Jump to content

CarlSeibert

High Rollers
  • Posts

    2,512
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    10

Posts posted by CarlSeibert

  1. I'd kinda like to hear Momentums that are broken in and on a rig they get along with. Shelly's pair were straight out of the box and it was hardly love at first sight with my portable.  Portable stuff is still finicky. Nobody's gotten it quite right yet.

     

    Musings aside, I think the point that portables should be heard with stuff meant to be used with portables - which the Momentums are - is really well taken.

     

    I'm optimistic. Hi-res DAPs are selling by the boatload - by audiophile standards, anyway. CDBaby is selling FLACs. The crappy headphones I see on heads at Urban Brew are getting a little less crappy. Kids are buying records. The other day I found an intern cutting video with a pair of Shure SRH 440s on. Quality is edging toward the mainstream. The real main part of the stream will always be garbage. It's the littoral zone where there's life.

     

    Remember the "good old days". Most people listened to scratched LPs on systems that couldn't aspire to reach absolute crap status. Or cassettes that were dubbed at ten or twenty times speed. And yet, they still manged to make enough records that sounded good enough that we could enjoy them.  Win or lose, this Pono thing is bound to help.  

    • Like 3
  2. Only 200 emails after 5 working days off is something to celebrate. 

     

    <whining> Me, I'm going through all my online accounts that met (at the time) the "this account can't hurt me so I'll use the same  (decent, but nevertheless the same) password" test and changing the password to LastPass-generated randomness. Which means I've got a couple hundred opportunities the experience the quality of coding on the world's websites up close and personal. It's pretty shocking. A lot of them are designed to make the  job of changing a password as difficult as possible. Fully half of them fail in some time-sucking way. Like a bunch of them return you to the password change page with a tiny little graphic change as the only indication that you got success instead of a loop. Which is great synergy, considering that a lot of them do fail by looping. 

     

    And at least a half a dozen so far have celebrated the password change by sending an email with my new password in clear text. Priceless. </end whining>

  3. We have a boatload of Senns and Plantronics at work. They both work well. The Sennheisers look better and the booms stay in place better. Both seem to last well. The Plantronics have great spare parts availability. I would cruise their respective catalogs to see if they have something to match your feature needs. I think both lines have a good selection of dongles to connect to phones, computers, or whatever. Good office headsets nowadays all seem to have a proprietary connector on the cable that connects to an interface dongle of some sort. I think that's a good thing. It would be a better thing I'd the connectors were standardized and the dongles interchangeable between brands, but such is life.

    I'm with Tyll on aviation headsets. They're all made for very specific environments (very different for aircraft type and mission role). I love my DC H-10-56s, but unless you're interviewing people in the back of a helicopter while holding a camera against your face, they would probably be a really bad choice.

    Maybe because of the amount of time I've doing the headset / camera thing, I've become a maniac about booms. Boom or tube, hinges or flexy, mic type, those things can either be a joy or really get under your skin. It's personal and situation specific. Me, I'm all about the boom staying put and coming back to the right place after I shove it away to answer another phone or something. YMMV

    (Speaking of which, I'm not fond of Plantronics tubes, the older ones anyway. They don't stay by my lips worth a crap. Just sayin.)

  4. Beats has implemented the library in their web client. Still no playlists in the web client, but I never used them for anything but keeping notes of what to check out later. There's Google Keep for that now.

     

    So, at this point, I'm declaring Beats to be usable - for me, anyway.

  5. My daughters school is the same. ALL DRUGS are treated as contraband even when prescribed for very good reasons.

    This kind of shit makes me crazy. How do we expect kids to grow up to be functioning human beings when the authority figures in their lives so often are puerile fucktards?!!!!

     

    I'm glad Alden is OK. 

    • Like 1
  6. Cable connectors for the NAD VISO HP-50 headphones

     

     

    ...reporting back, for the sake of Google and anybody might need to know someday.....

     

    I got some plugs from eBay and they work:

     

    post-1031-0-89078300-1405718090_thumb.jp

     

     

    The 'shoulder' is .202" in diameter by .075" in length. 

     

    I still have no idea if there is a standard, informal or otherwise, for the 'shoulder' dimensions.

     

    They look bigger than they are. The Mogami 2893 mini-quad that I used looks like power mains cable on these things.  Trust me, without getting too graphic or sexual, I'm pretty sure that we all will at some point in our lives experience something that is more fun than soldering them up. There are no real facilities for strain relief. I connected the unused fourth conductor pretty tight, made sure the cable fit tightly in the hole in the body, and potted the thing full of glue. Speaking of the hole in the body -  for the Mogami, I had to drill it out to 3/16". The silver one's body was brass and the snazzy red one's was aluminum. Both drilled just fine.

     

    Here is the eBay listing where I bought them:

     

    http://www.ebay.com/itm/201075924663

     

    Once again, connections are (3-pole to 4-pole) tip to tip, ring to the first ring, shaft to the second ring, and the shaft on the 4-pole isn't used. 

     

    It turned out that in addition to being long enough to reach from my amp to my head, the Mogami cable sounded better than the stock one. (I wasn't trying to be all audiophile about this. I had chosen the Mogami on the basis of cheap and I had some in my parts box.) On my Fiio X-3/ Pico rig the HP-50s just weren't cutting it, musically, for some subtle reason. The Mogami cable made just enough difference to bring them back in the zone. So I made a four-foot cable as well.

     

    Kinda makes me wonder how a cable similar to the 2893 but not wonky in the top octave might sound. 

    • Like 1
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

By using this site, you agree to our Terms of Use.