Category: headphones review diary

Beyerdynamic Custom Street On-Ears Review Diary

And so it begins. This is a “review diary” of the closed-back on-ear Beyerdynamic Custom Street headphones. It is a companion to the Text and Pictures Unboxing post. This is presented in reverse chronological order and will be updated many times in the next few days/weeks/months… I will be calling them “BCS” for short below…

YOU CAN PLAY TWO MUSIC SOURCES at the SAME TIME

You can indeed play two music sources at the same time. Each side is independent, so I have the Fiio X1 playing on one side, and a Clip+ playing on the other side. This is nice 🙂 Whichever one has the higher volume, is louder (obviously).

In terms of practical applications, you can do this if you listen to an audiobook with a layer of classical or jazz or other instrumental music in the background.

In terms of music playing, you can use this to simulate being about and out in a busy place where you have all kinds of sound and music. It is obviously not an ideal music appreciation combination, but if your brain needs more than background signal to help you concentrate, this may work.

More so, if the two music sources are not fast or loud, it is kinda interesting. I am doing this with Depeche Mode’s “Delta Machine” on one side, and Lady Gaga’s “The Fame”. This perhaps works better if you are already familiar with the music, so your brain’s musical “autocomplete” function can fill in the gaps as it gets two musical inputs instead of one 🙂

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VE Monks Plus Earbuds (red) Review Diary

This is a very impromptu thing, a new Review Diary (review developing in progress, diary-style) for the …VE Monk Plus in red. This is a companion to the useful Text and Pictures Only Unboxing post that includes close-ups of things that can help in deciding (plug size, earbud diameter, etc). I forgot to weigh them, but I’ll do that soon…

vemonk_in_the_bag

COFFEE SHOP TEST Part II

This time I sat by the door, with busy weekend traffic, and music playing over the speakers. This is where their limit is. The outer sounds often won over them, and I had to increase the volume to higher than I usually listen to, just so I can listen to the music instead of the noise. Again, not a surprise given that these are just basic earbuds, but they are not miracles, they have real-world limitations 🙂

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Yamaha EPH-M100 In-Ears Review Diary

We now have our first review diary for in-ear headphones, starting with the new Yamaha EPH-M100. This is posted diary-style, the latest updates go on top. This format speeds up sharing my impressions, versus waiting until the complete review is finished, which could take weeks/months – I guess I caught the GRRM bug of ever-sprawling and ever-expanding 🙂 The Holidays caused a delay in the start of this, but here we go…

For comments, questions, corrections, suggestions, and such, please feel free to use the contact form or leave a comment below.

How well does the 3-button in-line remote work?

On Apple devices (iPods, iPads, iPhones) all is well since this is an MFi device. There are three buttons, a Volume UP, a Volume DOWN, and the Middle Button. The up and down increase and decrease volume as expected. The Middle Button switches between Play and Pause with a One press. Two presses take you to the Next track. Three presses take you to the Previous track. These are quick click-click-click presses, not leisurely ones. If they are not behaving as such, before you declare them lemons, check the Settings of your app or device, some apps allow you to override the default behavior or may have default presets that are different. For example, in some Podcast apps or Audiobook apps the Next/Previous functionality may be mapped to 30 second jumps forward and backward instead.

On Windows Phone and Firefox OS, none of the buttons work, it pains me to say. I used the Nokia Lumia 520 running Windows 8.1 (Xbox Music, 7digital, Audible) and the ZTE Open Firefox OS smartphone. Music still plays of course, but there is no response at all to the buttons. You have to adjust volume from the device.

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Shure SRH-145 On-Ear Closed-Back Review Diary

Welcome to this new semi-exciting experiment! A headphone review diary. Instead of waiting a few weeks to post my impressions, I am posting them “diary style”. The latest updates go on top, so if you are reading this for the first time, start reading from the bottom (not that there are any spoilers). So the subject/victim of our first experiment are the brand new Shure SRH 145 closed-back on-ear headphones. You can find their specs at the bottom of this post in bright orange (that’s the back of their box).

If you have any questions, feel free to use the contact form or leave a comment below…

Dec 5: Keyboard Test

All apologies for the delay in updates, a number of factors contributed. This time I used them to play the music keyboard (61-key Casio). Overall, I did not find anything offensive in the piano sounds. The only audio area that stood out in terms of issues was the first few keys of the Acoustic Bass faux-instrument. The SRH-145 simply did not have the rumble and impact as the Sony MDR-V6 bass (which is a bigger and more expensive studio headphone). I’m guessing most people use the piano sounds on a keyboard anyway? There is a certain level of oddity playing a guitar or bass or saxophone or drums on a keyboard 🙂

While they do not have the benefits of over-ears, they are fairly lightweight and comfortable for a practice or play or improv session, and they are not picky on 1/4″ adapters (they don’t come with one – see unboxing – but they worked with random standard 1/4″ adapters I randomly grabbed).

Obviously playing the keyboard is not their intended use, but they are serviceable in this fashion, in other words, you don’t have to buy another pair of headphones (unless you want to or you are a more advanced player/student with a more advanced piano/keyboard). They are certainly an upgrade over the basic $10-ish headphones included with some headphone bundles (the aforementioned Casio was bundled with a Nady pair that fell apart without much use).

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