Performance

To judge the performance of the in-ears I had them burning in for well over 100 hours in order to be sure that the dynamic driver was at its peak performance. The players used to test the headphones with include the following: HiFiMAN HM-801, Cowon D2, Nokia E66.
These in-ears are designed to work with headphone as well as PCs via the break out cable. While the break out cable is a neat trick, the earphones sound quite bad out of most PC based sound cards due to the fact that the amplification stage is made for use with normal headphones both impedance and sensitivity wise. This mismatch means that they do not perform their best in a PC environment, on the other hand most normal DAPs will power them quite well.

Considering that they cost around $60 and you get a microphone and remote they are quite competitively priced since they also sound quite alright for music playback. The sound quality is unfortunately no better than that of the other cheap in-ears around. In fact they are only slightly more interesting to listen to than the Beta Brainwavz we recently reviewed. Of course they do have some things going for them, the tip selection is alright unlike that of the Beta's.
The midrange of the E361s is quite recessed and dull sounding, the bass is booming and completely overpowered, the same can be said for the midbass. Even though the midrange is suppressed it lacks details and can sound a bit distant and uninvolving. Solely based on sound quality they are not recommendable because you can get better quality for less cash, however, factoring in the headset capability makes them better value.

The treble is like the midrange very anonymous, both amount and extension is almost non existing which is a shame. They remind me a bit of a less resolving pair of Sennheiser CX300s / Creative EP-630s with their strong emphasis on bass and less than ideal all around performance. Unlike the other cheap (relatively speaking) in-ears we have reviewed these ones are bass monsters which is of course both a pro and a con. The fact that it is overpowering definitely subtracts from the listening experience, however, some users will undoubtedly be very fond of it.

They are very easy to drive and you can definitely get them to sound alright being run just out of a normal mobile phone.