“Of the myriad accessories now available for portable music players, and specifically iPods, only a tiny fraction have anything to do with improving sound quality. If you want to hear more from your portable it pretty much comes down to headphones and headphone amplifiers. Designed to drive the cheesy white earbuds that come with the thing, the headphone amplifier in an Ipod isn’t quite up to the task of driving the more difficult loads presented by less sensitive, larger, sealed or open-back type cans like the big Sennheisers and AKGs…”
“If only the other bleary-eyed, white-earbud-using subway riders knew how good I have it with headphones like these. Not only am I being spared the concerto for shrieking brakes and deafening track clatter by the Superfi’s 26 dB of isolation, I’m enjoying fantastic sound; Sound that, until recently, had absolutely no business coming from such tiny headphones…”
“Eighteen or twenty four months ago a comment to the effect that the Ipod accessory market was significantly larger than the market for the Ipod itself might elicit a laugh. Even a casual survey of the internet these days (just google “Ipod case” to see what I’m talking about) will demonstrate just how massive a product wave Apple has touched off, and just how much larger the accessory market is now…”
“Just in case you somehow hadn’t noticed, portable audio is hot. White hot. Ipod white. The Ipod has become the Sony Walkman of the 21st Century and gained a cachet and ubiquity in popular culture unrivalled perhaps by any piece of audio equipment ever invented. Ipods are now the object of enough consumer lust that they can actually be dangerous to their owners…”
“The Menttor is a plug-and-play 5.1 surround system, but here it is through headphones, and therefore may be of interest to many who like music, movies, or TV at hours when others in the home are sleeping. This quite large, but very light, headphone system, has 6 drivers, and the amplifier/DAC box, which is very small, has a Dolby Digital/DTS chip, and 6 channels of amplification…”
“I reviewed and ultimately acquired the Grado SR125 headphone almost two years ago (Smr 95), and have since used it in concert and session recordings for monitoring. The thing I’ve always liked about this phone is that it sounds more like speakers than any other I’ve heard in its timbral balance; other headphones tend to be rather bright and spitty by comparison…”
