The Facts
Specifications according to the manufacturer:

Weight: 0.9 oz
Sensitivity (at 1kHz): 115dB SPL/mW
Impedance (at 1kHz): 26 ohms

Shure includes a healthy amount of extras in the package with the E3c's. These are great: You get a good owner's manual, a wax removal tool, a complete "Fit kit" which is a comprehensive set of ear sleeves of varying sizes and flexibility to fit ears of different sizes, and you also get a great carrying case. This little gem is a hard-shelled, circular, zippered pouch with a strong plastic circular section in the middle. You roll up your cable and put the plug and earphones in the center for protection. This is not only convenient, but it also keeps the earphones clean and protected. This is an excellent case.

These Shures come with a very good 2-year warranty, and judging from the seemingly high build quality, it seems that you would never need it. They're attached to a cable that is 60" inches long with a right angle 1/8" plug at the end. The cable is dark grey and the driver units that get pushed into your ears are light grey. They retail for $179.

The retail price places them above the popular Etymotic ER 6i which retails for $149. The Ety's do not include as many ear sleeves and the wax filters need to be changed periodically, so you could just about make up that price difference in the first year of ownership by buying replacement parts for the Ety's.

There is an extremely annoying "Inspected by" sticker on the cable near the jack (visible in the photo below). Why this has to be attached here is a mystery to me. It is very visible and if it were up to me, I would peel it off and degunk the residue immediately. Irritating.

How do they fit?
Each earphone is marked with a small 'L' and 'R' to designate which ear they belong to. The earphone has a 90 degree angle to the end of it so that the cable aligns parallel to your face, not perpendicular to it. Shure recommends that you route the cable up and around your ear. You can then wear the cable either down your back for stealth mode (in class) or down the front (most convenient). I found that wrapping the cable around my ears provided some added security to the fit so that the cables weren't swinging too much and if they were accidentally pulled, the ear acted to help anchor them and provide increased resistance to prevent them from being pulled out. A good method.

A clear flexible sleeve is placed on the cables just after the joint where they split into two. This sleeve acts as a lanyard and further helps to route and manage the cable. Slide it up close to your neck to take out some of the slack. I found that it was handy and did a nice job of it.

There is a good selection of ear sleeves that come with these little ear slugs. The standard ear sleeves mounted on the E3c's fit my ears very well and I found them to be very comfortable. They are also easy to insert and remove as well. If you've never worn canal phones before, they still feel strange at first, but these are comfortable ones.

The cable is not too microphonic, which is very important with canal phones. But the cable is one area where the E3c's could be improved. Although it feels strong and well made, and the plug is top notch, it is too thick and inflexible. Plus, it has a memory so that after you uncoil it from the small carrying case, it wants to stay in that tight circular shape. One way to improve these earphones would be to make the material of the cable lighter and more flexible. The Etymotic ER 6i's cable being an extreme example of light and thin.

The Sound
I did all of my listening with the E3c's plugged directly into my iPod and used a variety of music over the course of numerous weeks. In critical listening I used a standard playlist of Apple Lossless encoded songs. I broke in the E3c's for 50 hours before I started listening to them. You can tell from the specs that these earphones are easy to drive and perform well plugged directly into the iPod.

If I had one word to describe the sound of the E3c's I would say that they're musical. They are enjoyable to listen to and not fatiguing at all. The demand nothing of the listener than to sit back and relax. Having said that, one negative aspect of their sound, and I'm especially sensitive to this, is a lack of detail in the sound. With the E3c's when too many instruments play at once you no longer hear the individual notes. The soundstage is not very deep and the instruments are not positioned clearly in it. The drawback is that you get a summation of the notes, not the individual instruments playing their parts. The benefit is that, because the E3c's don't really do anything wrong, the music is enjoyable and easy to listen to.

High frequency reproduction is especially important to create detail and openness in the sound. While the E3c's don't do anything wrong, they don't hit the target either. You hear the cymbals and the strings but they're not prominent in the mix and they're not in the place they should be. At the beginning of Don't Speak from the album Tragic Kingdom by No Doubt, as she sings the first few bars Gwen Stefani sounds further from the mic, there is no intimacy in the sound like I know there is in the recording.

Low frequency reproduction is good for canal phones. It is a balanced bass, but it is not extremely detailed. The bass line in Build That Wall by Aimee Mann from the Magnolia soundtrack is a good example: the bass and the kick drum are represented well enough, but the individual bass line gets lost in the other notes. But at the same time it manages to sound enjoyable. Like the rest of the sound output, there is nothing really wrong here, it sounds fine, but you know there are nuances to the music that you're just not getting.

What do you get for your money then? Well, you get a taste of high-end sound reproduction. Shure says that these are their first earphones in their product line that are audiophile grade and I don't dispute that. I like detail and soundstage and those qualities are these earphones weak spot. These earphones sound good, but it's a result of them not doing anything wrong, instead of them doing something really right. If that sounds bad, it's not.

The Bottom Line
If the Shure E3c's were a dog, they'd be a yellow lab that wears a bottle opener around their collar - happy, friendly, and ready to have a good time. I thought about giving these guys a 4 star rating due to the lack of detail in the sound, but when you consider the whole package - well designed and built earphones, very nice carrying case, and all of the extras that come with them - I couldn't justify a lower rating. 5/5 stars.

The good: smooth and musical sounding, comfortable, well built and durable, handy and strong carrying case included.
The not so good: thick cables with a memory can be unwieldy, lack of detail in the sound.

For more information:
Shure.com