No to Noise!

Obviously, I have a thing for headphones by land, sea & air!

This morning, I bought a set of noise reduction readphones from macally to replace the Sennheiser set that I've misplaced somewhere on a trip. You see, I don't like the low-frequency hum that usually comes with transportation of any kind, so there's two ways to get rid of it, either by in-ear headphones, which I cannot stand, or by active anti-noise headphones producing de-phased anti-noise which cancels out a good bit of that sort of noise. I just love the smart technical concept, and it works! When I saw the price tag of the macally set, I was a bit doubtful as to its quality, because the Sennheiser (as well as the Bose) cost about thrice as much, but I got it anyway - fortunately! It is really very comfortable to wear, sounds good (although the trebles seem a bit weakish) and does a rather good job at noise reduction. Plus it doesn't have the silly battery stick that's connected with the Sennheiser. The only negative point is when you have low-frequency short noise peaks like they sometimes occur on a train. The macally has some latency when the signal's gone, so you actually get to hear it with a minor delay. But it's rare, so that's ok. But wait, there's another minus: my iPod was running out of power in the afternoon, but when I tried switching from the macally back to the conventional headphones that came with the iPod, I got another hour or so of music out of the charge. Very strange - evidently, the macally requires more power. I'll have to look into that.

As for the seaborne headset, there's news, too! Finis has finally found out that their SwiMP3 does not work well with Mac OS X, so they patched their devices to work with Panther (at least). For me that means I have to find a cost-effective way of exchanging my old, never used one with a patched one. Fortunately, they offered to make the switch next time I am in the US, which is probably going to be DC in September. I hope it'll work out!