Audio Ecstasy

For years I went through head­phones the way that some peo­ple go through sun­glass­es or ball­point pens: I’d get the cheap­est ear­buds I could find and use them until they fell apart. And they worked fine for me until one day with mon­ey burn­ing a hole in my pock­et I decid­ed to spend fifty bucks on a pair of Sony MDR-V300 head­phones. Fifty bucks is not all that much to spend on head­phones; I can hear the audio­philes in the audi­ence sneer­ing at what pedes­tri­an head­phones the MDR-V300s are, but I expect­ed there not to be any dif­fer­ence; I seri­ous­ly thought I was wast­ing fifty bucks.

Then I plugged them in.

I swear I thought I’d have to lis­ten to all my CDs over again to catch what I’d been miss­ing. There was so much more to every­thing I heard that I could not believe that I’d gone so long with the crap­py earbuds.

One thing for the ear­buds though, is that they are light and easy to stow, where­as the MDR-V300s are rel­a­tive­ly quite bulky. They have a mile of cable that has to be car­ried around, which is great in some cir­cum­stances and awk­ward in oth­ers. So after going to the gym a few times with the MDR-V300s I start­ed grav­i­tat­ing towards small­er head­phones that did­n’t act quite so much as earmuffs.

When I got the iPod, I expect­ed that I would throw away the ear­buds that came with it. After read­ing the hype about the unob­ta­ni­um dri­vers that make Apple’s iPod ear­buds bet­ter than every­one else’s, I decid­ed to give them a try for a while. Well, no ques­tion, the iPod ear­buds are bet­ter than most, and I’ve been pret­ty hap­py with them so far.

But since I’ve been work­ing in an office with two chat­ty women and not even thin cubi­cle walls between us, I’ve been need­ing a lit­tle bit more sound insu­la­tion than is pro­vid­ed by the ear­buds. Yes­ter­day lec­tured me about my gripes about my co-work­ers, say­ing that I need to take some respon­si­bil­i­ty for my damn self and get some decent head­phones to block the sound out. Stiff upper lip and all that, eh?

Today I brought the Sony MDR-V300 head­phones to work. Well, no mat­ter how much bet­ter the iPod ear­buds are than every oth­er ear­buds on the plan­et, they’re still ear­buds. And the Sony head­phones are from anoth­er plan­et by comparison.

For one thing, they block out out­side sound even when I’m not play­ing music. Not total­ly, but elim­i­nat­ing some of the ambi­ent noise is the point here at the office, plus of course with less ambi­ent sound the music sounds bet­ter even at low­er vol­umes. But the dynam­ic response of these head­phones is so much bet­ter than the ear­buds. I’m sure it’s pure­ly a physics question—bigger dri­vers will have greater range. Not only am I back to hear­ing parts of the music I’d for­got­ten about, I’m think­ing I’m going to have to reen­code some of my music at a high­er bitrate because I can hear com­pres­sion arti­facts in some of my MP3 music.

I hope I don’t become a super­au­dio­phile jerky-boy. I actu­al­ly like not being able to hear defects in the range of CD-audio. I like being able to enjoy music with less-than-per­fect fideli­ty. So lets hope that this “enjoy­ing the high­er fideli­ty” kick isn’t addic­tive. I don’t want to be the snob turn­ing my nose up at 320-kbps encod­ed MP3s or turn­ing my nose up at CDs.