We caught up with Ultimate Ears' Mike Diaz at the Taqueria. "Check this out," he said, plunking a pair of earbuds in front of us with his iPod Mini. We cued up The Carpenters' "Close to You" and inserted the 'phones.

"Wow! These are great! What do they cost?"

Karen Carpenter kept singing.

"I said how much do they cost?"

Karen Carpenter kept singing.

I looked up. Everybody at the table was staring at me. I removed the earbuds and heard Mike saying, "These are the metro.fi 2s. We're charging $89/pair for them. They have a single titanium diaphragm and they're vented so they only offer about 15dB ambient noise reduction."

As I had just proven, sometimes that's more than enough. The metro.fi 2s are comfortable and extremely good sounding. Ultimate Ears is going sell zillions of these.