Ideapad

Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer

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Headphones at the halfway point

August 16, 2009 /

My fifth headphone review went live on Boing Boing Gadgets Friday, marking the midpoint in the series I’m doing this summer. I’m penning 10 pieces covering 11 models from seven different manufacturers.

And what have I learned? More than I expected, some of it obvious, others less so:

  • Greatness is variable. Undoubtedly, almost all of the headphones I’m testing are great, in one way or another; the cheapest pair is a hundred fifty bucks, after all. But what defines greatness? To Etymotic, it’s pure reproduction of original sound; to Klipsch, it’s top-to-bottom balance; to Audio-Technica, it’s pumping abnormally strong bass through miniature devices; to JVC (coming next week), it’s replicating its audio style across product lines. More than once I’ve found myself thinking, really, who am I to judge?
  • MP3s truly are a crappy audio medium. Don’t get me wrong, I’m used to the sound, and I don’t deny progress. But the high quality of electronics in my possession exposes an MP3’s flaws and has me casting a skeptical eye on my iTunes library. Someday I’m going to switch to a 200GB iPod and a lossless audio format.
  • I’m a picky son of a gun. Etymotic has pure sound the likes of which I’ve never experienced. My wife swoons at the mere memory of listening to music through them. But I disliked the lack of low-end punch, which I noted, and which made my contact at Etymotic downright wistful. Maybe I should lighten up a bit.
  • But hey, I know what I like, which is a balanced output that brings warmth and resonance to music at low volume levels. While I remain impressed by it, I don’t need Etymotic’s hyper-clear output. Give me the Klipsch, thanks, with a side of Audio-Technica‘s mind-blowingly good noise isolation. Heck, I’d take the Audio-Technicas, too. I like bass. (I’m bringing them both on a business trip I’m about to take.)

This project has been a ton of fun, and I haven’t even written about the fancy models yet. My continued thanks go out to Rob Beschizza and Joel Johnson for giving me the platform.

The [noun]

August 13, 2009 /

OK, Mr. or Mrs. Consumer, riddle me this.
Hut and shack
Which of the above buildings sells pizzas, and which sells radios?
I ask because of some aggressive and misguided rebranding efforts going on by major retail chains. In an effort to both be trendy and transcend an existing identity, they’re seizing the playful halves of their names and marketing around them.
Which sounds great, until you take them out of context.
Pizza Hut thinks its consumers already use “the Hut” as shorthand, so they’ve embraced it as a marketing initiative. That’s fine enough, but it doesn’t scale. The Hut doesn’t mean anything if it’s not related to mealtime and pizza, and it won’t catch the eye of someone looking for food.
Meanwhile, Radio Shack has decided to do the same thing. They, too, say their shortened “the Shack” is used by devoted fans, and that the name is more trustworthy than the official brand. Except, erm, it really isn’t.
When does a nickname imply trust? When it comes from a customer, it says, “I go here all the time,” which can be construed as, “I trust their products.” When it comes from the corporate mouth, the message is, “You should be my friend,” not, “You can trust me.” It feels entirely different.
But my biggest complaint is with the brand identity these nicknames create. Not only are the messages missing their mark, but they’ve gone so far as to become more or less identical. What do they mean? Tell your coworker, “I’m going to the shack and the hut at lunch,” and see what happens.
I’m all for nicknames; my coworkers have several for me (and probably a few that I don’t know about). But the best ones are descriptive and add warmth and depth to the thing they describe. Shacks and huts, for all their marketing efforts, don’t really do that.
This is a cross-post from aiaio.

links for 2009-07-15

July 15, 2009 /

On reviewing headphones

July 13, 2009 /

Review: A week with the Etymotic hf2, by yours truly, on Boing Boing Gadgets.
Last week I was on line at Duane Reade and watched the man in front of me ask for a pair of headphones. He selected a Maxell model from behind the register; it was $14.99, I think, maybe a bit more. He contemplated them for a moment.
“Those are very good,” said the cashier, blithely.
“Okay,” said the customer, who paid and walked out.
Suffice to say I am not that guy.
I have always had, and appreciated, top-flight portable audio, from my fancy Sony Walkmans in the 1980s to several pairs of expensive noise-canceling headphones in recent years. And with my tinnitus forcing me to listen to in-ear music at low volumes, having good noise isolation has been a must.
At the tail end of bicycle commuting last summer, I ran over my headphones–my $150, pristine-sounding, noise-isolating, wondrous Shure E3c headphones–with my front tire. Oops. I used them anyway, broken and sad, for several months.
It took me that long to figure out which headphones to buy, and the ones I finally got were good but not great. Useful reviews of noise-canceling and noise-isolating headphones are hard to come by. I don’t need wonky audio spectrum surveys, or dissections of the nuances of Django Renhardt’s solos: what I need is, do they sound good? and how well do they shut out the outside world?
So I decided to do what any good blogger should: do it myself. I pitched Joel Johnson, formerly of Boing Boing Gadgets, and he gave me the go-ahead. Two months of emails later, I have $2880 worth of headphones in my dining room, a ridiculous categorical spreadsheet, and a fun, interesting commute to work. Goofy expressions like “in hog heaven” come to mind.
The first review went live today, with 10 more to run through the summer. My thanks go out to Joel and to Rob Beschizza, my new editor, who inherited this project and has been most gracious and helpful. Look for more posts on BBG and some additional commentary in this space as the project continues.

It’s all the same nowadays anyway

July 12, 2009 /

Nathan answering the cameraNathan has figured out how to “answer” the phone, by putting it up to his ear. He does it with the home phone, with our iPhones … and, um, with the digital camera.
Which, if you think about it, isn’t really far off.

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