review: Monster Beats by Dr. Dre Tour

The popularity of the Dr. Dre-designed Monster Beats headphones made it inevitable that Dre’s product line would extend to in-ear earbuds. As such we have the Monster Beats Tour, some of the most uniquely styled earbuds I’ve ever tested. The cabling looks and feels like a big red rubber band (although thankfully without the stretchiness), the headphone jack runs flatly parallel to the top or bottom of your iPhone or iPod with no more than a quarter inch gap in between, and each earbud post is a flat round number that sits apart from the bud itself and bears the by now ubiquitous lower case “b” logo. Three button “ControlTalk” controls are on the right earbud cable.

Based just on the above description and the photo at the top, you’ve probably already decided whether you love or hate these earbuds from a design standpoint – I’ll leave that up to each of you. I will say that in my tests, the design choices didn’t interfere with usability in any way; the flat cables didn’t get tangled at all, and the flat headphone jack didn’t interfere with my ability to use my iPhone in any of the popular cases I tried it with.

But if you’re going to spend this much on an audio product, one would hope that sound quality would be your primary focus, and the Beats Tour does well here. In terms of crispness and expansiveness, the Tour offers a significantly better listening experience than even the best of competing earbuds in the $119 range. However, the Tour doesn’t quite measure up the best in its own $179 price range, as I still find the Etymotic hf2/hf3 line to be sonically superior overall, but not by much. So if you’re a fan of the Beats Tour styling, or you’re motivated by the fact that it’s currently available from Amazon for $169, or you want the three-button controls offered by the Beats Tour and you can’t wait until Etymotic’s line moves to the three-button format later this year, the Beats Tour turns out to be a really strong (if not best in class) option.

Learn more about the Monster Beats by Dr. Dre Tour at MonsterCable.com