New Headphones
Now that I work near the city I occasionally get the train into work. Well, in the several weeks so far I’ve caught the train only one week, and have driven the car or motorbike to work every other week.. but anyway, when I’m on the train I like to watch tv episodes my shiny new 80Gb Video iPod. This way I can watch a normal 42 minute episode and still listen to a good 5 or 6 music tracks before I have to get off at my stop.
The iPod sure has made the train trip oh so much more bearable, I’m really *not* a public transport person… The headphones that come with the iPod really are quite good in their own right but I’m not a fan of ‘in ear’ headphones, even tho the iPod headphones really comfortable when compared to others, they still annoy me. Another thing that’s a pain in the ass is the going through train tunnels and people chatting loudly on the train and so on.. I’m forever turning the volume up so I can hear the iPod over the ambient noise and down again when I deafen myself cause its too loud!
A few weeks ago I was in a local Apple store and in particular I was looking at their nice little Sennheiser stand. One thing that caught my eye was a pair of the PX200’s as they collapse down into a small carry case that I can easily throw into my laptop bag. This ability to collapse the headphones caught my attention as they are a closed headphone so noise doesn’t escape or get in to a certain extent improving my listening experience and the experience of those innocent bystanders who constantly whinge about being able to hear other commuter’s iPod’s while at high volume. Even though I don’t whinge about it myself, I personally don’t like being able to hear some other tosser listening to Justin Timberlake or other such freak of nature… Moving right along.. while I was checking out the headphones I was told about the same headphones but a pair, the Sennheiser PXC 250’s, that have a Sennheiser noise cancelling feature whereby small microphones are embedded into the headphones and a small device that attaches to your belt inverts the phase of those ambient noises and feeds them back into the headphones, effectively cancelling out those annoying noises! The headphones are specifically marketed at those consumers that travel by bus, train or plane. This was enough, I was convinced! I had to order a pair and they arrived after a couple of days which was good.
They would have to be the most impressive set of headphones I’ve owned so far. They certainly make my Phillips closed ear headphones sound like rubbish in comparison. the device that attaches to your belt takes 2 x AAA batteries and while at first I thought it would be a little annoying, really isn’t.. When the noise cancelling device is turned on, it is like as if a heavy door has been closed to block out the noisy outside, everything almost comes to complete silence! Albeit there is a very slight hum when the device isn’t plugged into the iPod and playing music, but whats the point of that really? What made them even more handy was that for the past week and a bit I’ve been in and out of noisy server rooms, of which I could be in a very noisy atmosphere for a day at a time. Without ear protection I’m sure I would have had some industrial deafness (if I didn’t have that already), but with the new headphones, it was almost like as if I had turned all the servers off and I was able to quietly listen to tunes all day/week! 
I think now that I have myself a pair of Sennheisers, I really don’t think I can go back to anything else. I think the next on my list will be a pair of eN-250’s.. *drools*
Filed under: m.o