Happily (for a luddite) I know nothing of headphones - I use whatever plastic things which happen to be connected to the device at hand. I'm not posh.
I do recall the more poncey audiophiles from some websites (stuff I used to read when I owned dBpoweramp and cared about such things) always waffling about Sennheiser type things. Back when I was a kid, Bose was the big name. Now I'm just an old deaf dumb and blind kid who plays a mean pinball. Or something like that. I'm nothing if not a well-tempered clavier sort of guy who listens more to the music behind the sound rather than the sound itself, much like dear old Ludwig was reduced to doing at the end of his years of studying Johann Sebastian's richly flavoursome scribblings.
I did however, make an exception recently and listened to a modern remix of Wish You Were Here (for once without any drugs) on a friend's "proper" home system. I quite enjoyed that in a nostalgic sort of "yes, I'm now officially middle-aged" sort of way - but it didn't inspire me enough to comb Berlin for a few gold-plated connectors. I'll live with my poor plasticky-things in my poor plasticky universe.
Kilmatead wrote:I use whatever plastic things which happen to be connected to the device at hand. I'm not posh.
Your poor ears!
I would call myself an audiophile. This does not mean I'd own a 50,000 € stereo device, I just like to listen to good music in good quality. (Hence my aversion against loudness and compressed-to-death MP3 files.)
I had those 20 € headphones for years, even went with standard earplugs that came with my mobile phones. Anyway, I had the chance to grab some real headphone (I started my Hi-Fi career with the Shure SRH-240 for about 50 € back in the days), and from that moment on "cheap" earplugs sounded like a can phone to me: Squawking and squeaking, but no chance to enjoy my beloved music.
Listen to Talk Talk's "Spirit of Eden" over $5 Nokia enclosed earplug crap and you'll notice what I mean.
About Bose: Great speakers, cheap plasticky headphones.
Tux. ; tuxproject.de registered xplorer² pro user since Oct 2009, ultimated in Mar 2012
Tuxman wrote:Listen to Talk Talk's "Spirit of Eden"...
I always used Roxy Music's Avalon album as a test-case scenario years ago when I was looking for a 5.1 system. I never used headphones - except those cool high-tech noise-cancelling ones designed for pneumatic-hammer specialists. Much like vinyl's soft-tone allure over CD's hard technological edge, I always figured there was a lot to be said for allowing the sound-waves to actually travel through the air and mix in a room, rather than letting my poor befuddled plasticky brain do all the work.
David Byrne in the [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECXaLCDk4fI]5th Knee Play[/url] wrote:Not everyone notices
As things drift slowly in and out of focus.
Being in the theatre is more important than knowing what is going on in the movie.
The sound in the theatre is very loud.
It builds up beacause it can't get out of the theatre.
The actors talk.
We can still hear what they said a minute ago.
This happens in any closed room - sound never leaves it.
If someone goes out to get some soda or popcorn.
Some conversations escape as they leave and enter the lobby.
When the movie's over.
And everyone leaves the theatre.
The accumulated sound leaves with them
And spreads out across the parking lot
To become forever part of the landscape
The film is a gift to the surrounding community.
It was the only CD I had in my pocket at the time which didn't snap as I toted it around Dublin's HiFi shops (you see, everything in Dublin is stuck, culturally, in the 1970's so they still have HiFi shops there) - and I drove the floor-guys crazy as I toured the local shops before (like everyone else) eventually buying online. Now, I guess, the rage would all be Flac's on Flash Drives. How can one feel so old in just a few short years?
And, notably, as the CD just turned 30 years old, we'll note that "The first test CD was pressed in Langenhagen near Hannover, Germany, by the Polydor Pressing Operations plant. The disc contained a recording of Richard Strauss's Eine Alpensinfonie, played by the Berlin Philharmonic".
For the record, my first CD was Arbos by Arvo Pärt bought in a dingy roadside shop in Detroit in 1987. And I still have it, somewhere, original case and all. Lord love ECM.
Kilmatead wrote:you see, everything in Dublin is stuck, culturally, in the 1970's so they still have HiFi shops there
Ah, that's why your beer tastes stale and old.
We Germans have Hi-Fi shops too, even in smaller cities. Obviously, Berlin fails to do the same. One would think inhabitants Berlin (seems to be the noisiest city of Germanys) have a higher need for headphones than anyone else. On the other hand, probably the high traffic everywhere in Berlin made them deaf yet.
Tux. ; tuxproject.de registered xplorer² pro user since Oct 2009, ultimated in Mar 2012
Tuxman wrote:Ah, that's why your beer tastes stale and old.
Well, actually that has more to do with the James's Gate Storehouse using Liffey water since 1759. Since everyone else in the country is "up river" from the city-centre brewery, we all get to urinate in the river's flow first and cautiously avoid the outcome by drinking bottled import swish while laughing at the tourists who pretend to appreciate "the real thing".
Argh! Don't talk to me about Vienna! I broke my ankle 25 years ago when walking through the Innere Stadt's cobbled roads drunk at 3 in the morning. Damn things are lethal when it rains. I vowed never to return. Adulterating Irish Beer is merely the first phase of my revenge. :twisted:
(The second-phase included impregnating their daughters with hell-spawn, but I didn't have the heart for it, so I cancelled that dastardly plan, which was just as well because the last Austrian girlfriend I had could have beaten the crud out of me if she had a mind to. Decided to keep on her good side, just in case. But I'd still never go back. I just hold a general grudge against the Viennese who left me crying on the road while they took their sweet time getting help, lazy sods.)
I only was in Vienna once (and another time in Kärnten). I considered it expensive and boring. Additionally, I don't understand their dialect very well. Especially older Austrians tend to speak in a weird language just to blur tourists' minds.
Tux. ; tuxproject.de registered xplorer² pro user since Oct 2009, ultimated in Mar 2012
Tuxman wrote:Especially older Austrians tend to speak in a weird language just to blur tourists' minds.
Freakishly I have a similar suspicion of Icelanders! Years ago I had a rudimentary "working knowledge" of Swedish (before "she left me" and I inevitably forgot it all out of spite), and I thought, hey, if most Euro languages are Latin-based (in the South, anyway) and I could get by using just that as a work-around, surely a month on the outskirts of Reykjavík wouldn't be that tough. Guess what? Icelandic bears no relation to the rest of Scandinavia's linguistic base so I was screwed. A hopelessly dark and scary month of unpronounceable and repetitive foodstuffs. No fun at all. (But at least I don't have a grudge against them, as it was my own hubris which let me down, and not for the first time.)
narayan wrote:For example, if a buxom lady is on the swing, the swing would go faster.
Wait, wouldn't three moving gravity sources (the lady being 1, the buxom part being 2) all working against each other with unsynchronised fulcrums basically negate any true pendulemic motion? It would be a free-for-all of accelerating madness - just like that boat ride in Willy Wonka's Factory. Never mind the dancing-décolletage, beware Gene Wilder singing quietly on Hellenic playgrounds!
And God bless the Sports Bra. Really. Just bless 'em fervently.
The guys at head-fi usually are fanboys. You ask for a headphone and get 5 answers by 3 people. I prefer the German Hifi-Forum.de where they answer in a more advanced, technical way instead of just answering things like "I only own x so buy x too."
Tux. ; tuxproject.de registered xplorer² pro user since Oct 2009, ultimated in Mar 2012
Never mind the dancing-décolletage, beware Gene Wilder singing quietly on Hellenic playgrounds!