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.