If you have, I’m happy to say yes. Yes, I can.

The two headphones described below are about as much as I can imagine spending on what are basically little speakers that you strap to your head. So this article isn’t so much a review as a freakshow; check out the guy with the weird obsession and the lack of self-restraint!

Denon AH-D5000

These are the big brother to the D2000s that I mentioned in my last article. Thanks to an uncharacteristically well-timed purchase, I managed to get these for US$425 from Amazon. They went up massively after I bought them, and I see they are now back around that price, but the AUD has dropped significantly.

US$450-odd is a lot of cash for headphones, and I’ll be the first to acknowledge that fact. What’s more, the D2000s are almost US$200 cheaper, and the difference is incredibly difficult to justify in objective terms. As I said before, the D2000s are already a fantastic headphone. Supremely comfortable and capable headphones that are easy to drive. Really, there’s no rational reason to upgrade them.

However, upgrading to the D5000s is not a decision I regret in the slightest. To my ears the D2000s suffer from very mild boominess in the bass department which is tamed nicely by the Real Mahogany Cups of the D5000s. Or maybe it’s some other bit of audiophile wankery.

I like music, and I especially like to hear it with as much clarity, impact and presence as possible. There’s nothing better on a Friday night than to kick back with some favourite tunes, some quality headphones and a glass or two of red wine. The D5000s are frankly perfect for this job. I’m pretty sure that without going for the insane Senheisser HD800s (at a wallet-busting AUD2400!) you’re really not going to do any better.

Ultimate Ears Triple-Fi 10vi

You can’t sit around all the time drinking wine and listening to ridiculous headphones. Oh no, not by a long shot. Sometimes you’ve got to get out on the street. And listen to ridiculous headphones.

Behold the Ultimate Ears Triple-Fi 10vi IEMs. You stick them in your ear and instead of hearing the sounds of nature, children’s laughter, oncoming semi-trailers, and so forth, you hear … whatever you want to hear. It’s amazing.

As I alluded to last time, the big selling point about the IEM is that it blocks sound from outside. This means you don’t need noise-cancelling and all that nonsense. It also means you don’t need to destroy your hearing trying to drown out the noises around you. In summary, good IEMs are basically earplugs with speakers in them.

Last time around I didn’t have a choice for an IEM. I tried the little brother to these, the Super-Fi 4vi. Prettymuch the only claim to fame for those was the fact that they would fit into the original iPhone headphone jack. But they sounded awful, so I ditched them.

Later, in a moment of bonus-fuelled excitement, I clicked a button and was A$640 the poorer. But when the Triple-Fis arrived, I was so much the richer. After some time trying out the different tips and getting used to different insertion techniques (yeah, I know, that’s what she said) they sound absolutely amazing. Better than most full-size headphones out there, in fact.

Once you’ve got the secret of getting the “seal” just right, they are quite comfortable, and the sound is incredible. It’s obviously more in-the-head than the Denons but the frequency response is amazing. From the deepest bass to the crispest treble notes, all emanating from these tiny little speakers stuck in your ear canals.

Had a bad day? Seriously, get yourself a pair of these and a portable music player, then go out into the evening and walk the streets. Great way to clear the head.

But look both ways before crossing the road, because you won’t hear that bus otherwise.

It’s a great little linux distribution that lets you do all sorts of geeky networky things, and is damn reliable to boot. I was a bit nervous about the upgrade from the (now) ancient White Russian release, to the new Kamikaze 8.09_RC2 release, but it all went very smoothly.

If you’ve shied away from OpenWrt in the past because of it’s depencency on command-line installation, well shy no more. OpenWrt now includes an excellent web interface called LuCI, which makes admin very simple. Here it is, showing off real-time network statistics, available via a plugin module.

Modules such as these are the main reason for installing a Linux distro on your router. Different routing modules, statistics and monitoring, security, QoS, application layer proxies, and many more, some with LuCI web interfaces. In short, there’s lots to explore if you’re at all a network geek (I am).

Although OpenWrt was originally written for the infamous Linksys WRT54, but now available for lots of other routers. Perhaps it is supported on the router you’re using right now!? Why not go check?

So, like most people, I don’t know much about the problems there and certainly don’t have any solutions to suggest. But I do know there are a certain class of solutions which aren’t on the table.

If you look at Twitter from a suitably high vantage point you see real-time communication between small groups. People entering short messages and having these messages appear at their peers a small time later. There’s also a central archive, but I’ve heard Twitter described as “public Instant-Messaging” and this seems to characterise it best for me.

In short, Twitter seems more suited to peer-to-peer communication than to client-server. What sort of protocol would it use? I can imagine a protocol which would be probably UDP-based, and which would send tweets to followers either directly from peers or perhaps through a local aggregation point. Large groups of followers could perhaps even use UDP multicast. Archive servers could be reached through network anycast addresses, to allow for greater decentralisation. IPv6 to get universal connectivity. And so on; fill in your own pet network technology here, there are certainly lots of potential solutions.

Instead of these, clients communicate directly with the Twitter servers using HTTP. Not only that, but they poll for updates. Bit of an architectural blunder, you might think. Well not really. In fact I don’t think the Twitter designers had any choice.

Once upon a time it was possible to deploy new application-layer protocols on the Internet. But those times have passed, it seems. These days, it’s HTTP(S) or nothing. And this is not the protocol you would choose for carrying tweets, if you had the choice. So the fact that twitter works at all over this sub-optimal application-layer protocol is quite an achievement.

This is a great example of the many ways in which innovation can be stifled by enforcing a lowest-common-denominator.

The impact is of course more widespread than just Twitter. In fact, the so-called end-to-end principle which was one of the fundamental founding principles of the Internet is now all but abandoned in practice. Geoff Huston examines the issue in some detail in a recent article, and it is highly recommended.

Of course, there are no easy answers, either for Twitter or the next application to suffer due to the proliferation of network middleware. But it’s certainly an issue that does need to be more prominent.

(This post is an obvious departure from my usual style of blatant attack pieces in order to score traffic and fame for myself. Normal service will resume shortly.)

Hits

The subscription model is fantastic. It’s great to be able to just pick a plan to match the rate at which you discover new music, or get sick of music in your existing collection. The subscription promotes a totally different mindset for purchasing music, one that is more optimistic and more willing to experiment. This is a good thing for all concerned.

Also the prices are quite reasonable. Better than reasonable really; $10 for 30 songs per month.

Unlike Amazon’s store, emusic is actually available to Australians, and presumably other non-USians as well. Hooray! In the past I’ve noticed some tracks on emusic have been not available “in my region”, but now that I’ve gone looking for them I can’t find any. Either way, it’s pretty rare.

The music selection is really good, and getting better. I’ve found that they have a lot of quite obscure titles and artists. In general Amazon might be better for the older back catalogue, and the more mainstream artists, but between the two there is more than enough keep you amused.

In writing this article, I just noticed that Radiohead is finally available through emusic. Just the one album, In Rainbows, but it’s a start.

The tracks are mostly ~160Kbps MP3s, encoded with LAME 3.96. I haven’t noticed any quality problems, but then again I haven’t heard them against the originals in a double-blind test, so take that statement for what it’s worth.

As well as music they now have a pretty decent collection of DRM-free audiobooks. (Just for the record, I refuse to use Audible on account of their DRM).

The monthly rate of $10 for 1 book is charged in addition to any music plan you might have, and yet it’s still the cheapest way to get audiobooks that I know of.

Misses

They don’t always score hits though. For one, the website is absolutely awful. I mean really awful. It’s difficult to navigate, and it’s hideously ugly. Not a good combination. Still, you can get used to it and find the music you’re after and use it to select either individual songs to download or entire albums.

But the frustration really starts when you’ve got 9 songs left in your monthly quota and you want to download a 10 song album. You might think that it would just send you the first 9 and queue the remaining song until the start of the next billing cycle. Nope! Instead, you have to click to download each of the 9 songs individually and then remember to get the last one next month. DO NOT WANT!

To download the music there is a download helper application, but it’s a klunky PowerPC application and won’t automatically add tunes to iTunes. (Or maybe I’m missing something?)

So after you’ve downloaded the songs and manually added them to iTunes, you’ll be underwhelmed by the lack of album art. Then, because like me you’re quite anal-retentive about metadata, you’ll go straight off to somewhere like Amazon or Discogs to bring the new tracks up to your exacting standards.

And speaking of metadata, there’s very little application of it on the website. This isn’t a gripe so much as a missing feature. They know what music everyone has downloaded, surely there are some basic correlations and recommendations to be made? They have made a token effort here but frankly they Could Try Harder.

I wonder why they don’t just outsource the community aspect of their site to someone like last.fm? Oh yeah, now I remember.

Despite these problems you certainly could do worse (like buying from MSN Music, oops!) so overall recommended. The market is still new, more players are needed.

I wasn’t hopeful of saving it. Since I bought my unit, the guy had stopped selling them for a while, and then been bought out by another company. Nevertheless I wrote to the new company and asked if it could be fixed. They said sure, send it in. A few weeks later, this arrived:

A brand new Arc-AAA, mysteriously labeled an Arc-P.

The new one is slightly heavier I think, but feels more rugged. The knurled metal case is that dull greenish-grey colour, as might be carried by Brown from Spook Country. The light is activated by twisting the head, and the new unit has a lot more resistance which makes it a lot less likely to turn on in your pocket. It’s at least as bright as the old Arc-AAA, in other words surprisingly good for the size (and capable of out-shining any AAA Maglite). If you want to get really mental I see there’s now a “premium” version which is even brighter.

The quality of the unit itself and of the support from the vendor gets two thumbs up from me.

Exhibit A: Apple, 24 years ago

Exhibit B: Microsoft, today

Yeah, I know, who cares about packaging? But howcome so few companies get it right?

And in the long run, I think it is important. The message you send with the packaging of your product is one of the care you have put in to producing it. And of the importance of the customer’s time in getting up and running quickly.

Message received, Apple.

The commonly accepted wisdom is that CPUs have gotten about as fast as they are likely to go in terms of sheer clock speed, and now manufacturers are turning to multiprocessing to provide more processing power for a given price point. The recent Intel price drops which made the quad-core Q6600 CPU available for less than AUD400 are a highly relevent (and welcome) data point to illustrate this trend.

This raises lots of hairy questions for developers, such as “how are we going to design our software to run efficiently in a multi-processing environment?” The previously-linked wide finder experiment is an attempt to explore some of these issues. And it’s pretty obvious that so far there is no silver bullet.

But wait, it gets worse. I will point you to a long but highly thought-provoking presentation from Herb Sutter. Turns out we are already hitting major architectural hurdles in the form of memory access limitations, and we’ll need to find some solutions for these before tackling the parallel computation problem.

Sutter’s presentation is deeply technical, but still quite accessible, and delivered with an engaging style that makes it required viewing. Highly recommended.

I recently had some experience diagnosing some memory-related performance problems (not quite in the same class as that discussed by Sutter, but similar) and I have to say there is a serious deficit in the development tools for these kinds of problems. Currently we need to look aggregate behaviour over multiple iterations to isolate some of these problems, and this is a difficult and error-prone approach. For example, check out Sutter’s technique to discover the memory cache line size in code. In the future it would be great if we could monitor cache misses, pipeline stalls, page faults, and other performance-impacting events within the debugger.

These issues also make me wonder about how higher-level languages are going to provide appropriate abstractions to avoid the performance problems. For example, garbage collection is a major win for programmer productivity but it does encourage memory usage patterns that are not always conducive to performance given architectural limitations in the underlying hardware. The same abstraction problems affect C/C++ of course but at least there is the option to go “bare-metal” where necessary.

Whatever the answers are here, it’s certain there are some interesting times ahead for developers.

I don’t know about you, but I certainly didn’t see it coming. Previous Amazon efforts with downloaded content were pretty lame, and I had no idea that they were going to come back with an offering that was as good as this.

Although I am a very happy bleep.com customer, their selection of music is limited to the Warp label plus a couple of degrees of separation. So I’ve been looking around at other DRM-free music stores, but few have excited me enough to become customers.

Amazon’s catalogue of music is quite large and hopefully getting larger. Most importantly, they have an extensive back-catalogue into which I have been delving in my quest to go legit, and to reclaim old legitimately-purchased albums that have got lost along the way. The purchase and download process is very easy and efficient.

I can also get individual songs from those long-lost albums. Somehow though I managed to turn on the infamous one-click purchase, so rather than bundling up a bunch of individual tracks and purchasing them en masse, Amazon conducts a separate transaction for each one. But no matter.

So if you have a US credit card, do yourself a favour and check it out. This, plus the new Radiohead release, make me think we’ve finally reached the point where purchasing legitimate DRM-free music is easier than stealing it.

Dan likes to make the analogy with motorcycles. They perform better than cars, but at a fraction of the price. This is true also of headphones versus a full-blown home Hi-Fi system. However, unlike motorcycles, headphones are more practical than their full-priced competitors. You can even carry them around!

The only thing you really lose with the headphone experience is that whole-body listening sensation. You don’t get to feel that thump in your chest on really deep bass hits. Instead it’s all in your head. Which is by no means unpleasant, just slightly different to a live performance or even a good Hi-Fi system.

In case it’s not painfully obvious, this post is about headphones. It contains some recommendations and advice about specific types and models, but mainly the message I want to get across is that headphones are an inexpensive and invaluable conduit to musical satisfaction. For a few hundred measly bucks you can experience something close to musical perfection. Without even bothering the neighbours. (Although you can do that too, just by singing along…)

Yuin PK3

Let’s start the tour at with the least expensive. These babies are a measly A$39 shipped from m’verygoodfriends at headphonic. Put bluntly, these are probably the best value of any headphone I own.

If you have an iPod, you’re probably listening with the iBuds that came with it, thinking they’re not too bad. And you’re right, they are OK. The second gen iBuds (with the rubber sides) are fine for spoken word and are quite comfortable, and don’t sound too bad if you manage to place them correctly in your ear. However in comparison to the Yuins they sound like … well, like crap really.

Take my word for it, the Yuins are well worth the measly upgrade. You dropped a few hundred on the iPod, what about another $39 for some decent headphones?

If you’ve tried earbuds before and have beed disappointed, I sympathise. I was initially reluctant myself. Unlike most earbuds I have ever tried, these seem to sit really nicely in my ears and don’t need fiddling with in order to get a decent seal (and hence provide very decent bass response).

Gripes? Umm, well the foam covers fall off pretty easily. Also the cables are slightly heavier than the iBuds, and hence snag on clothing more easily. Otherwise great.

These are my default carry-around headphones. The earbud form factor is light, portable, and easy to take on and off.

Just get ‘em.

Koss KSC-35

These are my exercise headphones. They have individual clips which take a few seconds and a bit of practice to put on, but tend to stay put a lot better when jumping up and down (or when bent double and breathless).

These are “open” headphones which means they leak sound to the outside. This may be bad in some situations. But on the upside they also sound a lot more open, meaning that the sound is less in-your-head. I believe headphone nuts refer to this characteristic as the “soundstage” but I wouldn’t stoop to such audiowanker terms. Oh, OK maybe I would.

In general the sound is probably not as good as the Yuins but there’s not a lot in it. The bass response in particular is really strong but a bit muddier than I would like. By this I mean they start to sound a bit farty and boomy, particularly when the music has complicated passages of bass notes. For the money though they’re great.

Koss don’t make the KSC-35s any more, but have since replaced them with the KSC-75s, which probably sound better. The newer models are, I understand, a lot sturdier and more attractive than the flimsy black plastic KSC-35s. Still very reasonably priced too: A$64 shipped from headphonic (no I am not getting any commission, though I am a satisfied customer).

Sennheiser HD-555

Another open headphone, this time a full-size pair. These are my work headphones. They are supra-aural, which means they sound like a Toyota you can wear them all day in comfort because they sit over your ears, not on them.

The sound is great too. A well “balanced” sound that doesn’t seem to emphasise or hide any particular frequency range. Otherwise they are not a huge step up in sound quality from the Yuins or the Kossen.

The main advantage of the 555s is that they are comfortable and very suitable for extended listening. Also they are open, so they let in the sound of coworkers trying to get your attention (or talking about you in the next cubicle). This may be a downside though if you’re trying to drown out their noise…

A$180 shipped, a good buy. See also Dan’s opinion.

Audio Technica ATH-A900

Now we’re starting to get into the serious listening. These are a big step up in sound quality compared to all of the above.

These are closed headphones which provide pretty good isolation. They are also very comfy, with this crazy but effective “wing” system to keep them in place.

The difference in sound quality over the HD-555s is quite noticable. There is more detail all over, more precise and deep bass, more betterer treble. Or something. They’re very very good.

For a long time these were my quality-listening at-home headphones. Get a glass of wine and kick back with the iTunes library on shuffle. A great way to spend a Friday night after a long week.

A$299 shipped. Well and truly worth the money in my opinion, although I am selling mine to upgrade to the Denons mentioned below, so contact me if you’re interested?

Meier Corda Move amplifier

Yes, an amplifier. What’s that you say? Speak up…. No! I’m not going deaf!

Here’s the deal. By the time you get to spend a few hundred bucks on headphones, they will likely stop being the weakest link in your audio equipment. Instead it is almost certainly the crappy amp in your source. iPods actually have pretty good D/A converters (from what I am told anyway), but space and possibly electrical limitations prevent them from using very capable amplifiers. Headphone outputs on other devices are almost certainly afterthoughts, and so in most cases you probably want an external amplifier.

There is another possible use case for the headphone amplifier, and that is for use with high impedance headphones. Such beasts do exist, typically at the high-end, and are typically inaudible without an amplifier. None of the headphones on this page strictly require an amplifier though; they are all low impedance.

Behold the Meier Corda Move amplifier. Besides being an amplifer, it’s also a USB audio device, which means that you can plug it into your laptop and not have to deal with its (probably) crappy D/A converters or amplifier. To top it all off the Move also a crossfeed filter, about which I will let Dan explain.

I was a bit sceptical about how well this unit would perform. Like I said, the iPod output isn’t too bad, and neither is that from my PowerBook. But whoah. Was I amazed when plugging this thing in. So much detail, so much bass, so much … presence. Just invites you to crank it up.

You know you have made a big step up in sound reproduction when you find yourself continually increasing the rating of everything in your iTunes library. All of your music just sounds better. The borderline three stars become fours and so on. Remember that I am very stingy with iTunes ratings, but this amplifier is rapidly curing that!

Once you have a good set of headphones, an amplifier is a great way to make them sound even better. Highly recommended. I paid US$235 directly from the source but also available from headphonic for a very reasonable A$299.

Denon AH-D2000

While the Move is the flavour of the month amplifier on the head-fi forums, the Denons are definitely flavour of the month headphones. My pair arrived the other day courtesy of audiocubes for a reasonable US$285, now going for an even more reasonable US$259 (dammit!), or available locally for a much less reasonable A$799 retail.

Without a doubt we are starting to approach the point of diminshing returns, but they still manage to greatly improve upon the A900s. Particularly when coupled with the Move amplifier, these sound just fantastic. So good that I want to instantly re-rate all my music with 5, no fuck it, 6 stars! OK, not really. Seriously, it’s a lot of fun listening through these things. Old favourites in particular sound new again, because you hear new details that were previously hidden or at least subdued. I want to use the term “presence” again too, because it’s a good one. Presence, presence, presence. Presents for your ears.

As for comfort, well these are the most comfortable headphones I have ever worn. It barely even feels like they’re on.

There’s a downside though. They fall apart. According to the forums it’s quite common. The left ear cup dropped off mine after about 5 days. Fortunately I found the screw and was able to re-assemble them without too much hassle. Still, not a great experience.

Missing: IEM

This collection of ‘phones covers most situations for which headphones are appropriate. Notably absent from this list is a headphone to handle the unique environment of the long-distance flight. If I did any regular long-distance flying (or other public transport for that matter) I would be picking up a pair of In-Ear Monitors (IEMs to the headphiles).

In the past I had used noise-cancelling headphones and I cannot recommend them lowly enough. These things are bad. The ones I had were Sonys, and quite expensive I believe at the time. But they sound atrocious. Even the noise-cancelling effect isn’t that great.

The last time I flew any distance I used a pair of really cheap IEMs (also Sony) and they were so much better than the noise-cancelling monsters. I honestly can’t remember the model, and they were certainly nothing special, sound-wise. Next time I travel I’ll certainly pick up a new pair of IEMs. I’ve heard good things about the Westone UM1’s and they will suffice as my recommendation for now, although I will be looking carefully at the equivalents from Shure, Ultimate Ears and Etymotic when it is time to buy.

What next?

Well of course it would be misleading of me to suggest that after dropping a grand or so I had reached headphone nirvana. But at this point I’d have to think long and hard about going for the next level up. I suspect also that the limiting factor in sound quality with my music collection right now may be in the lossy compression scheme, given that most of my library is encoded with AAC at 128kbps. But I have a plan for dealing with that, more later.

Invisible Changes

Under the covers, the entire girtby site (such as it is) is now stored in an SVK repository depot. SVK is a great little distributed version control system built on top of Subversion. I want to say more about it in future, but for now it is really helping me maintain this site.

I use it like this. First I set up local mirrors of various Subversion repositories. The mephisto repository, the 1-2-stable branch of rails, and the repository for my one and only plugin. With a single svk sync -a, I can download the most recent changes in all of those repositories, and access it locally.

So then I copy the source from each of these repositories into a new local branch. Any changes I make on this local branch are, of course, isolated from the mirrored sources that I just downloaded.

When time comes to update, I can just merge across from the appropriate mirrored repository into my local branch. The really cool thing is that this merge is generally painless because SVK manages to track merge points (a well-known limitation of Subversion). This means it can do a three-way diff and hence get the merge right ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Plus the Mephisto codebase has extensive unit tests that really help the confidence level.

Result: updating to the latest Mephisto, rails, etc is extremely easy. You wordpress guys really should do yaself a favour.

Visible Changes

There have also been some subtle changes to the girtby stylesheet. Hopefully it looks better, although you be the judge.

Thanks to the version control I can tell you in exact detail what was changed, but I’ll spare you from that. Suffice it to say: some font changes, de-cluttering, and general tidyup. There is more to do here.

Of course the most visible change is the new Markdown WYSIWYM comment editor, WMD. Let me know what you think of it. I’m very impressed so far, this is how WYSIWYM editors should be done.

It should be pointed out that the preview mode may not accurately match your comment when it published. This is because WMD uses its own, JavaScript, implementation of Markdown. The rest of the blog uses the ruby implementation, which is not as good, frankly. Until I get around to fixing the ruby version (yeah, right), please accept my apologies if your comment comes out wonky. Or more wonky than you anticipated.