For years, I’ve owned one working pair of headphones: the white earbuds that come standard with any Apple iPhone. They’ve slowly turned me into a roving audio Luddite. I live in New York, where I ride the subway daily, and have watched my fellow riders adopt all manner of un-alternative, presumably superior, audio technology: Beats earbuds inside the ear, Beats earbuds over the ear, Bose headphones without wires, Blue headphones over the ear...Sennheiser headphones on the ear?
Meanwhile, my earbuds weren’t even the newer oddly shaped ear-canal ones. They were the older circular clunkers, with their gray rubber edges peeling so badly they were coming apart.