Qualia Shmalia

http://phonephile.blogspot.com/2005/02/return-of-qualia.html

So... I wrote about this a while ago. Since then, a friend of mine has also procured one of these phones and I had the chance to compare the two before I sent mine back. I've now reconsidered sending them back for now, as I don't believe they're broken... both sound the same.

The thing is, the Qualia's sound is not so much 'broken' as 'really weird'.

So, I've been using the time recently to actually wear the phones instead of just burning them in. Generally speaking until now I didn't really want to wear them, especially when the Omega II's were right next to me. However I have a feeling, due to the build of the headphone earcups, that wearing them for extended periods rather than just sticking them on the stand and letting them play will actually result in 'burn-in'.

A review is forthcoming, warts and all. Keep an eye out in the next few weeks.

Dead iPod Chronicles, Part 1

From now, there'll be an infrequent range of postings tracking my success (or lack of it) in rescuing an iPod with a dead HDD. It is known that iPods have a Toshiba-tweaked HDD which does something different to a regular 1.8" HDD (in this case a MK4004GAH). So we'll see what happens with a standard MK4004GAH. I have a USB enclosure on the way, so at the worst (i.e. if it fails to work with the iPod altogether) I'll have bought an expensive portable 40Gb drive.

Turbaned Revolutionary.

I've finally realised why so many people assume I'm Asian in the Indian Subcontinent sense. For the record, I'm not Indian/Pakistani and I'm not some curry-fuelled beturbaned revolutionary as some have bizarrely assumed. I meant to call myself bhangraman on Head-Fi, but I misspelled it. What's in an online nickname? Not that much in my case.

iRiver H10 initial sound quality evaluation, voice recording.

Unfortunately, the iPod Mini has suddenly become unavailable at the moment so a comparison can't be done yet. In a brief other comparison, the Creative JB3 sounds more incisive yet more natural, but the H10 doesn't disgrace itself. The sound is pretty well resolved, a little 'hard' as stock but the hardware is capable of some good dynamics. Minor problems I could hear was a slight general overlying roughness, and a slight lack of depth to the soundstaging. The EQ modes are much more effective than those found on the iPod Mini, although for some reason I can't use the Custom EQ. The SRS WOW effect is fully customisable, and while I found that it did negatively impact the sound quality, the effects you could tune it with could be atmosphere enhancing.

The H10 has switchable quality for voice recording, and setting it at the highest (direct encoding into 128K MP3) the results are very usable. In fact, for clarity in the highet quality mode it surpasses the iPod + iTalk and the Zen Micro by quite a large margin. But of course it wouldn't be an H10 if even a good-performing feature didn't have a few problems [evil grin]. Hard disk access and display backlight intrudes very noticeably into recordings.

All said, not a bad effort on these two points... The performance of these two aspects of the H10 certainly is not a let-down. It does seem though that those using the U.S. firmware of the H10 are having problems with sound distortion. I can't confirm this, and I've not come across any overt distortion like the iPod bass issue.

I've figured out what the H10 actually is.

It was one of those Eureka moments. As I posted in another forum, I was thinking about the unpredictability of button presses on the iRiver H10 after the backlight goes off, and also the way it plays back music in an unexpected order.


The H10 is iRiver's entry into the 'unpredictable player' category started by Apple's Shuffle.


With the unpredictable controls, they've gone one step better than Apple. Now I know I have an iRiver Advanced Shuffle instead of just a terribly buggy H10 makes me proud to own one ;)




PS: Oh yes... I hate doing comparisons from memory, and I've managed to borrow a Mini (not the new one). Sound comparisons (finally) coming up soon.