May 9, 2005

Shitty MP3's Must Die!

Dr Evil

With my next overseas trip just over a week away, I'm in the final mad rush to get everything ready, including breaking in my new Shure e3c Noise Isolating Earphones. These are the in ear canal style units that musicians use, and I have to say the sound quality and detail is quite extraordinary!

I used Sony active noise canceling headphones on my last trip. They helped a lot in reducing the aircraft engine noise, but were quite bulky, only worked on low/mid frequencies and need batteries. The Shure ones on the other-hand block about 25dB across all frequencies (the noise-canceling ones were 10dB) and are very compact, which will help my carry-on baggage only plan for this trip.

They take about a week to properly mold to your ear canal (or your ear canal to mold to the earphones as the case maybe, lol) and break-in the speaker drivers. We're at day 3 now and they're definitely getting more comfortable to wear—and the sound quality still blows me away!

Shure e3c Earphones

However, this does cause one major problem— 128 & 160kbps CBR MP3's which previously sounded ok, now sound terrible. The encoding artifacts are clearly audible in all their hideous glory. The 160kbps songs sound flat and lifeless, and we won't even mention mangled state of the poor 128k ones, lol.

So, I've been on a mission hunting out all the poor quality songs in my collection with the help of Tag & Rename, which is an excellent program.

Tag & Rename can also tell you which encoder was used to make the file (this is separate from the ID3v2 tag's "encoded by" field), which is quite handy for generating a report of all the MP3's not encoded with LAME and are CBR 160kbps or less.

On a related note, I checked with the airline the other day and my skateboard is good to go as carry-on. It was the only piece of baggage I thought might possibility have to be checked, which would ruin my carry-on only plan. Apparently if my main carry-on bag isn't too big, it's all good ;)

Update: It appears I was missed informed, and the skateboard can only be taken on as checked luggage—which added just under an hour to me getting out of LAX the other day, arrrghh!

Posted by Matt at May 9, 2005 12:02 PM

Fraggle Chitter Chatter

Have Your Say

Remember me?



 (not displayed on site)