Earbuds and Sonic Memories

Over the years I have grown accustom to the headphones that come with a number of my iPods and iPhones. For that matter I have been wearing headphones on portable devices for years. I can remember laying in the back of my parent station wagon (the “L-T-D” I used to call it) and listening to audio cassettes in these simple goofy silver wired headsets that culminated into plastic-sizers as the speakers shoved these cheep foam pieces that softened the blow of unreasonably large speakers being pressed to the sides of my brain. It is surprising that I can hear anything today at all after the abuse I put my ears through as a kid.

I remember my first portable CD player. I didn't have a lot of money and I desperately wanted a portable CD player. So after much saving I finally purchased a Sanyo player. I was saving for a nice Sony player but I did not have the money or the patience to wait it out. After I got home I immediately fell in love with the CDs I owned and wondered how I ever got along without them previously.

The truth about that Sanyo portable CD player, there was nothing portable about it other than it's size. You had to carefully handle it like you were diffusing a nuclear bomb. Any tiny bump, jostle or sideways glance and the player would lay waste to your CD sending it skipping and scratching into eternity.

After a few weeks of listening I had a bit of buyers remorse because I imagined that the Sony player would have been a far better purchase. The infinitely curious boy inside me had me in my room cracking the case of the Sanyo player one afternoon. Low and behold I quickly learned a harsh lesson in marketing and branding as all of the chips affixed to the Sanyo circuit board had the word “Sony” imprinted on them. Alas, I felt fine with just enjoying the state of the art and challenging the branding machine from that day forward.

Here we are years later and while I am fully addicted to portable electronics (I am writing this on my mac book while listening to my iPhone at a Starbucks in downtown DC) I still forget the trade-offs that we sometimes make for portable convenience. For example, the fidelity of the tiny earphones that came with my iPhone, while fine enough, leave a bit to be desired. Then there is the nearly forgotten reality that average MP3-style technology trims the audible (and near-audible) range of sound files to make room for longer tracks in increasingly smaller space.

We forget that hearing the music isn't everything. Sometimes hearing and feeling music makes all of the difference. For the same reason we all still go to theaters to see movies, sometimes we need to get out of our headphones and turn the stereo up to 11. In the audible range of analog music you can hear subtleties of musical nuance. But then in the near-audible range of sound you can sometimes find the rhythm and crescendo of music drive you to your feet and make you want to sway and dance. You can't quite find that in a set of earbuds blaring MP3 tracks regardless of what Apple iTunes ads attempt to convince us.

So, go re-download the highest bitrate version of your favorite songs (or go out and buy a CD or heaven forbid- a record) and feel the music again. Hearing isn't everything.

Oh worthy of note! Before you run out and buy $400 earbuds hoping to improve your listening experience, an independent tests claim that better headphones don't ensure a better listening experience.

tech-tip: If you tend to purchase CDs and rip them to iTunes then with a little tweaking you can turn up the quality of your sonic experience.

From within the preferences of iTunes, select the import settings for audio CDs. Then with MP3 selected, pick “custom” from the list of possible bit rates. Now, you will notice that from within the bit rate list you can select more than double the rate that was likely initially selected. You might guess that by selecting the highest rate you would be ramping up the quality, and you would be correct. But you would also be cranking up the size of each MP3 file and that will effect any MP3 storage, so you have to find the sweet spot between quality and size.

So here is my recommendation: 192 kilobytes per second (kbps), with a “high” quality “Variable Bit Rate” (VBR.) VBR means that if the moment within a single audio file could benefit from scaling up to 192 kbps then it will vary the bit rate up to that value. And if the sound data won't benefit from that quality well, you guessed it, it will save some space and not crank up the quality. From what I have read, this is about as good as it gets within earbud headphones. If you are thinking of taking off the headphones and turning up the stereo, then push it on up to 256 kbps with High Quality VBR. And if you are ripping audio DVDs then take it all the way to the highest bit rate and VBR quality if you want to experience the same quality but not have to worry about playing the DVD.

Again, fiddling with these settings can increase file sizes and slow down the ripping process, but hey we are talking about a better sonic experience right? Remember, it isn't just about what you hear, it is about what you can feel.