All about Headphones
It’s the final countdown! << insert the catchy "Europe" popcorn-rock song here >>. February 24 in 2021 is the final deletion date for your Google Play Music (aka GPM) music and data. On that day, everything will be gone and it won’t be recoverable! Google just sent an email with this warning to everyone with a Google account and music data or activity…
Continue reading “Final Warning: Google Play Music music and data deletion on February 24 in 2021”
Welcome back! After a long break we are back with another one of our customary text and pictures unboxings! This time around we have a necklace-style bluetooth earphones set, the 1More Piston Fit Bluetooth, formal name E1028BT. The official product pictures you see may be a little bit misleading, this is not a neckband-style; it is a standard cable. The pictures are so in the packaging because it is just to be worn with the cable behind the neck. But you can also wear it necklace-style, the headphone police won’t come after you 😉
Continue reading “Unboxing the 1More Piston Fit Bluetooth In-Ears”
A little bit of background. I was one of those who jumped on the inaugural Google Play Music (GPM in short for the rest of this post) subscription plan, because they promised an $8/month lifetime fee. At the time, apart from the price, it has some other advantages over the other services: you could upload your own music and have a unified music library [Amazon’s two-library thing with Prime-Music and your-own-music was annoying], YouTube RED was included, you could watch YouTube proper without ads, and you could play YouTube on your Android phone in the background…
Continue reading “Former Google Play Music Subscribers: A New Hope to Restore your Playlists!”
I was among those who jumped on Google Play Music right when it came out, and I was at the then-lifetime $8/month subscription rate. I am no longer there, I switched to Spotify a couple of years ago for a variety of reasons [including the need to support smaller companies as the Big Ones looked to be taking over music subscriptions]…
Anyway, Google made the Big Decision and Google Play Music is going away and the MP3 store at the Google Play Store is also going away and the stand-alone Music Manager software is also going away…
And we are baaack! Silver lining of the coronavirus, after 20 months we are reactivating on this blog! While I am working on new content, here’s something interesting to read if you had previously missed it…
The “The Noise Issue” of the Popular Science magazine has a total of 32 sound and audio related articles You can look at the list of articles at their website with excerpts for all. A few of them are in full even, a couple of which I linked to down below…
You can find the issue with the full articles if your local library includes digital magazine subscriptions or you can read it if you have a Netflix-style digital magazine subscription or you can digitally buy the single-issue online, or look for it on eBay and such.
Of potential interest to headphonalia:
The word of the day is definitely “mondegreens” 🙂
The Logitech monster is hungry! The mice are hungry for some more headphones 🙂 A couple of years ago Logitech scooped up Jaybird, makers of bluetooth earphones of the non-budget kind. Now they’ve opened their checkbook again and paid almost 2.5 times as much as they did for Jaybird to buy another company that makes headphones, Blue Microphones.
Continue reading “Logitech scoops up another headphone company, Blue Mic”
LATEST UPDATE: April 17 in 2018 – another Sony XZ without… with more smartphones abandoning the headphone jack, the time was right to create a parallel list to this, Headphones WITH a headphone jack…
Even the best of futurists sometimes have a hard time beating a coin toss with their predictions, so I have no way of knowing where the headphone jack will be in five or ten or twenty or thirty years from now. At the moment however, it reigns supreme in smartphones, despite some high profile defectors to the Lightning cable (Apple) and USB-C (a few Android models).
Given the situation today, it is a lot easier to keep track of the smartphones that do not have a 3.5mm headphone jack, rather than keep track of all the ones that do (the vast majority of them). There is only a handful of defectors so far. 2016 created a mini panic, but as of mid 2017, the existential crisis that was predicted did not materialize.
Samsung’s Galaxy 8 co-flagships along with the LG G6 and Sony XZ*, Huawei P10 flagships continued to embrace the headphone jack. Heck, even the brand new iPad Pro 10.5″ has a headphone jack 🙂 But the year is not over yet, we are still waiting for the new Note 8, LG V30, Pixel 2, iPhone 8, Moto Z flagships.
Continue reading “List of Smartphones Without a 3.5mm Headphone Jack”
The VE Monks are not the only earbud game in town! Philips has its own little single-figures budget model, and it even has a microphone and a 1-button remote control. It is the Philips SHE2105WT/28 earbuds, coming in an all white color scheme. We have our customary text and pictures unboxing of these here…
Continue reading “Unboxing the Philips SHE2105WT/28 Earbuds”
Surprise, surprise, Monoprice is back with Big Bang II! Their first big bang of 2018 gave us two closed-back planar-magnetic headphones and a quarter of headphone amps from the tiny to the twenty-pounders! Their second Bigg Bang of 2018, the Spring edition, brings two curiously named headphones and a couple of …Alex Cavalli co-branded amps!
Continue reading “Monoprice Big Bang II of 2018: two Open-Backs and two Cavalli Amps”
Bad news for OPPO fans. The company officially announced that after 14 years, they will be gracefully exiting the US market. No new products will be developed or released, but support, repairs and warranty service will continue for existing products. Perhaps this may explain why some of their products were hard to find. Firmware updates will also continue to come out as needed.
Oppo’s official twitter account confirmed that headphones too are part of the end of development…
Our end to manufacturing new products includes our headphone products.
— OPPO Digital (@OPPODIGITAL) April 2, 2018