The beauty of PC Mag’s “How to Buy the Right Headphones” series is that the team there keeps updating the piece every year with new models, updated features, and more things you should think about before you run out and buy a pair of headphones for your digital music player or even your cell phone – this year’s roundup has some of the best headphones that the team has ever seen, and has boiled down some of the things you should remember to four basic types of headphones: earphones, headphones, noise-cancelling, and wireless.
The piece has some tips to remember for each type, and what you can expect in terms of audio quality when it comes to each and how much you can expect to pay when it comes time to lay down your credit card for a shiny new set.
One important thing to remember though is that cheap doesn’t always mean bad, depending on who you go with: sometimes some very affordable earphones in the sub-$100 range sound really really good, and you don’t need to go all out and drop $2-300 on a pair of noise isolating brand name earphones to get good audio quality – especially when your source audio is garbage anyway.