I have a love/hate relationship with my Motorola S9s.



Firstly, you'll either love or hate the sound signature. They are quite flat, and the midbass is not overextended. They roll off in the extreme highs, but that's a good thing - bluetooth's compression mangles them anyway (>12khz).

They have a similar sound signature to Etymotic ER4s, though not as accurate.

Personally, I love the way they sound (for rock/metal/jazz/blues/classical), but if you listen to a lot of hiphop or electronic, they may not work.

They're ultra-portable, have outstanding build quality and battery life, and are great for the gym. Call quality is acceptable as well. I personally think the controls are outstanding.

However, they are indoor-use only.

They simply do not work outdoors. The antenna is inexplicably in the back of the unit, which sits on your neck. Bluetooth's low-powered 2.4ghz signal cannot penetrate the body, so it relies on reflections, which you don't reliably get outdoors. You can make it work if you keep your phone in a backpack, but it will not work with your phone in your coat or jeans pocket. It's frustrating their literature doesn't make this clear.

If you only need them indoors however, they're outstanding.

Finally, I would recommend avoiding the Sony DR-BT50. I just bought them about a week ago, and they are utter trash. Fit and finish is decent, the controls are OK (but not great), and the antenna placement is good. However, this is all moot, because of the audio quality. Appalling.

I honestly believe the testers they had either serious hearing damage, or listened to the most compressed, hissy pop songs they could find. Yes, they were in A2DP mode. Yes they used a large A2DP bit depth. They were massively spiked in the 200-400hz region, with no deep bass (<100hz) and muddied mids. The highs were completely missing. It wasn't a personal preference thing; it's not that I didn't just dislike the bass-heavy sound signature. They were simply not well engineered. Drivers were aimed improperly, and offered all sorts of strange harmonics and standing waves (particular in the midbass, which makes me wonder if the engineers were just deaf and tuned accordingly).

They were so bad I actually disassembled them and swapped the speakers from a pair of Koss KSC-75s. They sound decent now, but there's still some funny refractions going on in the speaker cases. Maybe some cotton would help. Anyway.

At the very least, if you are considering them (I bought them because they are closed over-ear cans, great for cold winter walking), do yourself a favor and listen to them first.