Last Week's Most Interesting [CES edition]

Like predicted, many earphone makers are holding back their product launch for this year Consumer Electronic Show. Since most of them are just being showed off by the manufacturers instead of a real product release, I think I'll skip the actual spec for now and do a more in-depth report once they are ready for the actual market. Here is a bird eyes' view of all the interesting earphone news I found over the Internet:

Griffin Technology is known for their iPod accessories. Here is their latest offer and an upgrade to their old earbuds series, the TuneBuds Fit.

Acoustibuds is an adapter that change your open style earbud into a semi-open design. It probably will block out some noise but don't expect a lot. Generally speaking, this type of adapter usually do more harm than good, I am not sure how well this one will actually do.

UE is luanching two new IEM for their Metro.fi series, the 170 and the 220. Strange enough that I can't find any of the Metro.fi series on their website any more. Seems like the new owner is changing things a bit. Oh well, Metro.fi is the low end of UE line-up, so don't expect too much.

Shure is also launch its own low-end IEM model, the SE115. It is said to be an upgrade of its current low-end SE110. Instead of the balanced armature transducer used in SE110, Shure decided to give the new IEM a dynamic transducer for better bass kick - I won't blame them since many of their low-end model buyers are probably not looking for accuracy but rather more 'fun' sound and head banging action.

Altec lansing is launching a whole new series debuted the BackBeat, including the one in the picture called 906, a bluetooth IEM that can be used with either bluetooth enable devices or with the bluetooth adapter. The new series looks pretty good, hopefully they'll sound just as good.

Koss has a new IEM to show us, the CC-01. The most interesting bit about this IEM is the adjustable eartips. By turning the metal knob on the back of the earpiece, the eartips will change its size accountingly and you'll get a 'custom' fit with just one set of eartips.

There are still two more headphones I like to tell you about: Maximo iM590 and Koss KDE/250. I didn't find good pictures on both on the Internet but I did find a thread you can read about them (over here). I had have an opportunity to demo the iM590 sample few months back and I can tell you that it is an very good sounding IEM of its class, so those of you who are looking for an entry class IEM should at least take a look of it once it launches. The other Koss offering, the KDE/250 is a dual drives clip-on - Yes, you are reading it right, it is a two-ways clip-on, with one 20mm transducer for the bass and one 13mm transducer for the mid and treble. The expected MSRP isn't cheap (US$250), but I think Koss might have something real special this time. Fingers crossed.

CES is really fun, isn't it? :D

[UPDATE] Here is a good picture of Maximo iM-590. This will be one IEM worth looking into for Q1, 2009.