Shure SE535 vs Sennheiser CX Sport

The Shure SE535 makes for a good, if unremarkable, Earphone for people with a $250 budget.

The Sennheiser CX Sport, however, is merely mediocre at its $121 asking price, when compared to similarly priced products, and won't satisfy the needs of most people.

In either case, we suggest that you first take a look at some other options at the $250 and $90 price points before committing to one of these - it's likely that you'll be able to find some better alternatives.

If you're still interested in learning more about the Shure SE535 and Sennheiser CX Sport, however, we wrote a summary of what we could find about them:

While the Shure SE535 wasn't able to make it to the very top of any roundups from sources that perform quality hands-on testing, it still got featured in a large number of them. The Verge, Techradar, CNET, Head-fi, What Hi-Fi?, Reviewed, and inews.co.uk have all deemed it worthy of a place on their respective shortlists.

Moving on to the Sennheiser CX Sport: it was unable to reach the very top of any roundups from sources that conduct reliable and unbiased testing. Nonetheless, it still managed to impress reviewers from a number of such sites, like Techradar, What Hi-Fi?, PCmag, Wirecutter (NYTimes), and Reviewed, enough for them to include them on those lists.

To get a better idea of how they fare when compared directly to each other, we analyzed review scores of sources that tested both. Techradar, for example, preferred the Shure SE535, while What Hi-Fi? rated both of them the same.

We also took a look at which sources had the best things to say about them. We learned that the Shure SE535 got reviewed the highest by The Verge - it gave it a rating of 9.4, while the Sennheiser CX Sport most impressed reviewers at Gadget Review, which gave it a score of 9.1.

Lastly, we averaged out all of the reviews scores that we could find on these two products and compared them to other Earphones on the market. We learned that both of them performed far better than most of their competitors - the overall review average earned by Earphones being 7.3 out of 10, whereas the Shure SE535 and Sennheiser CX Sport managed averages of 8.6 and 7.7 points, respectively.

Due to the difference in their prices, however, it's important to keep in mind that a direct Shure SE535 vs. Sennheiser CX Sport comparison might not be entirely fair - some sources don't take value for money into account when assigning their scores and therefore have a tendency to rate more premium products better.