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episiarch

High Rollers
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Everything posted by episiarch

  1. Will do. No exciting New Year's plans, so likely to be able to report back in a few days. I can tell you Bill Clinton's a fan, though.
  2. If you love the Ety sound and just hate fitting them, ACS custom tips are for you. Really, I love these things. Pars, the Ety MC5 (which I believe Tyll called "the shit" earlier in this thread) is a candidate to consider.
  3. If isolation, in the sense of blocking outside sound, is high on the list, then IMO the ESW9 and K271 are both pretty questionable assuming the mkii doesn't isolate any better than the mki. They're not utterly useless but IMO neither one is all that big on isolation. If it is not isolation that's needed but just an an absence of sound leakage that would annoy people nearby at work, then ESW9 and K271 are fine (and again, props to the K271 for auto-muting when you take it off). When I needed some sort of approximation of real isolation at work and IEMs were too fiddly, HD25 was my choice. However this was a few years ago and options like the Shures didn't exist at the time.
  4. FWIW I've had good luck picking up used ER-4S's on the other site, where the resale value of a good earphone that needs an amp is so often way lower than the resale value of a worse (oops, is my bias showing again?) earphone that <scare-quotes>everybody</scare-quotes> knows <scare-quotes>doesn't need an amp</scare-quotes>.
  5. I only have the K271 mark 1 (okay sounding, not awesome), but I agree it's a super comfortable headphone with the addition of those Beyer pads. And it gets extra workplace-friendly points for the little switch that auto-mutes them when you take them off, though if bhjazz is considering RS2i this clearly isn't an issue for him.
  6. For self-improvement: The China Study To the daughter at bedtime: Thirteenth Child For fun: just finished Surface Detail. Not sure what comes next, so I'll be skimming this thread for ideas.
  7. Well, ya know, I'm not sure anybody else agrees with me about the ER-4P thing.
  8. Ety blather from your resident Ety-head and not-quite-collector: I won't disparage the ER-6i, which I think is really darn good for the price. However in my experience ER-6i << ER-6 (late, lamented, non RoHS compliant) < hf2/hf3/hf5 < ER-4S so I think there's a pretty useful benefit to going with the hf series instead. That said, the ER-6i is still very representative of the Ety sound signature, so even if I'm not wild about it on its own merits it's still the least expensive way to find out whether you're an Ety person or not. I haven't heard the Ety MC series yet, but people keep saying great things about it, and if it's anything like what people say then it's a bargain at the price. Sight unseen I would probably go with an MC5 over an ER-6i at this point because the ER-6i's weaknesses are so apparent to me*. However the ER-6i is much more tiny and 'stealth' if that's something that matters. Ety hf2/hf3/hf5 all use the same transducers and shell, and sound alike, differing only in the mic pod (if any) and what controls are on it. The Ety hf2 was a massive bargain a few weeks ago because it's been effectively replaced by the hf3 (which adds volume buttons on the mic pod); Amazon actually had the hf2 for less than the hf5, making it a fantastic deal. That's no longer the case, making the hf2/hf3/hf5 merely very, very good deals. The hf2/hf3/hf5 share the same stem dimensions as the ER-4 series, which is a big plus in my book. Try out an hf2/3/5, and if you like it then upgrade to ACS tips, and then later (MUCH later, when you can afford an amp to properly drive the ER-4S and skip the shaky FR of the ER-4P entirely) transfer those tips to your ER-4S. Total win. My advice, in short: - Buy a good earphone in the $80-$130 ish range. Personally I like Etys (did it show?) but you are unlikely to go wrong with Shure, a quality brand made by real audiophiles (who just happen to prefer a warmer tonal signature than I personally go for). - If you're happy with what you got, then your next purchase is ACS custom eartips for what you have. Superior comfort, improved speed of getting the right fit on each insertion, great isolation. IMO your next $100 is much better spent here than in starting with a $200-$250 earphone that you may not even like that much. - If you're not happy with what you got in step 1, return to step 1 and try a different brand. - If you're on a budget then only after you have found what you really like should you move up to the top of that brand's range. Otherwise you're just gambling, really. But, again, these are just my biases and it's you that has to be happy with what you get. *Capsule description of my complaint against the ER-6i: it seems like it has good upper-end response, but it's really smeary. I'm thinking, for example, of a piece of music that has some really quick, really light work with a triangle or similar metallic percussion instrument. With a higher-end Ety you would hear, say, three individual strikes, "ring-a-ting." With the ER-6i those strikes all merge into a single "splat," sort of a cymbal sound, with the individual strikes just gone. It's one of those things that once I've heard it I can't not hear it when it happens, so it bugs me extra much.
  9. It's my opinion that it is. I will go further and say that the number of people on the other site who claim things like: ER-4P and ER-4S sound the same, ER-4P didn't need an amp with (insert weak source here), changing filters on an Etymotic is never needed and is just a profit center to fleece the rubes, an Ety-designed $100 IEM sold by Altec Lansing was actually a stealth ER-4 inside, and more along these lines is solid evidence, as far as I'm concerned, that many people never get very good at listening to what their equipment is really delivering. Sure, you could be an exception. But even if you are I still think you would be better served to start out on the cheap end, because: a) the marginal difference in quality between, say, an Ety hf5 and an Ety ER-4P is small (actually IMO it's also negative: I rate ER-4P < hf5 < ER-4S), while the marginal difference in cost is large. If you can get a used 4P for a price comparable to an hf5/3/2, then okay, I won't argue. But otherwise you're spending an extra $100 or more for a very dubious (and again IMO negative FWIW) difference in SQ. Why do that unless you already know you are going to turn out to be the kind of person who hears and cares about that small bit of difference (like us), or have enough spare $100s in your wallet that you don't really care about each of them earning its keep (like some of us)? we don't all like the same things. Polling even a collection of very good ears for their favorite IEMs in your price range, and choosing the one with the most votes, does not provide very much confidence that it's the IEM for you. Even if one model gets a full 60% of the votes - not a mere plurality but a freaking decisive majority - what's your confidence that you'll turn out to be a member of that 60%? Well, arguably it's better than half, but that's far from a sure thing, so why spend your money in such a way that you have only one chance to get it right?
  10. Fairly sure it doesn't have any form of "live view" at all, but this is an interesting idea and I'll check to be sure. Thanks for the suggestion.
  11. I haven't heard that Monster Turbine, but from the HeadRoom graph mpi helpfully posted, it's way, way bass-heavy. From 1kHz on up it looks OK, but at 200Hz it's up 10dB, which is a lot, and the low bass and subsonics are up 20dB, which I assume is a satisfying sound for someone but to me seems more like the earphone of equivalent of a head cold with blocked sinuses. Judging (again) from the FR graph, if you choose this earphone you are choosing an extreme: not neutral, not a-bit-on-the-warm-side, not bass-boosted, not downright-bassy, but bass-at-almost-any-cost. Perhaps that's what you want, but I think you'd be missing out on a lot. With your budget you could afford a very nice level of audio quality and musicality, and I think it would be sort of a pity to put a substantial chunk of it towards something that appears to be essentially a tarted-up and overpriced bass-delivery system. It's a little like going into a fine wine shop with a few hundred dollars to spend on one or a few quite good bottles, and heading straight for the one with the highest alcohol content. But those are just my biases. You're the one that has to be happy with the purchase.
  12. Interesting fun/scary article. Thanks for posting it!
  13. On the way lower end than the rest of you guys, I got a Nikon 50mm/1.8 for xmas and am busy relearning manual focus since it'll mostly be on the D40 (it would AF on our D90 but in practice it's going to spend most of its life on the D40 which doesn't have the little in-body focus motor). I used to be fairly OK at focusing on an old-school SLR with proper groundglass etc., but I'm finding it pretty hard on this little DSLR despite the little "yeah that's in focus, trust me" green light in the corner of the viewfinder.
  14. So sorry to hear this, and get well soon. I spent the last couple weeks mostly in bed with fever and an ear infection, so I can kinda-relate. Best wishes for a speedy recovery. What I did today: went to Ikea to lock down our furniture selections for the new place we move into in January. Spent enough of the day there that it seems to have cost me my chance to log in here and be called an unfriendly twat by well_respected_man. This makes me a little bit sad.
  15. episiarch

    Top Gear

    Assuming that was roughly the same bit of the Blue Ridge Parkway that I'm familiar with, it's a shame they couldn't do serious driving on it, but honestly those speed limits are sensible. There are campgrounds on either side of the road, pedestrians crossing all the time, people pulling over and then crossing to take pictures, idiots just slowing down in the road to shoot pictures out their windows. Even at the posted speeds that road seems to bring out a blithe carelessness that makes it remarkably nerve-wracking to drive on. And when the fall colors are in full bloom, or whatever fall colors do that isn't blooming, just forget it. They shouldn't even pretend it's a functional road at that point, just close it and run a Disneyland parking lot tram for sightseeing. If they really wanted a driver's road with the scenery and swoopiness the Blue Ridge promises, Skyline Boulevard in NorCal would have been a better choice. A genuine driver's road that sees its share of supercars already, running along the mountain ridge between Silicon Valley and the ocean. And plenty of good destinations to head to from there, Sears Point coming particularly to mind. (Or better yet, from Skyline to TechShop for some kind of DIY challenge involving plasma torches.) I don't know if you can find drive-by-shooting school in NorCal, though. At least not formally.
  16. Good luck with those! I hope they do the trick. The half-dozen sets of old-style ones I mailed you can't last forever.
  17. I took it from first post, a pair of monitors.
  18. FWIW I know nothing about the ACS softbody earpieces that Spych quoted. From what I know of the company and its founder they are probably very good, but I've never seen them. My personal experience is limited to the ACS custom tips for off-the-shelf earphones, and I do highly recommend those.
  19. I had had the impression that dual-link DVI just gave a faster data rate for higher resolution displays, but not dual-display capability. Can you actually split a dual-link DVI to drive two different displays? If so, well, Apple offers a mini-DisplayPort to dual-link DVI adaptor, so conceivably even a modern MacBook could work. Otherwise, there are external DVI ports that run off a USB port. I haven't experimented with them myself, but they're out there. You wouldn't want to use that for motion video, but for still images it should be all right. Any laptop with two of those, or one of those plus a laptop that could drive DVI, and you'd be in business*. *OS / driver support could be an issue, so it'd be worth carefully checking the specs and reviews before buying.
  20. I honestly differ a bit with the advice to get JH customs for this application. While my JHs fit me very nicely, IMO they're not all that for isolation. It fills the ear but in my experience it's still somewhat transmissive. I get significantly better isolation with a slightly pliable custom eartip - like the ACS tips or certain of the Westone materials - and slightly better isolation still with an expansion tip (foam, but flanges can work too) that really overfills the ear beyond the point of long-term comfort. Anyway, assuming the OP is truly serious about isolation, and would like to stay in budget, I'd suggest ready-to-wear over customs. So bmasseur, my advice is this: for best bang for your buck, do not get customs, look toward the lower end of your price range in ready-to-wear. Specifically I'd suggest Etymotic mc5 (or mc3) or above for really good clarity, or Shure (whatever model best hits your budget/capability curve) for more bass impact at the expense (IMO) of sharp-edged clarity for things like hard percussion and cymbal strikes. Really, though, start towards the lower end. It sounds fantastic. It takes a fair amount of time for your ears to get sufficiently used to this level of fidelity to make it really worthwhile to invest in (say) ER-4 Etys over mc3 or hf5 Etys. With the money you save by starting with lesser models of Ety or Shure (or one of the others, though I'm less familiar with them), you can try a second brand if the first one you buy doesn't have quite the sound signature you are looking for. After you've settled on something then later for added comfort you can have ACS eartips made for them. All that and you're still within budget, probably with budget left over to put towards your next step up in audio now that you know what you like, or towards a stunningly decent DIY amp.
  21. Needmor, welcome to Head-Case. I am afraid your existence is about to take on something of a "city boy lands in Deliverance and asks where he can get a soy latte" quality. Just ride it out; the boys are getting older, and I think the survival rate is up to almost 30% now. And in answer to your question, it sounds like you've made the rounds of the usual non-exotic suspects, so perhaps it's time for JH16s.
  22. You should be able to stick an SSD in any iMac new enough to use SATA internally, which the 2006 iMacs do. I am not sure whether there is space to mount your old hard disk internally or whether you will have to shift it to an external enclosure. You should be able to do it without terribly specialized skills or tools. A good way to start is to open up the iMac (unplug it, lay it on its face, and I think there are just a couple of Phillips screws to undo to remove the back cover) and take a look inside. If you're able to look and say "well that chunky thing there is obviously the disk drive, and all I'll need to do is detach those two cable harnesses and physically unmount it," then yeah, you'll be fine. While you have it open, glance around to see if any of the electrolytic capacitors on the motherboard are visibly bulging or leaking. I think that problem was specific to the iMacs before yours, but it would be good to check.
  23. episiarch

    Top Gear

    Looking forward to some new UK Top Gear to enjoy. Haven't seen the American version -- the trailer link I found had been pulled, and I'm not sure where else to find it over here. I do have to say that my idea of the Top Gear USA that *I* would watch would probably feature and be directed by Alton Brown. Okay, perhaps I'm weird, but I swear it would have worked.
  24. For anybody who's fairly technical but not into spending the cash for an SSD quite yet: A couple weeks ago I followed the advice in dropsafe : Addressing The Outmoded Swapping And Paging Strategy in OSX? to adjust some paging parameters and move paging to a separate (non-journaled) partitioned volume. The results have been extremely satisfying. In no way am I getting SSD-level results, but beachballs are now rare*, and things like quitting Firefox after a long session no longer take acres of forever while swap space is reclaimed. In other words I can now use my (non-unibody, maxed-out-at-4GB RAM) MacBook Pro all day (in my usual mode of lots of apps running and lots of tabs open) without wanting to punch something. Rage-free (and free) is nice, even if it's not SSD-nice. A few caveats: 1. This is a bit of work (and depending on your skillz, maybe a little risk) so it's not worth doing unless you need it or love tinkering. My wife has an 8GB unibody MBP and it runs so smoothly it's really not worth doing this on hers. 2. Really should not be attempted unless you are unixy enough to understand the entire article and infer the (very slight) missing pieces, or have ready access to someone who is. 3. Although Disk Utility seems to offer live repartitioning, it did not actually work the first time I tried it -- it crashed my Mac (hard, but completely harmlessly) when I was trying to shrink the main partition. In my case the path of least resistance was to boot off my nightly SuperDuper clone and do the partitioning from there while I got some work done, so I didn't pursue the live-partitioning thing further. (If live repartitioning doesn't work for you and you don't have a bootable external, you can always boot off your OS installation or upgrade DVD and go to the utilities from there -- assuming you still have that DVD.) 4. After you make your scratch volume, remember to exclude it from Time Machine and Spotlight explicitly so you don't get pointless extra activity on it. OS X doesn't automatically know to do this for you. Also, a tip: I made my scratch partition a little bigger than I expected to need, so that I could move some additional application-specific caches onto it. That was a good call. A few days later I moved the caches for Firefox and one of my video games onto the scratch drive, making an incremental but welcome difference in the general smoothness and non-spasticness of both apps. If I haven't made you afraid/reluctant/bored by now, then it's a good tweak that you might want to try. *Well, rare except when I do anything in Safari, which just seems ridiculously prone to them, but even in Safari they're not nearly as long or plentiful as before.
  25. I'm late to this discussion, but two things: 1. Nate can have my entire supply of Ety foamies. I have a big sack of miscellaneous eartips -- Ety, Comply, Shure -- because for a while I was trying them all. I'll root around in there and separate out the Ety foams, of which I must have at minimum 3 or 4 unused pairs, and perhaps more. Nate, send me a PM and let me know where to send 'em. 2. Justifiable indignation and cost aside, the Custom-Fit eartips are fantastic. They are made in the UK by ACS, and they do them right. The sound channel is maybe a third the length of the one in my Westone-made tips, and the SQ is very good. They're compact, so the feel is more like a regular IEM eartip rather than something that fills your entire ear (the way, say, JH13s do), and I can wear them longer. The isolation is quite good; less than a foamie, but for me they're on par with tri-flange, or better. Best of all, in my opinion, the custom fit gets the sound tubes to a consistent depth in my ears every time and keeps them there, so there's just a whole lot less effing around with getting the insertion just right before I can start enjoying them. I will not promise that the Custom-Fit tips sound as good as the Ety foamies, because I could never wear the Ety foamies, and the shaped Comply foamies that I can wear are just a different kind of beast. I will say that although Westone's custom tips had me a little grouchy about the SQ that I was audibly giving up for the sake of convenience, the ACS tips do not. (It is possible that I am in fact making some degree of SQ compromise with the ACS tips as well, but I don't notice any -- and I haven't felt motivated to carefully A/B them with tri-flanges just to see how dissatisfied I could be if I tried.)
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