Review: Ultimate Buds UB7 and UB7EB
A common complaint about the iPhone is that it has no physical buttons for playback control; you’re forced to use the phone’s touchscreen, which presents challenges when carrying the iPhone in a bag or pocket. Another complaint is that the iPhone’s recessed headphone jack prevents you from using many third-party headphones that offer better performance than the stock earbuds.
Apple provides a workaround for the first issue via the special earbuds included with the iPhone: the right-hand cable provides a small, inline module that includes a microphone and a control module. Squeeze the module once to pause or resume iPod playback, or to answer or end a call; squeeze it twice in succession to skip to the next track. The functionality is limited–you can’t skip back, skim, or perform any other action, but it’s a welcome way to get at least some degree of playback and call control.
Third-party vendors have provided workarounds for the second issue through small adapters that let you connect other headphones to the iPhone’s headphone jack. (We’ve reviewed two, and we have a few more to cover.) Unfortunately, when you use most third-party headphones, you lose the stock earbuds’ control module and microphone. Shure makes an adapter that includes such functionality, but it’s $40 and somewhat bulky.
For those who want better audio quality without losing the additional features of Apple’s earbuds, an appealing alternative is provided by Ultimate Buds. The company takes a set of quality in-ear-canal headphones–either the Etymotics ER-6i (MSRP $149) or the Future Sonics/XtremeMac FS1 (MSRP $150)–and a set of Apple’s iPhone earbuds, and then performs electronics surgery, grafting the iPhone-headset’s cable and controller onto the in-ear-canal headphones. The result is the Ultimate Buds UB7 (pictured above) or UB7EB, each $150 (at the time of this writing, the UB7EB is on sale for $120). You get the sound quality and noise isolation of the ER-6i (UB7) or FS1 (UB7EB) with the playback-control and phone-making convenience of Apple’s own iPhone earbuds. (Ultimate Buds will instead modify your favorite set of headphones for $40; we didn’t test this service.)
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