What I'm Listening On

I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts. Podcasts from bloggingheads.tv. Podcasts of ESPN Radio's various and sundry shows (my favorite is The Big Show, on the extremely unusual days when both Dan Patrick and Keith Olberman appear.) Podcast summaries of Olberman and Chris Matthews' shows on MSNBC. Not to mention the fact that I haven't watched any of the Big 3 Sunday news shows (Meet The Press, Face The Nation, or This Week) on TV in months.

So I am a big fan of my mp3 player. What I'm listening on is an old Sandisk 512 MB mp3 player, which also has an FM radio and a voice recorder (a 3-year old version of this one.) It certainly doesn't have the bells-and-whistles of an iPod; no video screen, no fancy software-interface. Also, the hardware interface sucks. 4-ish buttons, each of which has a completely different function in the 3 different modes. Learning how the hell to change radio stations took me weeks.

But I actually prefer it to an iPod. For one thing, I like that it doesn't talk to iTunes. I'm a computer guy; it makes sense to me to go in and rearrange files however the hell I want to, and the easiest way to do that is directly through the Windows interface. When you plug this one in, it looks just like a drive to Windows. Easy as pie to work with. For a second thing, it doesn't have a rechargable battery; instead, it runs about 15 hours off a fresh AAA alkaline battery. This means I get 8-10 hours from a fully-charged Ni:MH AAA battery. This is perfect for me. It means that, if I'm going backcountry or snowboarding, I can easily take 2-3 extra batteries and easily have several days' worth of playtime. Plus, if and when the batteries start to die (as happens with the lithium cells as well), I just throw them out and get a new one for about 75 cents.

Bigger to me, of late, has been headphones. I've been looking for a light set of headphones with sufficient noise-blocking capacity that I can use them on an airplane. I saw a brief article in the Rocky Mountain News for these guys. They were pretty nice; memory foam pads which you roll up, like a pair of foam earplugs, and they fill up your ear canal. Supposedly they provide up to 33 dB of passive noise blocking; I know that I could listen to either mp3's or my portable DVD player on buses, trains, and airplanes without issue.

But the cord was kind of shitty; on two pairs I got, a bad tug pulled one of the internal wires loose, and one of the ears stopped working quite as well. So I decided to change brands. At the advice of the extremely uninformed-seeming dude at Circuit City, I tried Sony's MDR-EX51LP's.

And, well, my ears are in love. These guys don't have a one-size fits all ear pad; instead, you have a choice of 3 different rubber plugs. The default one fits my ears perfectly. It's almost eerie how little you can hear of the outside world when you get them seated just so. Plus, the volume and sound character is roughly 1,000,000 times better than my previous pair.

For $40, I firmly believe you're not going to get a better set of headphones. They have the Dave stamp of approval. Go buy them.