Sennheiser PX-100: Review

Ever since I got my iPod, I had been thinking about getting myself a better pair of headphones. And when my sis offered to get me something from Canada, I knew it had to be headphones. So after doing a bit of research on the ones available for around fifty US dollars, I narrowed my choice down to Sennheiser PX-100 and Koss PortaPro. Both have received extremely good reviews and in the end, I chose Sennheiser for its more contemporary looks and perceived comfort of wearing.

Sennheiser PX100

When folded

A great pair

I have had the PX-100 for a couple of months now and think it’s time to write a review of my own about it.

First, the obvious question: How does it sound? I can tell you, it is without a doubt the best thing that happened to my ears. Never has music sounded so rich, so complete and so powerful in any other equipment I have used. The bass is strong, but never overwhelming. The vocals sound better and you’ll definitely hear more detail in the instruments playing in the track compared to your iPod earphones, probably something that will have you amazed a long time after putting them on for the first time. Of course, you’ll notice a definite increase in quality if you feed it better input. I personally prefer 320kbps MP3 (I did try lossless audio like FLAC, but didn’t notice substantial improvement to merit such huge file size). All in all, the PX-100  sounds a lot more amazing than its size and slender frame would lead you to believe.

Among other pluses, the PX-100 is foldable, and comes in a strong plastic case, and when folded, the whole package is not a lot bigger than your average spectacle case, making it a good companion if you are a traveller. It is comfortable enough to wear, and you’ll probably forget that you have them on after a while. The cord is long enough for everyday use.

Now for some minuses. Since the cups sit on your ear rather than around it (open type), you’ll find that there is some sound leakage, so you might not want to put these on in a quiet room full of people. The headphones do tend to slip off if you bend down and do some head-banging (so don’t do that). Also, the mechanism for folding it is cumbersome and takes some getting used to.

So now for the final vedict: If you are one of those who believe that listening to music is not something you do to kill time, but an experience in itself, and have around Rs.3000 to spare, don’t think twice. Just go ahead and get these. And if you don’t have Rs.3000, then skip a meal for a couple of months, save up and get yourself these. You won’t regret it.

FTF India 2008

My second year at AllGo, and my second FTF. Freescale Technology Forum is a global event that is held annually to help Freescale and its partners showcase the latest technologies and products. In India, it is held in Bangalore. Like last year, this year too I was part of the team that represented AllGo at FTF. The venue this time was The Leela Palace Kempinski and it was held on the 13th and 14th of November. Compared to last time, the venue was better, the food was better, the freebies were better (heh heh), and even though I didn’t win a Creative Zen at the lucky draw , it made for a very satisfactory FTF for me.

We had a booth at the Technology Lab and we had one demo relating to automotive infotainment and another in home automation. We showcased Trio, AllGo’s popular multimedia solution as part of the automotive infotainment demo. We had on display support for different devices like iPod and USB thumb drives. Also on display was the Bluetooth handsfree support, which lets the user answer phone calls via his car audio system. It certainly made for a very interesting demo. As part of the home automation solution, we demonstrated a Wi-Fi and Zigbee based setup which lets the user control different electrical components of his house using his Wi-Fi enabled mobile phone, no matter where he is. Needless to say, the participants were very impressed by it.

I’ll leave you with a few pictures from the event. If you want to see all the photos we took at the event, you can head to my Picasa account here.

Me at the AllGo booth (Day 1)

The AllGo Team : (from left) Srinu, me, Girish, Kunal, Yagnesh (Day 2)

Our Automotive Infotainment setup

The Home Automation setup

iPod and the ml_ipod alternative to iTunes

I know I should have written about this long ago, but anyway, here it is: I now own a stunning 8 GB third generation iPod Nano, courtesy my dear sister. Everyone knows how great the iPod is, how easy it is to use and how good the sound sounds and all that stuff, so I won’t waste precious keystrokes on that. I’ll just tell you that it is something I have started taking with me almost everywhere I go, so I always have my entire music collection with me, in a device that fits snugly in my palm. The new ‘Apple‘ of my eyes if you will. To make you more jealous, here’s a pic:

Though the iPod and its legendary user interface have become synonyms for simplicity, you can’t say the same about iTunes, the software used to transfer data to it. Within five minutes of using iTunes, I knew I would hate it for as long as I live. For one, I hated how complicated it is to do such simple things as adding songs to playlists, and for another, I was more than put out by the fact that iTunes will let you sync your iPod with only one library, and so for a guy like me who has half of his music collection in one system and the other half in another, this meant a big problem, since trying to sync with the second library would erase music which were synced with the first. So, for the next few days, I was found searching for iTunes alternatives.

Here’s a good post from Simple Help. Since MediaMonkey seemed to have been recommended by most people in different forums, I decided to try that one. Everything seemed to be working fine when I connected my iPod (the songs on my iPod were being displayed and all) and it also seemed to be transferring songs perfectly. But when I disconnected the iPod, it seemed to think there was no media inside. I finally realized that MediaMonkey didn’t have support for third generation nano yet. I tried using Winamp 5.5, which comes with a plugin called pmp_ipod bundled with it, but it didn’t show any of the songs in the device as it was supposed to, so I concluded that pmp_ipod didn’t support my iPod either.

I then read somewhere that another Winamp plugin ml_ipod has support for my third generation nano. I tried it, and it worked like a charm. The songs and the album art transfer without a hitch. And since Winamp doesn’t insist on erasing my existing collection to put in new ones, I don’t have to worry about syncing my iPod across multiple libraries. Photo transfer still seems a bit buggy, but since I use my iPod mainly for my audio collection, that doesn’t really bother me much. Winamp, like many times before, has proven to be the only player you’ll ever need, at least as far as audio playback is concerned. And in the process making at least one iPod user very happy.

Oh, and happy new year, all of you!