Phitek Blackbox i10

If cellphone half-conversations and grinding gears make you feel murderous on your morning commute, these earphones are for you.

The latest from the noise cancelling geniuses at Phitek, the Blackbox i10 earphones are the first in the world to plug directly into your iPod dock connector, so you don’t have to carry around an extra battery pack. The earphones are compatible with most generations of iPod – given you have a 30 pin dock connector – but be warned, their power requirement will drain your battery much faster than using normal headphones. Leave your charger at home at your own peril.

The earphones are designed to fit snugly inside the ear, and I mean right inside the ear, with three different sizes of moulded ear pieces known as “grommets”. This works well if you have average sized ears but, unluckily for this reviewer, not so well if you have freakishly small ones. Even with the smallest sized grommets, fitting the earphones in the ears was a struggle. After repeated use, however, it became a lot more comfortable.

Once forcefully stuffed into the ear canal these earphones proved their worth. Phitek’s press kit claims its patented Active Noise Rejection technology cancels 92% of background noise. In perfect testing conditions this might be the case, but in the real world it seems like less (large trucks, for example, always seem to have a way of making their presence heard).

That said, the earphones do a magnificent job of noise reduction. Noisy traffic, the bus driver jamming the gears, loud colleagues, and the rest of the world in general is reduced to a low buzz in the background. In situations where with normal headphones you’d have to turn up the volume to hear a vague melody, with the Blackbox i10s the lowest bass and the highest treble can be clearly heard, even at low volumes. Two hundred dollars might be a big outlay for a pair of earphones, but not for saving your hearing in later years.