You’ve seen them on the bus on your way to work, on the heads of people just bopping their heads. I’m talking about those headphones that everyone seems to have or want.

Celebrity endorsed items aren’t a new thing, in fact most fail to fulfill your dreams of making a foul line slam dunk; attract woman to you like Demi Moore on a 20 year old.

Back in 2008 Jimmy Lovine and Dr Dre formed a partner ship with Monster Electronics to produce a line of audio peripherals.

The Headphones I will be reviewing to day are the Solo HD, it’s a lightweight /compact over the head design.

Lets get to the unboxing; the packaging is excellent in that it is a more than packaging. It’s also a display case as well. Inside you will find a storage compartment for the warranty cards, cleaning cloth and instructions. Also included is a handy carrying case with 2 cords, one with control functions for use with iProducts and one standard cord for all other audio players

The headphones are very comfortable all round with great detail to the padding, the ear padding acts much like noise cancellation and is made of very soft leather.

I’m quite happy with the audio quality; it’s clear and crisp with little to no distortion even when I crank up the volume.

Now comes the price, the average price from all your fave stores is about 200-220 bucks. Is it worth it? I was lucky to get my pair on sale at %40 off.  At that price I’m completely sold but I guess these kids have a heck of a lot more disposal income than me (when I was a kid my parents gave me cardboard box to put on my head to sing in)

If you have shopped around for these you may have noticed that there Solo and Solo HD versions, so what’s the diff??? Well lemme tell you!

When originally produced the Solo’s had a matte finish vs the HD’s piano glossy finish!!! That’s it????  but wait there’s more!

A fatal flaw in the original Solo’s was the headband, which was notorious for snapping right above the foldable hinges. Thus we now have the HD’s, with a redesigned headband and new finish. As far as audio goes the non HD’s have a stronger Bass response, the HD’s on the other hand have a great Mid range sound with a lil more treble.

With the popularity of these headphones knock offs have been quite rampant, here’s a few quite tips to avoid getting duped.

The first thing to look for is the images and materials used for the packaging, the images are very low quality as per the examples below. Monster has also provided a link with examples to view of knock offs.

http://www.monstercable.com/counterfeit/

In doing my research I stumbled upon another gem, if you’re looking for the style and audio capabilities of the Beats by Dre headphones check out www.fannywang.com word is the same audio engineer produced these as well but what I think is the bigger selling point is that you can customize the color of your headphones.

Well it came with no announcement what so ever, ITunes Match is available in Canada. Woohooo!

Hmmm so $27.99 a year to have access to my entire music library on any iDevice or iTunes…. Not too bad to lets give it a shot.

Set up was easy, on the left side of my iTunes there’s a link you click on and then it starts by examining your whole list of music in your library and checks to see if they have it. Once this process is complete (it might take a while if you hoard music like me) it then adds any missing artwork. Now keep in mind that if they do have the matching song in the iTunes store they don’t really need to upload yours, they just simply provide you access to stream or download the one they have directly from the iTunes music store. 

So what about all those great DJ mixes and live recordings you have that aren’t on iTunes??? Well what happens they up load it for you and you still get to have access to it ISN’T THAT GREAT!

Now like most people I have more than one computer (i.e. netbooks, laptop) and different music on each one. I simply performed the same process on each one and all my music is in one place. 

One thing I like most about iTunes match is getting re-acquainted with music I have that I have not listened to in a very long time, I also like being able to listen to it on anything I own that has iTunes and an internet connection. Another bonus is that I was able to free up a lot of hard drive space, very seldom am I using my Macbook with out an internet connection and if so I can always download songs from the cloud.

I highly recommend Itunes match