All about Headphones
Don’t look at the calendar now but we are exactly at the halfway point to Christmas! Time sure does fly. Time to start preparing gift lists 🙂
Focal has the biggest expansion so far of their consumer headphone line-up, coming on the heels of their two high-end headphones (ELEAR and UTOPIA). They have an over-ear bluetooth headphone, along with a mix of new wired and bluetooth earphones…
Another week is in the books, and we have another This Week In Headphoolia round-up. Speaking of round-ups, Father’s Day is always a good time for headphone sales. We rounded up some of them…
Headfi published their Sony MDR-Z1R measurements using their own setup powered by GRAS and Audio Precision, and their measurements are noticably different from the Innerfidelity measurements and Tyll discusses the differences at IF.
One next possible step is for the two to exchange headphones and measure them with their own setups. This could partially help resolve the question as to whether the two headphones measured are different, or the difference is in the measurement setups.
Often the price (and relative price) of a consumer good is assumed to have some correlation to the product’s quality. But that’s not always the case. This varies from product category to product category, but needless to say, it’s almost never a linear correlation, audio or not.
Continue reading “This Week in Headphoolia #17: Sony Z1R measurefefe (up to 6/17/17)”
Time won’t stand still and another week zoomed by, which brings us to a new installment of our weekly round-up, aptly (?) named This Week in Headphoolia (all previous, and future editions there)…
+ three days of coverage of the Los Angeles Audio Show at Stereophile
+ part #1 of the High End Munich Audio show at Headphone Guru
The videos in this segment compare and contrast open versus closed headphones. Before you scream “apples vs oranges”, note that one can compare anything with anything ~ as long as one understands what they are comparing 🙂
Continue reading “This Week In Headphoolia #16 (up to 6/11/17)”
Another week flew by, here’s our new weekly round-up that is “This Week in Headphoolia”, covering up to Sunday 6/4/17. You can check previous (and future) editions using the Headphoolia Archives. Please feel free to leave feedback in the comments of what else you like to see here!
The $Flagship$ Mania of 2016 continues rolling into 2017, with Grado now joining the party with their brand new PS2000e Metal and Maple (but no maple syrup) headphone. It is revealed and teased at the official Grado blog.
And as fate would have it, this week Engadget posted a text, lots of pictures and a 7-minute video multimedia post entitled “Inside Grado Labs”, going back to the beginnings of the company.
Another week flew by, here’s our new weekly round-up that is “This Week in Headphoolia”. You can check previous (and future) editions using the Headphoolia Archives. Please feel free to leave feedback in the comments of what else you like to see here!
Second best thing to actually going is looking at all the nice pictures from the comfort of your home or office, without having to lift a finger (okay, you have to lift a finger to click on the link and scroll the page).
Headphonia was there at the 2017 High End Munich show and posted two detailed and visual blog-reports, here is Part #1 and here is Part #2. Enjoy 🙂
Continue reading “This Week In Headphoolia #14 (up to 5/28/17)”
Another week flew by, and with it we have a new edition of our weekly round-up. You can find previous editions (and future ones in the future) in the Headphoolia archives…
JDS Labs took to their own blog to opine that their new Element is not an O2 in a shiny shell. Pictures, charts and data are included!
What is Isolation? The SoundGuys YouTube channel take a 5-minute stab at explaining it.
If you missed Metal571’s live YouTube Q&A, fear not, it is saved on YouTube (except for the Live Chat, which YouTube does not save). You can watch all two hours of it at any time you want.
Continue reading “This Week In Headphoolia #13 (ending 5/21/17)”
Another week is in the books, and so here we have another installment of our weekly round-up. You can catch up to previous installments in the Headphoolia Archives…
Microsoft is executing a powerplay with Windows this month. The launch of “Windows 10 S” gave new momentum to the Windows Store, and this week at the MS Build 2017 conference, Microsoft revealed that two of the most high profile music-related apps will soon become available through the Windows store, iTunes and Spotify.
On the other hand, Groove Music team members may be crying, perhaps sending out resumes to their old friends from the Zune and Xbox Music teams 🙂 Microsoft is not very musical it seems 🙂
Time won’t stand still! RUSH, like most Canadians, are always right 🙂 Another week flew by. No big news this week but plenty of review action. I am including a mix of video and text, since different people have different preferences, and read this at work (text is better) or at home where the Wifi rivers flow unimpeded…
On the Meta front, the very busy Headfi forums received an unpopular and confusing forum software update. The forum founder posted a detailed update explaining why. TL;DR: the company making their previous forum software is shutting down. Back to USENET? 🙂
Xiaomi confessed to Android Central why they removed the headphone jack from their new Mi 6 smartphone, giving USB-C audio their vote of confidence.
Continue reading “This Week in Headphoolia #11 (up to 5/7/17)”
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 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 🙂
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)”