Headphones

[plonq]

My good headphones shattered as I was taking them off during an online gaming session on Friday. Fortunately, we were just going on a break at the time. atara came to the rescue with some duct tape that got me through the rest of the evening, but I was annoyed. These were not inexpensive headphones, and I've only had them for a couple of years.

We swung up to Best Buy on Saturday and I found a less expensive set of headphones that were marked down 40% for their "Black Friday Month" sale. I brought them home, hooked them up, and was immediately disappointed. The sound out of them was flat, lifeless and - I daresay - muddy.

I went to the manufacturer's site and installed the two sets of software to control their features. My first annoyance was that I had to sign up for their cloud service in order to operate this software. I used their "guest" option until it got too annoying to have to click through that any time I wanted to change anything, so I created a throw-away account.

"No, this does NOT mean that I want to use your streaming service."

I quickly discovered that the "surround" feature on the headphone is a paid subscription service, so I promptly uninstalled that software. The other driver program let me set things like level controls and EQ. Except that the controls did nothing. No matter how I set the levels or the EQ, these headphones sounded flat and muddy.

I did some research to find out if there was an EQ option for Windows itself, and I learned that there is an open-source EQ available on Sourceforge that people seemed to like. There were complaints that it was subject to a bit of latency, but nothing serious.

So far I've only noticed two quirks with the software (I installed the EQ, and a pretty front end to control it). The first is that it got interrupted by a Windows event. I was listening to Spotify and I received a notification in Windows that disabled the EQ. The other quirk is that audio in YouTube videos tends to breathe (it's one of those audio effects that you will recognize when you hear it, even if you didn't know what it is called).

I uninstalled the manufacturer's software since it doesn't seem to do anything but take up resources, and I'm going to stick with the basic Windows driver and this third-party EQ for now. On a good note, once I balanced out the levels, these headphones actually produce pretty good sound.

... and speaking of Spotify.

I get that they are trying to promote podcasts since they probably don't have to pay royalties for those, but give us the option to block/remove the ones that don't interest us. I am never going to listen to Joe Rogan, and I am tired of having him in my face every time I open the program. On a different note, same with Drake. Nice guy, I suppose, but I'm not a fan of his work.

On another note, I drove out to Stony Mountain to help a friend build a shelter for firewood. While most of my effort was spent pointing at things and critiquing his work, it was definitely a job where a second set of hands made a big difference. He had to stop and feed the horses at one point, so grabbed a couple pictures of some of the critters.

Hors


Doge

Comments

[frith]

Hoss's! Is that a non-fungible doge? <8o)***

Quite the adventure with those headphones. It's amazing the lengths manufacturers go to cripple something as simple as headphones, apparently in hopes of farming you and milking you should you opt for the privilege of an enhanced audio experience.

[plonq]

Once I got set up with a decent EQ, I think these new headphones sound arguably better than the previous ones. That's a plus, considering I paid about 1/3 the price for them.

[frith]

I think headphones should be plug and play hardware and should not require a holy quest where you lock wits with Gorgons and Oracles to get the darned thing to work properly. It's great you got it to work, it's a shame it was broken on arrival. If I buy a button-up shirt only to find out I have to go online to order the buttons, I'm going to plotz.