In a previous Art of Sound article, I stated that the single easiest thing you can do to improve the sound coming out of your iPod was to invest in a better pair of earphones. Now it’s time to put my hypothesis to the test. I’ve got a line-up of earphones at different price points, an iPod and my favourite tunes. Let’s see if some extra dough will actually make your ears happier. Here’s the roundup:
The test at hand was to essentially pick a few of my favourite tunes that I know really well and have heard on many a system, and rotate through all of the earphones and see how they compare. The first thing that really struck me is how much in-ear designs that stick right in your ear canal outperform the gently-sit-on-your-ear variety. The tight seal doesn’t allow much noise to bleed in or out. This may not be the best thing if, like me, you like to wander around the city and be oblivious to things like cars and velociraptors. The upside is that it makes everything sound a whole lot more convincing.
So how does the Skullcandy’s compare against professional grade Shure earphones? The answer to that question definitely confirms a very important point about audio equipment. That is, that the Law of Diminishing Returns certainly holds true. The Shure earphones do sound better than the Skullcandy’s; but they don’t sound 10X better, even though they are 10X more expensive. There is a sweet spot on the price-performance curve where additional money only gives you incremental gains.
As I’ve been demo’ing the Skullcandy’s over the last few months, a most curious thing has occurred. When I reach for a pair of earphones on my way out the door, more often than not I find myself grabbing them over my more expensive options. If I’m going to the gym or running errands around town, I’d prefer not to sweat on, lose, or damage my $250 pair of Shure’s. Grabbing the $20 Skullcandy’s that still sound pretty good is a no-brainer; they’re easily replaceable.
So if you really love your music and take good care of your earphones, then I recommend spending some money on quality earphone’s like the Shure’s (the latest comparable model number is SE315). They come in a quality little protector case and have a variety of different coverings to ensure a perfect fit for your ear. They’re also designed so that the most common point of failure, the jack that plugs into your device, is actually just an extension cord. This has saved me a great deal of heartache once already.
If on the other hand, you want better than iBud sound quality and don’t want to break the bank, then go for something like the Skullcandy’s. You can take them anywhere and not worry if they get damaged or lost.
Toronto – Have you ever noticed that some people’s digital music collections look so organised? Every album seems to have the proper album art attached to it. All the information about artist, year of release, and genre, are all properly filled out. It may look like a lot of work to get there, but the good news is that once you have a good system for tagging your mp3’s, it will be much easier to navigate your burgeoning music library.
Now before I get started, a message for the guys: no man has ever gotten laid due to his well tagged MP3 collection.
Now before I get started, a message for the guys: no man has ever gotten laid due to his well tagged MP3 collection. Also, a message for the girls: geeky guys will definitely be impressed if you have a well tagged MP3 collection. But how does it all work? Every MP3 file has what are called ID tags embedded in the file. These tags contain all the relevant information about the song: the artist name, album, disc number, and year of release. Music programs like iTunes and Winamp read these ID tags to populate their library. When it comes to these programs, the actual mp3 filename is irrelevant. Only the tags count, baby.
So how does one manage these ID tags? I’m going to suggest two main options. The first is using your primary music program directly. Both Winamp and iTunes offers the ability to select an entire album and modify ID tags. This is an easy and quick way to fix the name of the album, or ensure that all the artist names are consistent across all albums. This is how you can prevent your ipod from showing you different artists like “Belle & Sebastian”, “Belle and Sebastian”, and “belle & sebastien”.
The next level of MP3 tagging is to get a program that specializes in it. Two popular ones are Tag & Rename and Media Monkey. The advantage with these tools is that they typically plug into popular online databases like Amazon that quickly allow you to download all the relevant details about an album. You can preview the information that was retrieved, and make any last minute changes before committing them. While these programs are a little more involved than iTunes, they provide you with powerful tools to manage the data embedded in your MP3’s.
Happy tagging!
Toronto – Ah the mp3. It’s the little file format that could. It, along with good ol’ Napster, completely transformed the music industry and how people explore and listen to music. Back in the 90’s, our sound files were largely uncompressed (known as WAV files). Limited access to both broadband internet and storage space meant that it was very difficult to share music on the web.
All that changed with the mp3. It was a compressed music file that allowed you to store songs using a fraction of the space. This came at a price though: musical data is essentially “thrown away” in a process called lossy compression. The good news is that over the years better mp3 encoders have been developed. Most people nowadays can easily tell the difference between the thin sound of a 128 kpbs (kilo bits per second) mp3 and a CD. However, those same people would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between that CD and a more recently compressed 320 kpbs or VBR (variable bitrate) mp3.
In our last article, we covered how you can easily upgrade your sound by moving away from those tinny apple earbuds. Now, I’m going to talk about mp3 bitrates. The bitrate of an MP3 determines it’s quality. With ubiquitous broadband access to the internets, and vast amounts of storage space at our disposal, it’s a no brainer. Whether you’re using iTunes or Winamp, just make sure you set the bitrate to either 320 or VBR – high quality when creating new mp3’s.
In iTunes, click on Edit->Preferences, go to the General tab and click on the “Import Settings” button. This will bring up a dialog that allows you to select “MP3 Encoder”. Select the “Custom Setting…” option to bring up another dialog and then change the settings to what you see in the picture at the top of this article.
You’re geeky friends will thank you.
Toronto – With a title as audacious as “How To Listen To Music”, you’d think that this article would offer up some deep insights into music appreciation. Perhaps there would be a profound revelation about how you can better form a connection with your music in this fast-paced world? Of course, if you thought that, you’d be dead wrong. I’m going to set the bar much lower here, friends.
One of the main reasons why the “Art of Sound” series was created was to delve beyond pure music reviews and ask the how’s and the why’s of music. It could also offer up some tips in navigating this new music world where anything you want to listen to is quite literally at your fingertips. We’ve talked about the neuroscience of music, as well as how the medium affects the message. Now I’d like to move in a more practical direction and discuss how one can go about improving their listening experience.
It’s hard to believe that just ten years ago, the ipod was a big slab of white plastic. It had precious few gigs of memory stored on a hard drive with moving parts, and was easily prone to damage if dropped too many times. Today we can store many times that amount of music on tiny resilient flash drives. The ubiquity of the ipod is quickly being replaced by the ubiquity of the smart phone, as our method of communication and our main source of music converge.
Regardless of whether you own an ipod, a smart phone, or both, what is the one thing you can do to improve the quality of the music you listen to? That answer is simple: buy another set of earbuds. Sure, those white Apple earbuds look stylish, and they successfully convey to the world that you can afford an ipod. However, everyone now owns an ipod, and those earbuds sound horribly tinny and may even literally shock you. Spending even $20-40 on brand-name earbuds will make a noticeable difference.
All you have to do is the old “A/B comparison”. Short of a blind listening test, it’s the best way to choose stereo equipment. Just load up your iphone with music you are most familiar with; stuff you’ve heard millions of times on all sorts of different setups. Then listen to those songs on different earbuds. Choose the one that sounds the best to you.
Now, enjoy your music! If you’re willing to spend a little more money, companies like Denon, Shure, Sennheiser, and Grado all make fantastic headphones and earbuds that won’t break the bank.
