My earbuds broke a month or so ago, and since I keep breaking them I went out and tried to find the least expensive earbuds possible. This led me to pick up several different inexpensive earbuds.  The first was the Sentry Talk-Buds from the crummy shelf of my local store.

Now if you’ll allow me to spoil the review only this far in, (and really, you could guess by the price) these are not a good product. But they don’t seem like that at first.  A bit off maybe: the buds themselves are made of metal and give a strange cold feeling in the ear, but that’s just because I’m not used to it. The sound is crap. Nothing is really unbalanced (I’m not a bass person myself so the lack of heavy bass doesn’t bother me)– it’s just fuzzy, like one would expect from inexpensive earbuds. The real problem here, though, is the microphone, more specifically the “answer call” button on it. This button also acts as a play/pause button, and it broke within a week of me owning the thing. But if it just broke in an unobtrusive way that would’ve been fine, since I didn’t want that feature really anyway. But it broke in such a way that it randomly paused and unpaused the music I was listening to, and that was unacceptable. If the button, or even the microphone, was removed I might have liked these (I’m not much of an “Audio Snob”– I just want what I listen to to be recognizable and not make my ears bleed). As it is, though, I’m not a fan. It does seem like it might be a quality control issue and thus hit or miss, but with so many other cheap and better options I wouldn’t bother.

(Also these came with a case, which I was semi-excited about, because I like small containers. But this one has a cheap, plastic hinge I could break with no effort, and came with what seemed to be a type of oil inside, so it was dirty. It might have sold me in the store, but once out of the package it was quite disappointing.)