audiodition

a couple of things of gadgetry i’m pondering:

with all of the articles about the ipod earbuds being mediocre, i finally broke down and picked up a pair of sony MDREX71SL fontopia in-ear portable headphones. at first, i really had a problem with these, and thought these were oddly tinny and ironically enough, had much less bass than the standard earbuds. however, having read many a review of these types of headphones before, i knew that it was probably a matter of getting them to fit deep enough inside my ear to get a good seal. (this was the other factor that lead me to that whole ear-cleaning debacle). still, i’m still not quite sure about these. i don’t know if they really sound that much better to be worth it, and i don’t like the fact that there’s no really elegant way to store them without getting everything all tangled up, even with the carrying case. i think i really want them to do as well as my large noise-cancelling headphones, but without the bulk, but i don’t know if that’s really realistic. plus, there’s a specific noise-cancelling in-ear earbud version anyway.

i also picked up a tivoli portable audio laboratory, which i thought i’d use as a portable speaker when travelling, so i could listen to the ipod in the hotel room or whereever i’m staying. we used to have some flat speakers, but some cat chewed them up, and they were a little fussy to set up anyway. altec lansing makes the inmotion, which is an ipod specific little set of speakers that fold out from the size of a paperback. but i ended up trying the tivoli thing instead, probably the result of some clever marketing or ad somewhere. i think the thought was that it was pretty portable, would have better sound that other speakers, and even had a radio if i needed it. the downsides is that it was just one speaker and thus mono, but isn’t a single speaker sounds great better than two that sound so-so? how much stereophonics can you get out of a pair of speakers four inches apart, anyway? also, it has an internal rechargeable battery, but when that runs out, you need to plug it in, as you can’t use regular batteries. i was thinking that this might be an issue, but it lasts 4-6 hours, and by then, wouldn’t my ipod run out of juice as well? plus where am i going to be where i’d need to run out of batteries anyway? (i know, famous last words…)

in any case, i’ll road test them out this week in vegas.

Posted at May 1, 2004 12:07 PM