Idle Thoughts

Lust can be a terrible thing. It can also simplify matters considerably when faced with a choice between the object of your desire and any or many alternatives.

I have always had a like for high-quality sound reproduction, whether it’s from my pair of superb, but spacially demanding, transmission line speakers or for something more portable. The TLs are great, but somewhat limited in that I can’t get the full benefit from them without alienating my neighbours - and probably a lot of other people in my street. Worse, being 1 metre high and weighing 38kg each, they don’t exactly qualify as portable.

Since we have a highly mobile society, and I’m an active part of it, over the years I’ve collected quite a wide selection of portable music players: from a Sony walkman, though a minidisc (anyone remember those?) to a PDA and mobile-phone, both with MP3 and video playback abilities. So far I haven’t bothered with an iPod - partly because it’s too small to accommodate my whole collection and partly because of reliability/licensing/inter-operability concerns.

All these gadgets have a common weak-link in their headphones: a lack of high-quality sound, especially a lack of bass. Now some of the headphones have very good technical specifications. However, these lab-based specs don’t take into account all the extraneous sounds that come into your ears from listening to your music in the real world. To give one example, towards the end of last year I met up with some of my ex-colleagues in the centre of London one evening. To pass the time on the trains, I had loaded a couple of movies and some albums onto my phone, with a view to playing them during the journey. In practice the ambient noise on Network SouthEast’s bone-rattlers is so loud that while I could hear the tracks, the experience was very disappointing. The same situation occurs on planes - although there the headphones have a secondary use, to discourage fellow passengers from talking to me.

The weekend Financial Times has an occasional glossy magazine called How to Spend It which seems to be mostly aspirational in nature, but does contain a page or two of mini-reviews of technology. A year or so ago one of the items in this section was a pair of in-ear headphones that had excellent sound reproduction and also managed to exclude outside sounds from interfering. As soon as I read the review, I was sold.

The only problem I had was how to justify spending over a hundred quid on a pair of tiny little headphones?
The nice thing about high-tech gizmos is that over time, their price usually goes down. In this case, biding my time and a couple of premium bond wins (don’t get your hopes up, they were only £50 each) meant that The Er6i’s I’d had my eye on for what seemed like forever suddenly became affordable. A few clicks on an Amazon reseller’s website and a couple of days waiting and they arrived.

They’re not like normal earphones. To get the bass response that’s a major selling point and to exclude external sounds, the rubber “buds” in this photo have to be inserted quite deeply into your ears. The feeling this gives is a bit like walking around with your fingers in your ears: it definitely cuts down on unwanted sounds, but you do hear certain bodily functions in a new and not particularly pleasant way. For example, when the music stops, I can hear the sound of my own pulse.

There’s also some sound transmitted up the cord into the ears, when the wires rub against your clothes. However, this can be reduced to some extent with the shirt-clip that comes attached. Ultimately, the trick is to sit still.

Since not everyone’s ear canals are the same size, and taking into account that some people’s are more sensitive than others the package comes with a couple of alternatives. These include some foam rubber collars that you can use instead of the ones shown above.
So far I’ve worn them for about 4 hours in one “sitting” without any discomfort. You are warned against wearing them while driving, riding a bike or jogging as the lack of external sounds removes a lot of warnings that may save you from (causing) an accident. I do have a nagging feeling that I won’t hear the doorbell or the phone - although since most landline calls are telemarketers or go through to voicemail, I doubt I’d miss much.
One drawback is that the much improved sound rendition has highlighted some shortcomings in the quality of my recordings. Some tracks that I’ve recorded off record (yes, real vinyl) have pops and scratches that I hadn’t heard before. I may have to re-record some of these, or possibly get some processesing software to remove these flaws.

There are lots of other in-ear phones available now. Some like the ER4 series, also from Etymotic Research are way too expensive, while others from Shure, Sennheiser and even Koss come in much cheaper. However, I’m very pleased with the ER6i’s. That’s the thing about lust, if you settle for something else you’re always left wondering …