How to make a pen work again.

Lick the end.

You're welcome.

Headphone Amp Review: Little Dot 2

Doubles as an awesome preamp and a room heater. It uses 30W and puts out 100mW, making it 3% efficient. This commends it to me.

It does of course, sound perfect, it's a class A valve amp. I use it to amplify my gameboy, because I DON'T LIKE HEARING DISTORTION WHEN I'M PLAYING SUPER MARIO BROTHERS.

Why women ruin sound quality.

Now before you accuse me of being an androcentric bastard, let me explain. I am an androcentric bastard.

There are a number of ways in which women ruin sound quality. The first is economics. A women is highly likely to lower the available funds in your bank account, and is likely to use your audio purchases as a calculation of her relative worth.

What this means, is the next time you spend $2000 on a valve amp, be prepared to spend at least that much on her next pair of shoes.

The second factor, is called the WAF, or wife acceptance factor, whereby the more obtrusive an object is on a particular living space, the less likely your spouse will allow it. Explained in more detail here.

Thirdly, and most importantly is the FAF, or fat ass factor. Women are notorious for sitting on objects of high monetary value, and low resilience. I have had several pairs of headphones completely obliterated by some giggling tyrant of the opposite sex. You might think the answer would be to buy a decent pair of speakers. A woman will always compromise your listening experience somewhat, by displacing you from the center of  the stereo field. This is minimised by getting a woman who is lean, but at the risk of creating a point of reflection for high frequency sound. It is best to place lean women in a large fluffy jumper for this reason.

If you must have a woman, I would recommend getting a Russian type, preferably lean and fluffy. They are less likely to use your purchases as a measure of their relative worth, being unfamiliar with the basic concepts of free market economics. They're also going to be more sympathetic when you play Tchaikovsky, and may even find your nationalism somewhat endearing. You are also not going to have to compromise when it comes to music choice, as they will be unfamiliar with 'western pop music'. She can also help when it comes to obtaining Russian surplus military valves for your next amp project.

Hmmm...

Why [most] modern music sounds like shit.

Ever noticed if you keep turning up the brightness on a TV, the black goes kinda grey? Looks shit doesn't it? What's happening is you're reducing the range of contrast available.

If that doesn't please your eyes, imagine the same situation with audio. This is basically what producers have been doing for the past 20 years. You mad?

Basically, in order to make the music louder, they take all the bits that were quiet, and make them as loud as the loud bits.

You might have heard this in a classical album. All the instruments seem to be the same volume. You'll hear a pronounced hiss before a quiet instrument plays (e.g. a triangle). This is because a previously quiet part of the track has been amplified, including its noise.

What's wrong with that you ask? I like hearing everything. Well to begin with, the hiss is annoying. More importantly, it gives the recording a distinctly artificial sound. If an instrument is barely perceptible, it's probably supposed to be.

What good is a crescendo if the harp is as loud as the brass?

This isn't just something that affects stuffy classical albums, it's actually far worse with rock.

Apparently Bob Dylan criticised increasing loudness levels -"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like—static." But Bob Dylan is a dick, and his latest albums are horrendously loud anyway.

As for modern electronic music, it's hard to say what distortion is on purpose, but a dub step drop works much better if there's actually some silence before it! Luckily for contemporary listeners, most electronic artists have an active interest in the production of their music and will devote considerable energy into balancing loudness levels. Whether or not this is preserved in the inevitable remixes and radio edits is another matter entirely.

The loudness wars are described in this article here.

Headphone Review: Philips SHP9000

There was once a time where the idea that an Asian motorcycle company could never embarrass the European market. Italy, Germany, and the UK (Let's ignore a certain anachronistic North American manufacturer here) all put out the big hitters, Triumphs, Ducatis and BMWs while the Asian manufacturers seemed content to mop up the budget market with little runabouts, and all was well.


Then Honda put out the CB750 and everyone looked a bit silly (Especially a certain anachronistic North American Manufacturer)


The same could be said of headphones, if an Audiophile wants a decent pair of cans, he goes to Europe (let's ignore a certain anachronistic North American manufacturer), gets awfully fixated on a pair of Sennheisers and sits at home, with a funny look on his face. This is because frankly, most Sennheisers sound like dog crap, but because generation X weren't read to as children, they don't know about the emperors new clothes.

So enters Philips, putting out fantastic headphones, with 50mm neodymium drivers, O2 free cables, the most comfortable headset in the world, for a rock bottom price...


And nobody cares.
 
Anyway, these headphones have a very strong bass capability. Which is to say, they don't boom, but if you want them to they'll shack your entire skull [literally, you'll sense your nose vibrating]. The rest of the frequency range is handled perfectly well, and the highs don't have any harshness.

They're extremely comfortable, probably the most comfortable headphones you'll ever wear, you forget they're on. The cable is cloth covered, which is pleasant to twiddle with, though I'm sure it fulfills some other function.

Don't drop them, or sit on them though, the plastic is brittle.

If you're thinking about buying these, do it. You won't find a better pair for the money.

Noise (and why you should get rid of it).

I want you to try a little experiment, start shaking your hand, and while doing so pick up a pen and write your name. If it seems a bit silly to expect your writing to be neat, or nice to read, then spare a thought for your speakers.

If you are feeding your speaker a noisy signal, your speaker has the audio equivalent of Parkinson's. You can't expect it to reproduce a sound accurately if it's shaking randomly in all directions first. How good would an orchestra sound in an earthquake?*

Noise is that hiss and hum you get when you should have silence. The problem is, it doesn't just go away when the music plays. 

There are a few likely culprits for creating noise.

One of which is your input source. That is to say the music you are listening to. To check for noise in your music, one of the best ways I have found is listening to a quiet part of the song. Usually at the beginning of a song there is a quiet part before the music starts. Can you hear a hiss? If so, the recording is probably poor! Try finding a better quality song, if you want to hear it in its full glory.

Another terrible source of noise is your amplification. What usually happens is the input volume (e.g. the volume in foobar2000, iTunes, and/or your computer) is set too low, and the volume of your amp is set too high. This will usually be obvious as you will be able to hear a hiss when the speaker is not playing anything. Usually the volume from your PC or other input source should be about 3/4 of the way up.

Another way to set your input volume is to keep your amplifier (i.e. speaker volume) at a fairly low setting. Play a track, and while you do so, keep turning up your input volume. As soon as you get distortion, or the music does not seem to be getting any louder, back off the volume a bit until it starts losing volume a very little bit or the distortion (fuzziness, harshness) disappears.

This way, regardless of how noisy your amplifier is, you will have minimized it.

The last culprit, unfortunately is the point at which you might need to spend money. If your laptop, CD player, PC, or car stereo is creating noise or distortion you may want to replace it, because there is really little that can be done to work around it!

One of the best ways to improve the sound quality of a computers output is by improving the sound card. Before you panic, this doesn't necessarily mean pulling your computer apart. I think the cheapest, and best value way of improving a sound car is just buying an external one.

An external sound card is a great idea, because it gives you the ability to have good sound quality no matter what machine you're using. If you want to change or sell your machine, you just take the card with you.

A good, cheap example of an external sound card is the Soundblaster X-fi Go! It's readily available and retails for about $35US. If you're looking for a fix for bad input, it wouldn't be a bad place to start.

Best of luck in your noise reducing quest! If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

*I'm aware that an earthquake isn't exactly random motion, but if you take into account the stumbling musicians, the wild gesticulations of the conductor, and the tuba player colliding through the percussion section, random motion, and thus noise is approximated.

Tuning an equalizer for iTunes.

It occurred to me that a lot of you may be using an Apple computer, or the iTunes software. As such, I have created some new sounds which correspond to those on the iTunes equalizer.

You may download them here.

The principles are the same as tuning the EQ (equalizer) in foobar2000.

First, create a playlist which repeats, starting from 32Hz through to 16000Hz.

Next, adjust your listening equipment to a comfortable listening volume.

Open the equalizer, and play the playlist. As each tone plays, adjust its corresponding equalizer value, so that it sounds the same volume as the tone which played before it.

For example, if the tone 500Hz played, and it sounded much louder than 250Hz, you'll want to reduce its volume on the equalizer quite a bit. The next time the sound plays you may make a finer adjustment.

Keep adjusting and playing through the tones, and you when your are satisfied that each tone sounds the same volume you are done. Congratulations, you have just fine tuned your listening set up perfectly!

You may wish to save your EQ settings with the name of the listening equipment you are using, as any new equipment will require different settings.