Right, before any other business can I just exude on the topic of these headphones? That’s rhetorical obviously.

The headphones wrapped around my fat head at this moment are Sony MDR-V300’s that were picked up at a flea-market in East Falls a couple of years ago for a tenner.

Now, I spend the majority of my waking life wearing headphones; the only way to find the required seclusion for software development in open-plan offices necessitates headphones or earphones. At the last place they were “Koss” phones provided on day one by Mr Fritz, and they served me well in their various incarnations. Nowadays I have a cheap pair of in-ear “noise cancelling” cheapo mobile plugs that came with some phone or other.

At home there is rarely a need for headphones and so these Sony cans haven’t had a lot of use. Additionally I’m pretty skeptical about “high quality audio” for reasons too plentiful and intricate to go into here…but by god now I’m using these headphones it’s apparent they are orders of magnitude better than anything I’ve experienced before. Trying to describe how and why they’re better is going to be too difficult but just believe me when I say that it’s extraordinary how different a track sounds in these compared to the usual crap I’m used to. There’s bass – but not muddy, OTT, bass – just a proper bass response. There are details in the recording that were inaudible before. It feels like I was previously listening to music via ear-plugs.

Lifewise things have been pretty unremarkable (apart from a couple of unblogable things) but there have been some high points:

• Discovering an excellent Sonic Youth album I’d not heard before.
• Discovering an excellent Camper Van Beethoven album I’ve not heard before.
• Spending a couple of nice Sundays with a couple of good friends doing fun things – a separate blog is needed to fully describe these; especially Cabelas.

Well that wasn’t what I intended to write at all…