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Archive: MP3 player

I just can’t win with headphones

13 July 2007 01:48

Categories: Entertainment, General, Music, Personal, Technology

As though my shoe woes (shoo woos? shoa woas?) were not bad enough, I recently made another purchase which I almost instantly regretted. But I knew that I would in advance.

I have always had bad luck with headphones. They always fail really quickly. I guess in a sense this is to be expected, since there are not many objects in existence that have to traipse around the world being hurriedly stuffed into your pockets, or being violently untangled. So given that headphones are quite fragile objects in the first place, it shouldn’t be a surprise when they stop working.

As such, I am never sure which approach I should take when buying headphones. Should I splash out on an expensive pair of headphones in the hope that they will be a bit more durable? I should I just buy a rubbishy pair for a few pounds and buy a new pair every few months? Of course, being the wishy-washy, indecisive, Lib Dem-voting kind of guy I am, I normally opt for the in between option — something that costs somewhere between £10 and £20 and lasts a year or so.

I have completely fallen out with the kind of headphones that go inside your ear. Compact they may be. But thanks to my ears being different sizes, I often find that one of them keeps on falling out, while the other one doesn’t fit in properly and hurts like hell.

So a while back I decided to get the kind of chunky headphones that sit on your ears. You know, the ones used in The ITV Chart Show logo. Even though that style is more traditionally associated with home listening, you see a fair number of people walking around with kind of medium sized ones. So I set out to find some.

I searched Edinburgh high and low for a pair of the medium sized chunky style headphones that I keep on seeing people wear. I went into every Kirkcaldy shop that I could think of, even taking a major excursion to the Currys on the outskirts. But I simply could not find them.

In the end, I had to go for a pair that I saw in HMV. I was a little bit sceptical because the description did not say that it was specifically designed for portable music players. But the picture on the box made it look portable enough. I could even see the headphones themselves, and they looked fine to me.

The problem with buying headphones is that it is not always easy to tell exactly what you are buying. Unfortunately, the pair that I went for were about as portable as a tank. It might have been okay if it weren’t for the obscenely long cable, which on its own could take up the space of a normal pocket. Plus, they make my ears feel as though they are in an oven. Still, they are good for home listening (I am using them this very moment, in fact).

Because I am once bitten, thrice shy by nature, I decided after that to persevere with my old in-ear headphones, even though they kept on cutting out and giving me excruciating pain. Last week, though, they finally kicked the bucket. No sound was made unless I held the cable in a really awkward way that would cause people to give me funny looks.

Because I am addicted to music — constantly plugged in — when they do fail, it is a major crisis. Going cold turkey on music will never last long for me.

Even though I do almost all of my shopping on the internet, I did not want to take the risk with headphones. I had trouble enough telling whether or not they were suitable even when I could hold the packaging in the flesh. There was no way I could let the cozy glow of the computer monitor to guide me through this one. So I just had to go to HMV and buy whatever pair I could get my hands on.

The only suitable pair was the ones that I had bought before, with the fifteen metre long cable. There was a plethora of the kind that go inside your ear, but I wasn’t touching them for the reasons I noted above.

The only other kind were the ones that clip on to your ear. I had a pair like this before, and they also hurt my ears. Probably something to do with the fact that they clipped on to them.

But being the only suitable pair, I just decided to buy them. Plus, they were Sennheisers — and Sennheisers are meant to be good, right? So I keep on being told, at least.

I had a pair of Sennheiser in-ear ones before. I didn’t think much of them though. Nothing particularly wrong with them, but they seemed a bit bog-standard to me, particularly given the reputation Sennheiser have. I just put it down to the fact that it was the pair that I got free with my iRiver.

So, what about my new headphones then? The most muffled headphones I have ever used in my life. I could tell immediately. It is a bit like listening to music through water. And they hurt my ears. And they have a neck band which means that I can’t even sit back when wearing them.

Sennheiser? Sehr scheisse more like!

4 comments

Thumbs up for iRiver

20 March 2007 13:11

Categories: Entertainment, General, Music, Personal, Technology

My iRiver is two years old today. It was a birthday present a couple of years ago (yes, today I am now officially, unfortunately, in the grip of adulthood… gah).

Recently, the MP3 player started totally acting up. It did so on the same day I got my new PC, so that put a dampener on the whole day. I felt as though I was being punished for having the audacity to buy a PC.

Anyway, as you can imagine — I am a huge music lover — I was pretty upset about it. Eventually, I convinced myself that there was a silver lining. It provided the perfect opportunity to buy an iPod.

Yes, today I would probably buy an iPod. I would still feel like a bit of a posing prick with one, in much the same way as I wouldn’t suit driving a Porsche.

Most people are evil and superficial, and many point out the alleged “enormous” size of my iRiver. I don’t think it’s that big — I would say it’s chunky. But I really like its shape — roughly the dimensions of a cassette case. Fits very nicely in my pocket.

Somebody called outta stace left a comment recently explaining why they would “never get an iPod”. I wouldn’t say that I’d never get an iPod. But it explains well part of the reason why I like my iRiver.

But the iPod is tempting for two major reasons. One: gapless playback. I’ve picked up that you can get this for your iRiver, but only with an unofficial firmware upgrade, which I’m too much of a wuss to do. Two, and even more importantly: it Scrobbles.

(This is even more important at the moment because iTunes for Vista is buggy as shit, and the Last.fm software doesn’t play very well with it either — so most of my tracks are never Scrobbled.)

Still, as tempting as an iPod is, the price tag heading towards £300 pounds (I’d need to get the 80GB iPod as I have roughly 35GB of music) is a hefty hit on the wallet. I realised after a while that my iRiver was still under warranty, almost two years after I’d bought it (If my iRiver had died a month later, it wouldn’t have been — I was lucky).

I sent the player back to iRiver in Germany, who very promptly worked out the problem (HDD failure), fixed it and sent it straight back free of charge. I was impressed with the good service.

So now I have been reunited with my iRiver, complete with new HDD, but with all of the same external scrapes and bruises that have been inflicted on it thanks to two years’ worth of my usage. There’s a bit of life in my iRiver yet. Who needs an iPod?

10 comments

Beware the friendly stranger

7 December 2006 08:09

Categories: Commuting, Fife, General, Personal, Scotland, Technology, University

My mother and I often have a debate about whether it is polite to say “hello” to people who are almost strangers. I — and most normal people — think it is stark raving bonkers. My mother thinks that I only think this because I was brought up in the east. I think that’s just racist.

My mother assures me that in Glasgow people — complete strangers — say hello to each other all the time. This is clearly untrue. For a start, if everybody said hello to everybody the greeting would become meaningless and you might as well not say hello at all. And it’s more efficient to say nothing, which is why strangers don’t say hello to each other.

Even so, if you accept that Glaswegians are more likely to say hello to strangers, then it’s only because the greeting is swiftly followed by, “Any spare change pal?”, or a knife in the chest. If it isn’t, they are probably a raging drunkard who has mistaken you for their long-lost uncle.

I’m not just going on one of my anti-Glasgow rants here you know. Every sane person thinks that it’s not normal to say hello to strangers. Matt T for instance.

Today, for what is the first time in the thousands of walks to the tube station I have made, a complete stranger said ‘Good morning’ to me as I we were passing in the street. Furthermore he wasn’t – or at least didn’t appear to be – in any way mentally ill.

My mother would say that he was just being friendly. But it is not friendly to go up to a stranger and say hello. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine anything that is more impolite. We all know from past experience that a stranger starting a conversation means one of two things. The first is that you are about to have a conversation with somebody who is utterly bonkers. The second is that you are about to have the most boring conversation you have ever had in your entire life.

There was one particular incident that made the purchase of an MP3 player my top priority. It was no longer a luxury item that would merely keep me entertained on those long journeys. It had become a necessity.

I was coming home from university, and my face was buried in a book. I was trying to revise, you see. Most people would take this as a kind of ‘do not disturb’ notice. Not the absolute dullard who sat next to me. The ticket inspector came along to check our tickets. So far it’s all very mundane. Once the conductor had moved out of earshot this person looked up at me and showed me the ticket that had been printed out for him.

He pointed at the price, as if I was meant to know what a single from South Gyle to Kirkcaldy costs. Several seconds later he finally opened his mouth. “Look, I’ve been overcharged.”
“Oh really?”, I replied.
“Yeah, look. He’s done me out of twenty pence.”

What are you supposed to say to somebody like this? My awful train neighbour was the sort of person who would make a fuss over twenty pence. But people like this are common. I’ve learned over these past few months working in a shop that people will do anything to save even the smallest amount of money — even though they certainly could have done something much more productive with their time. But it was clear that our poor overcharged soul had expected more of a reaction from me.

About ten minutes later, obviously still seething from the whole experience, he piped up again from absolutely nowhere. “That conductor is very crafty. I bet he’s got a Porsche. It all mounts up you know.” Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Because you were overcharged twenty pence, the conductor must have a sports car. Shut up!

I would rather not have to deal with dodgy, boring old men who have nothing better to do than complain to a student about losing twenty pence. So I bought an MP3 player because it is a very visible ‘do not disturb’ sign. It is useful even if you’re not listening to music. People say that it is anti social. But it’s the only way I can stop myself from actually hating people.

11 comments

DRM arguments

17 September 2006 17:46

Categories: Asides, Current affairs, Entertainment, Music, Technology

Murky has written about DRM, and the fact that owners of MP3 players don’t buy many digital downloads, but are very likely to buy more CDs than somebody who doesn’t own an MP3 player. Superficially, this “blows the pro-DRM arguments for music out of the water.” But it isn’t even as simple as this. Perhaps the reason why portable music player owners buy more CDs is because they like music better anyway? NB: I hate DRM.

1 comment

Don’t you see I have important things to do like listen to music?

18 March 2006 14:35

Categories: General, Technology

Somebody has designed a smart little sticker for the iPod Shuffle that signifies whether or not you’re prepared to have a conversation!

This design is a visual interpretation of one aspect from my current study about Acoustical Privacy: the iPod as a potential indicator for “non-communication”. Through a playful approach the sticker either strengthens the wish for privacy but also offers the opportunity to break up the silence with the direct demand for conversation.

Via Boing Boing.

It is a bit of a dilemma for me. I have to confess that one of the reasons I bought an iRiver was so that weird people wouldn’t talk to me. One time on the train back from Edinburgh this weirdo next to me kept on going on about how the conductor screwed him out of 5p for his ticket, and how the conductor must have a Porsche because it all adds up. He kept doing this at random points of the whole journey. I thought, “If you really care that much about your five bloody pence, why didn’t you tell the conductor?”

If I remember correctly, I was trying to do some fairly important reading at the time. Or maybe it was just the Student newspaper. But whatever, it was a whole lot preferable to listening to this freak going on about his five pence. That was the moment that I decided to buy an MP3 player.

Part of the intention was to get more reading done on the train, but I don’t think it works. I usually just end up staring out the window like a complete idiot, or just thinking about things, dreaming up some awesome blog posts, working out the meaning of life, the universe and everything, or just sleeping.

The trouble with being plugged into your MP3 player all the time is that, although you avoid conversations with weirdos, you could also miss out on having cool conversations with cool people. Or maybe you look like you aren’t prepared to help somebody who’s looking for directions or doesn’t know if they’re on the right train (even though I am happy to help). Or if somebody sees you in the street and they shout at you, but you can’t hear them. Or if somebody wants you to taste some organic porridge.

It’s pretty anti-social. But then again, I love listening to music, and most of my listening time is probably when I’m commuting these days. Plus, if you’re spending about three hours just travelling, listening to music is probably the easiest way to stop you from going completely insane.

I’m not sure about the sticker approach though. To make it so explicit that you really don’t want to talk to anybody would just be down-right rude and, well, anti-social. To display a message saying you want people to talk to you would just look desperate.

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