Landed at home port yesterday after another about 18 h from hotel to home. The Etymotic earbuds were great--wore them all the way in-air and for part of the time traipsing through terminals.

My ears are a little asymmetric: the left ear leaks a little more noise and requires more attention to seating the buds. This would be a good reason to go to custom tips...

I think these are not so great for jogging/running since I hear a loud thud with each footfall (or could that be my heavy feet...) when walking around. Anyway, I will leave the over-the-ear phones at home next time.

A comment about sound quality: very good for earbuds, abou t the best I've heard, but not up to reference phones (no surprises here). The response sounds fairly flat to me--the best overall performance was obtained with the source (iPhone 5 in this case) equalization set to "flat" or just off. Bass is clear and crisp without any hot spots or booming effects. Mids are strong, and highs are present but not shrill.

The quality is best, of course, with low ambient noise but on the plane it is still very good, just turn it up a little. The highs are clear enough that I was reminded that I wanted to re-rip a bunch of my CDs into a lossless (flac or something) codec instead of MP3, which I used years ago when first moving my collection off of discs: I can really hear the typical high-frequency distortion from high-compression codecs but the few lossless tracks I do have are like hearing the fog lift.

Anyway, enough said about this. I'm switching to the buds until something better comes along that can combine comfort with acceptable or better sound.