John Walker

Actually, there were two offers from Amazon at the same time, both about $55. One was from JTT, not an authorized dealer, and the other was from Amazon, an authorised dealer. Klipsch confirmed that it was the real deal (--If it says sold and shipped by Amazon, it's real--) and so I bought a pair. I'm going to compare the real ones with the fake ones pretty carefully and I'll let you all know the results. Amazon has since returned the price to about $64 (in response to someone saying it was too good a deal? - I don't know ). I doubt Amazon sold them at a loss, so perhaps the price is not a good guide to the fakes after all. Perhaps some sellers are looking for high volume sales of the real deal. We still have the question of how do we know that they are fakes? How many of us have a real pair from low margin sellers that we are returning simply because we think the deal is too good. The cheap ones I bought certainly sound good to me but I have never had a pair of ear buds before IEM or otherwise. This is my first MP3 player. I've always preferred audio via speakers and not headphones. I never had a walkman. So I am quite literally an earphone virgin. I wanted a good set of earphones and relied on a review as to which ones to buy. I'm eager to compare the real S4's with the presumed fakes and both with the earbuds that came with the MP3 player ( I got it yesterday), So far, the "fake" S4's sound a lot better than the buds that came with the player, let's see if the real S4's outperform the presumed fakes. I might have 2 pairs of real S4's. John

Hi everyone, I just bought a pair of S4's on the internet and while the price was low ($49 ) it was not that low (Amazon is selling them today for $55). I can't tell if they are fake. They came in a blue box, the tin had the alignment between the logo and the h that elsewhere on this site is taken as indicating a fake, the Klipsch name on the side is resistant to rubbing, they came with 4 rubber buds and a cleaning tool, and to my inexperienced ear they sound OK. I have very little experience with earbuds and so can't tell if they are genuine. I asked Klipsch directly and got the standard "We are looking into it" and "we can't tell you how to tell the genuine S4's from the fake ones, you might be a counterfeiterlooking for hints, so go and pay full price at our friends, the authorised dealers, just to be sure they are real" response. You would think that they could tell us at least what previous rounds of fakes got wrong even if they keep the current errors under their hat. This would be some REAL help to people who are trying to be Klipsch customers rather than keeping the margins up for the authorised sellers. So, a question to ask is, While the alignment of the Klispch logo and the h is found on fake tins, is it also found on real tins? That is, is it simply manufacturing variation that has been copied by the counterfeiters. We have two problems here. Accepting fakes as genuine and rejecting genuine S4's as fakes simply because the deal seems to good, My deal was good ($49 vs Amazon's $55) but was it too good? Am I hearing klispch sound quality or not? Right now, the Klipsch brand is suffering because I, and presumably many others, can't answer the question - Is this really Klipsch sound? John Walker