I guess I’m pleased and a bit bummed too…sad they are coming to an end in some way.  They’ve combined to well over 140 hours of my life in the last 6 months or more, and have for the most part represented almost my entire connection to music creation in that time.  It’s a funny thing…when you spend so much time on a project, how much you become attached to it, feel some ownership of it having poured yourself into it.  And then how, like a parent, you feel cautiously anxious and excited at the same time as they are stealed away from your studio into the nasty public arena.  Ok, that’s a bit lame and dramatic,  but you get the idea.  

Despite some unavoidable bumps along the way for each, from logistics to crisis of every kind, and of course ego, which is a part of every creative effort in all its various stages, the end result is what really matters. Now that the end game has begun in the mastering, I can really say that I’m excited for these projects to see the light of day.  Not because of the work I’ve put in, although my ego is in there as well, but because of the talent the creators posses, and the work they’ve put in well before I became a part of things.   I know both artists very well, and I know what it took to get these albums written, recorded and ready for mixing. 

From another angle, seeing the result of so much time and effort come to fruition is like a guilty pleasure of mine…as an artist with 2 or 3 albums of material almost ready to go, it’s a twisted smile of irony I wear as reflect on helping others put music out while I waffle on finishing my own.   However, the learning through trying hard to make music other than your own sound both good and true to the creator’s vision is what I wanted.  Now that these things are almost done, I can take the lessons learned and apply them to my own music and future projects I work on.  

-R.

So, like, yeah….stop sucking, ok?  Just out of curiosity…what did I ever do to you?

Harmon Kardon  EP720  $149.99

These earphones were surprisingly tinny.  So much so that I spent a good 5 minutes putting them in and out to see if I had done it wrong.  Perhaps it isn’t a surprise that I found them quite uncomfortable.  Sound-wise, I found the high frequency detail to be surprisingly lacking, the mid-range to be sharp and unpleasant, and the bass to have left the building along the way.    I didn’t spend too long with these ones, as they pretty much sucked.  Any garden-variety $20-$40 headphone/earbud, competes well with this product.   As the most expensive of my test units, they almost certainly will finish last, unless the others don’t play any sound at all.

 JBL Reference 220 $99.99

The JBL’s were tinny as well, but thankfully had better high-end frequency representation.  They also sounded harsh in the midrange and lacked in low frequency response, though better than the Harmon Kardon’s.  The earbud covers were good, the small ones fit nicely into my ears and stayed there.  The cord was cloth-wrapped, which seemed to make a bit more durable, although perhaps unrelated, the cord movements resonated directly into the earbuds, and that noise is very irritating.  The included plastic lanyard and over-ear clips both worked very well at stabilizing the buds for exercise or movement…best of all the tested earbuds.  But that wasn’t enough to make up for another disappointment in audio quality, especially for the price.

Bose In-Ear Earphones $129.99

These were promising, although I’ve always been suspicious of Bose products which seem to “hype” their sound.  The earbuds were designed so their wasn’t any tight fit squeezing your ear canal, but rather a silicone pad that rested inside of your outer ear…very very comfortable.  Combined with the lanyard string, they were fairly stable, although not exercise-friendly.  The sound, however, was the fullest of the bunch in the low end.  To full!  Everything sounded unnaturally bass-ish, like I’d pushed some kind of XTRA Bass button on my cheap stereo.  Surprisingly, the high frequency detail was lost to this low-end consideration…and I had to adjust the iPod’s EQ settings to boost the treble.   Another disappointing experience.

Shure SE110  $119.99

Almost the last in this earphone shoot-out, the Shure SE110 has impressed me from the outset.  Interestingly, these come with a cable that is only about 1 1/2 ft long, and an additional 3 ft extension cable for when you need it.   It’s nice to leave extra unnecessary cable length behind when you don’t need it.  The earbuds come with the sponge-like earplug style material that you pinch small, insert in your ear, and it expands to a very snug fit.   It does two things very well:  1) keeps them in your ear tightly, 2) blocks out almost all ambient noise.   I could listen to my iPod very comfortably at one volume notch above nothing.  I could also cut the grass and listen, which is a first, as I have the loudest lawnmower ever made.   And it was a comfortable listening volume too, at about halfway.  Most importantly, however, the sound was great!  It wasn’t hyped, or deficient that I could tell.  I was able to hear detail in the mids and highs without having my hair running to get away, and the bass was punchy and present but not overbearing.  Very real sound, and very much what I’ve been after.   Way to go Shure! 

So, I’ve taken all of these back except for the Shure SE110’s.  I’m curious about the the Shure SE210’s, which,at $199.99 are way out of my budget for earphones.  I just have to know if they are $80 better than the entry-level SE110’s. 

Testing is ongoing…. 

The last three weeks have seen me rockin’ a set of these Sennheiser OMX 70 headphones.  I was looking for something that would 1) stay in my ears, and b) sound decent.   Since my main studio headphones are Sennheiser, and I like them, I figured it to be a decent bet.  $70 later…which I figured was astronomical for earbud style cans, and off I went. 

So how were they, you ask?  Not bad, as long as you weren’t moving quicker than 5 km/h, or on a bus, or in a room with noise of any kind.  In a perfectly quiet listening environment, they sounded great.  Nice detail in the top end, acceptable low-end definition.  However, once you busted these things out in the real world…read: anywhere other than inside your reading room, they really started to…well, suck.  Today is as good of an example as any….riding the bus to work - a perfect stretch of listening time without distraction, right?  Wrong.  The noise of the bus driving was overpowering my headphones.  I had to crank the volume on the iPod to even complete.  It wasn’t a pleasant experience.  This experience has been duplicated many times in recent weeks… so back to the store they went.

So I decided to move up one full notch in the scale of these things…considering the Shure SE110 earbuds, which are noise-canceling, but instead opting to try the Bose earbuds, which were only $129, instead of $149. 

First listens tell me that while the bass end is very much a found thing now…very punchy and perhaps overpowering, I’m missing high-end detail.  Grr….

I don’t want to have to use the iPod EQ presets…I want to hear my audio without boosting of any kind.   I guess I’ll try these for awhile, get used to them, and then see how they are compared to the Shure offering.  I think $150 is where I’ll draw the line….since we’re talking about listening to lossy audio anyhow.  Which makes me find my audio collection on my iPod suspect…I might have to re-rip things at a full 320kbps, CBR.   Sigh….I had no idea I’d become so picky. 

Here’s

Notably, the Woodcock is only represented with an English "peent".  Also, Camel nuzzing is apparently only an English or Russian experience. 

It’s Elemental I want to talk about a bit today.  This album also represents a crucial time in my life….my second year at recording engineering school, my first apartment of my own, and memories of my one and only furnishing of this apartment, a chair, positioned in the sweet spot between the speakers of my system, where I spent many a ruthlessly hot summer night, eyes closed, sweating like crazy, just listening to the masterful layering and composition at play on this album. 

At that time, midi was still growing up, home recording wasn’t remotely affordable unless you used a cassette 4 track, and there wasn’t any DAW’s as we know them today.   But by this time in school, I’d had a chance to work with exceptional equipment, including the cutting edge Kurzweil K2000,   and so I had an inkling of how synthesizers  could massively influence my writing and the potential for arrangements.

Elemental, however, was perfectly timed.  I had one year of engineering in a pro studio under my belt, my eyes (and ears), were busy deconstructing albums to understand what was going on, what were the elements, (heh), and how were they assembled to make the final product, and Roland Orzabal (Tears For Fears at this point), was a genius both musically and lyrically.  His sense of arrangement, particularly on this album, really got my attention.   And I think it sparked a fierce interest in working with technology, to incorporate it into my writing and production palette.   I recall reading an article in an audio recording trade journal at the time which described his use of all kinds of animal sounds throughout the record, but modified and twisted up to become other textures woven into the music.  I just loved the thought of that.  I clearly remember being extremely motivated to start writing, to create my own masterpiece.

Years later, and I’m still not anywhere near the level of Tears For Fears, and I’m still working on that masterpiece…but its amazing to stumble on those inspirational moments and be able to recognize for what they were…in this case, an awareness of the larger world of arrangement and how technology might help with it.