskell's North and South last night and one of the readers had a strange accent that was hard to understand (almost sounded Cockney to me, but I know that's not quite right). Anyway, the first two chapters were fine, but the third chapter with this reader gave me problems. I had a hard time with the accent and gave up and went to the book and read the third chapter for myself. Of course, good ear phones may not help with reader accents, but they would probably help with the overall experience of being able to listen and clearly hear what's being said.

[MLE (Emily Cotton)]

theseare the ones I use on my ipod nano. They are cheap enough to replace when I lose them, and they are nice and clear for the spoken word.

[javagirl]

Besides whatever change in ear phones you end up with, you might want to consider setting the equalizer present in Itunes to "Spoken Word". That's what I do.

[annis]

The idiosyncratic dialects of Northern England can defeat those with the sharpest of hearing My son spent a year working in Manchester and despite being an English speaker he couldn't understand the Mancunian dialect and they couldn't understand the Kiwi accent, so he had an interesting time!