Month: April 2017

Time sure does fly faster and faster. Another week is gone, so here’s another round-up. I promise I will have more content in-between the round-ups… one of these days 🙂 Theme music while preparing this round-up: Kraftwerk’s “Trans Europe Express” album, FLAC (rip from CD), with the Philips SHP-9500S (review is coming, just like the “Winds of Winter” is coming; unboxing already posted) through the Fiio X1 DAP.

These round-ups are intended to be a fun/funny round-up of the action, but they are not intended to be comprehensive. I can’t post every review, every new headphone announcement, every news item. That’s a full time job ~ please feel free to load up the Patreon if you want that 🙂

SENNHEISER HD820 LEAKS

Sennheiser has unleashed a boatload of HD 5XX and HD 4XX headphones, they even teased with a special edition of the HD 6XX series at Massdrop, but it looks like they are not done. A leak spotted the mention of a Sennheiser HD 820 headphone in marketing material.

Continue reading “This Week in Headphoolia #10: Sennheiser HD820 leaks (up to 4/30/17)”

Another week flew by, another week my glorious procrastinations produced zero reviews on the blog 🙂 But we have a new installment of the weekly round-up, covering up to Sunday 4/24/17. The big drama story of the week was a lawsuit against Bose for allegedly harvesting and selling customer data through the Bose Connect app (iTunes, GooglePLAY). A lot of the headlines on mass media and clickbait-y websites said things like “your headphones are spying on you” which is not true ~ the app is spying on you, which is worse because it has access to more data 🙂 But the story was not big enough to make it to the Techmeme headlines 🙂

BIG BOSE is LISTENING

The story broke out on Reuters and was filed in the state of Illinois. Innerfidelity downplays the importance of this lawsuit since almost everybody else does it, but on the other hand, if we don’t hold companies accountable for data hoarding without permission, they will not stop doing it or at least won’t give us more control ~ or better yet, give us some profit sharing from whatever they make from our data and social graphs. Since they have very granular data on each person, they can easily calculate our profit share 🙂

Continue reading “This Week in Headphoolia #9: Bose app lawsuit and more (up to 4/24/17)”

We have a new installment of our quasi-weekly round-up that is “This Week in Headphoolia”. Here we go…

CAN JAM 2017 Part II

We posted a lot of CanJAM 2017 (So Cal edition) action in the previous round-up but more things came out since them. These are some of them…

+ AudioHeads visit Noble Audio (3 min video)
+ AudioHeads visit ZMF (3 min video)

If you missed it last week, there’s a 1-hour video from Headfi previewing the action, YouTube-embedded below…

Continue reading “This Week in Headphoolia #8 (week ending 4/16/17)”

Welcome to a new edition to “This Week in Headphoolia”, a round-up of some of the action in the world of head-audio. This installment covers 1.5 weeks instead of one week because my Sunday nap turned into a hibernation session 🙂 You can find all previous (and future) installments in the Headphoolia archives.

CanJAM 2017 SoCAL (Southern California)

Headphones don’t have big trade shows like some other electronics products, but they have a variety of local and hyperlocal events and meet-ups. One of the bigger ones is CanJAM SoCal and the 2017 edition took place last week. If you want SPOILERS about everything here’s 1-Hour video from Headfi.

If you’ve never been to one such event, here are some YouTube videos to give you a first-hand look at what goes on, the first two are YouTube-embedded below…

If you only watch one video, this 7-minute video by PhotoTristan gives you a good walk-about feel for the show.

Continue reading “This Week In Headphoolia #7 (up to 4/11/17)”

Another week flew by, and the tax deadline is now getting real, even with the extra three days! Speaking of time, you can read all previous editions in the Headphoolia archives. If you have any recommendations or suggestions of what to include or exclude in these round-ups, please leave a comment or opine on Twitter.

LEARNINGS

Tyll of Innerfidelity and Headroom fame appeared eight times so far at TWiT’s “Home Theater Geeks” (HTG) with Scott Wilkinson, so they are not ignoring headphones! Of more general audio learnings interest, HTG had two back to back videos in late March 2017 with Paul Hales (of Pro Audio Technology fame) talking about audio science, EQ curves, speakers, and such. This is not headphone-specific, but there’s plenty of audio/sound talk in over 2.5 hours of total runtime. You can find these two episodes using this pre-filled YouTube Search or look up episodes #345 and #346.

Sony is partnering with The Mother of Dragons Android (The Googleleesi) to bake in their LDAC technology into the new version of Android (“Android O” (the letter, not zero)). LDAC promises up to three times as much data as the more common SBC and does not have to perform a down-conversion. So this is a good time to read a primer on LDAC at Sony’s. There are plenty of charts over there too. Already, Sony has a trio of compatible products, the MDR-1000X headphones, Walkman DAPs, and one of their Xperia smartphones.

Continue reading “This Week in Headphoolia (6th edition)”