18 November 2008

A rant

I have tried hard not to fill this blog with random off-topic rants. I am about to break that rule. If you do not wish to read my rant, please move on - normal service will be resumed shortly.

There is some (tenuous) relevancy about this rant. I will mention user interfaces!

My rant is about iPod's. No no, sorry, its about iPod users and iPod headphones.

I use an iPod. I use it because it was given to me and is 8Gb whereas my MP3 player of choice (a Creative Zen Stone Plus) is only 4Gb. It is a 3rd gen nano and is truly wondrous to hold and behold. I find the sound quality lacking in comparison to the two Creative players I have had, but it serves my needs adequately.

I am not such a fan of using the iPod. I often find myself getting frustrated at the imprecise and slow controls - I just want to move to a position within a track and change volume without waiting for the interface to allow me!

Anyway, I was sitting on the train this morning - not listening to my iPod - and the woman sitting next to me was listening to hers with the rather poor, but iconic iPod headphones.

She felt she had to have the volume turned to maximum just to be able to hear her music through those rubbish and very leaky headphones! This resulted in the whole carriage "enjoying" her music along with her. And I got the brunt of it.

In short - if you have an iPod, buy some decent headphones!

</rant>

2 comments:

neilp said...

Totally agreed about the utter uselessness of standard ipod headphones. Mind you, the subject of "decent" headphones could lead to another rant about the durability of certain "in-ear" style headphone brands. I used to get through a pair every six weeks of the sony ones, then recently switched over to sennheiser and they have lasted for ages.

James Norton said...

Ahh, yes. I remember those Sony cables being amazingly weak. I too moved to the Sennheiser but dont find the sound quality as good.

I am getting noise reducing headphones now. At least I can have some quiet even when not listening to my own music!