Lets face it, we all hate wires. Whether they're refusing to stay hidden behind your svelte new TV, or eating peripherals alive in a deadly web of tangled death behind your PC, wires are the bane of an electronics-obsessed existence. And no music-lover's commute can commence without spending several tortured moments in the Rubic's-like pursuit of tangle-free tunes. So when a company comes along promising to make my portable music tangle-free, I tend to take notice.

The Grandmax Music Band-It is essentially a pair of retractable ear buds and a neoprene iPod pocket that attaches to a backpack strap. It's a nice idea, but in practice, I found it far from perfect.

The case isn't bad, necessarily. Is it offers two pockets, one for your iPod and one for the headphones. The pockets connect at the bottom, allowing the headphone jack to snake through and hook to the bottom of your iPod Mini. Adjustable Velcro straps keep it hugging most any backpack strap with relative security. The problem is, once your iPod's in place, you lose access to the controls, and getting your iPod in and out of the case while it's strapped to your backpack next to your chest isn't exactly easy. Thankfully, a number of backpacks now come with a similar pocket built right into the shoulder strap. But if your favorite bag has no iPod shoulder holster, the Music Band-It might be useful to you.

The main selling point for the Music Band-It, though, is the company's patented retractable ear buds, which promise to "eliminate cable mess." The problem is that what they eliminate in mess, they add in bulk, mediocre sound, and the jarring interruption of music, as the buds occasionally go flying off your head, returning to the case.

The iPod-like white buds are of the large, sit-outside-your-ear variety, which is fine but doesn't make them very secure. A pair of included in-ear silicone adapters might help, if it weren't so hard to actually get them on the earphones. Without them, the phones sat outside my ear canal, pumping tinny sound, and waiting to fall off my head at any given moment.

Also, the retractable mechanism is just too powerful. Give the phones an accidental tug, and they fly back to their home at a speed that seems to approach Mach one. OK, so it might not be that fast, but trust me when I say you don't want any stray fingers, faces, or babies in the way when these headphones decide to fly south for the winter. And the housing for the retractable cable is a bulky, white disk that seems much larger and thicker than it needs to be to house 4 feet of thin headphone cable. Personally, I'd go for the Sony MDR-Q clip-on headphones over these ear buds. They sound better, they look better, and their retractable cable mechanism is decidedly less spastic.

The $29.99 GrandMax Music Band-It is available now for all flavors of iPods. You can pick one up by hitting up one of the three online retailers listed on the GrandMax site.