V-Moda Vibe, two weeks later

In case you didn't see the first review, here you go.

Anyway, it's been two weeks (actually two weeks and a day) since I bought them. I think the initial review was maybe four days in. If you've read it (and if you haven't, go do that now) then I'm sure you know that I didn't return them like I said I might.

Even though the fit was terrible on the first day, using them very often (I do mean VERY often, I wore them literally whenever I had the chance, even if I wasn't listening to anything, just because I liked the sound and didn't want to get rid of them) helped a lot. During the first few days I had a problem where they'd gradually slide out every few minutes, but that is no more. They feel very soft in the ears now, and stay in quite well. If you get a pair and have the problem I did, give them a week of very frequent use. You'll be glad you did.

Other than that, what else do I think of them after two weeks? Well the sound is better. As I mentioned in the first review, they drop off on the highs. After the first week though, they seem to have finished breaking in. Another review I read said that it takes them about 10 hours to break in. Maybe 10 hours for the immediate break in, but frequency tests showed significant distortion on 16000kHz after 10 hours. After a week though, the distortion was there but much less significant. I've also helped with the highs by equalizing them just a bit. Here's a screenshot of my iTunes equalizer settings for the headphones:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v408/videocwk/Picture562.png

The slight bass boost is optional since it performs just fine there, I just wanted a little more bass. The significance here is the highs. Does that help? Yes. This gives a subtle, yet important boost in clarity and spaciousness. Even though they sound good prior to equalization, after equalization I don't think I want to hear them again without it.

Yesterday was my last day to return them and quite clearly, I didn't. I don't regret it at all, these are great headphones. I'd still recommend them, so if you're in the business for some IEMs and your price range is around $100, give these some serious consideration. 

V-Moda Vibe headphones

So I recently decided that I am getting a Macbook. To assist in this, I decided to put my expensive speaker system "project" aside and get headphones. I don't know if I've mentioned it here before, but I'd been wanting a pair of IEMs. So I was in the Apple store (this was when I was using the Macbooks) and I figured since I was there, I'd look at headphones. A salesman helped me out, and like all Apple salesmen (or at least the ones I've dealt with), he was pretty helpful. I told him that I was interested in the in-ear ones, and he showed me the Vibes and some Sennheisers, saying he heard good things about both. I looked over both and decided I liked the Vibe pair more. The Vibes were purely in-ear while the Senns wrapped around the ear. There's nothing wrong with that, but for the sake of comfort and portability, I went with the Vibes.

And by "I went with the Vibes," I mean I went with the Vibes the next day since I hadn't brought my wallet with me that day. So I picked them up ($100) and I took them to my house. They come in an attractive box, which shows the headphones (as in the headphones that are in the box, not a picture)through some plastic on a backdrop of some fading colors with a translucent face on them. Opening the box, I found out that the plastic wasn't sitting there, it was one of those awful hard plastic packages that you need a chainsaw to open.

After some hurt fingers and a pair of scissors that were probably dulled from opening it, I had the headphones. They feel as great as they look in the packaging.

The build quality is just great, they definitely feel like something you'd drop $100 on. They come in five colors, which all look good. The TRS connectors are gold plated and the plug is made of aluminum. The splitter on the cord that splits into the actual ear pieces is made of aluminum. The ear pieces are made of aluminum. And the cord is wrapped in a durable yet flexible fabric. All the aluminum is the same color, which is whatever color you got them in. They look very good, and they're advertised as being "fashion headphones" so I suppose that kind of accounts for something.

But looks aren't everything, sound is the most important thing. The packaging and advertising would have you believe that they were "basshead" headphones. You know what I mean, those kinds of headphones that saturate the music with way too much bass. To me, the bass is very even. It seems to be contrasted very well with the rest of the sound, not having too little or too much of it. Bass is very clear and strong though. If you do like it to sound bassy though, you can equalize them. When I got them my iPod was still equalized (I've set all my sources of audio to EQ-off since these seem pretty accurate) and the bass was a little heavy as a result. It didn't lose quality though, it kept it's good-soundingness. All the vocals I've listened to on them so far (which is a lot, I've been using them a lot since I got them) sounded warm and good. I suppose the overall sound quality could be described as "warm," although not too warm.

Ghetto frequency tests (basically I played a sine wave and then listened) show me that the advertised frequency response isn't much to believe. I think it's advertised as 12hz-22kHz, but that's just flat out wrong. They don't hit 25hz. They also seem to fail on the highs (but this hasn't bothered me much, despite this they still sound very good). They don't hit 17kHz properly, and 16kHz distorts. The frequency tests weren't that elaborate, but for whatever reason these frequency dropoffs don't seem to affect the sound that much.

They also hold up well when given noisy music. If you're a Franz Ferdinand fan, you'll probably know that they tend to make loud, busy music. In my experience, a lot of speakers have trouble reproducing it without mashing the sounds together somewhat or downright distorting. These, however, handle it fine. Same goes for Smash Mouth's noisier songs. 

Now that I've covered sound quality, I'll talk about how they fit. At first, they hardly stayed in my ears at all. After hearing them though I wanted to see if I could keep them. This was with the smallest ear gel size. My ears seem to be adjusting to them though, they're fitting and staying in much better now (I got them on Saturday, at the time of this writing it's Tuesday). It seems that the white gels (you get three sizes of ear gels and you get them in black and white) are softer and more flexible, they fit to my ears better. For the record though, my mom tells me that she has small ear canals and can never use in-ear anything because all the gels are always too big. So I might just have small ear canals. My girlfriend says they fit her perfectly, so remember that what doesn't work for me might work great for you. It's just like this with IEMs. I emailed the company to suggest that they start making a smaller ear gel size for people like me and learned that they have plans to in the next few months, so that's good news. I'm still deciding whether or not to keep these (because of the fit, the sound quality is awesome and that's why I haven't returned them already). I'm giving them until the weekend, as I'm told by a friend that this just happens when you buy your first IEMs.

So in conclusion, I would highly recommend these. There's almost nothing bad about them, and for most, the good will outweigh the bad. Go buy some.

Bose Computer MusicMonitor, my thoughts.

So while visiting the Apple store the other day, I noticed that they had a few pairs of Bose's sexy new MusicMonitor computer speakers on display. I'm not really a fan of Bose, but being the gadget freak that I am, I still had to try them out. And I'm not that impressed.

Yes, it probably is the best sound you'll get for that size, but that doesn't mean it sounds good, and that doesn't mean it's worth $400. The first thing I noticed was how much bass they try to shove down your ears. Then immediately afterward I noticed how bad the bass really was. Yes, there was some true bass to it, but that complicated a number of things. But first I'm going to complain about the sound of the bass.

Muddy. That's the word that comes to 

mind while listening to the bass from these. The way they get it to be as powerful as it is for speakers of that size is with dual passive radiators inside a little slot going through the back of each speaker. It is a very interesting design and it does get results, and I do think it is a pretty smart way of getting bass out of these small speakers. But again, it doesn't sound good. And it makes room for a design flaw which I thought was pretty distinctive. Since there's only one driver and those passive radiators get their radiaton from that one driver, it means that not only do they extend the bass, but they mud up all 

the mids as well. This is more noticeable at higher volumes, where the louder mids are also coming from the passive radiators. Of course, since they're still picking up bass that mixes the bass and mids quite a bit and of course, muds up them both. And to top it off, it's all coming from the same driver, so that driver is making both bass and mids to begin with, so it's already muddy by the time it gets to the passive radiators.  They just finish the job.

So because of that, they lose a lot of their quality when you start to turn them up. But since the bass and mids come from the same driver to begin with (as I just said), they're always going to be mixing and mudding each other up. The highs weren't so bad though.

Now, they're also using some fancy chip inside the speaker (called a DSP chip or something) to make the bass and highs louder than the mids. What's wrong there? Well, anyone who doesn't know much about high end audio (basically the average consumer, which is all Bose targets) tends to notice bass and highs the most in a store system. So they did that to impress people who don't know much about real hifi. And it's working, since they do it in a lot of their systems and they always impress the average consumer.

But after all that I just said, I'm sure you already know what's wrong here. The bass is purposely overpowering the mids, and the overpowering bass was one of the first things I noticed. And after all that I explained, this only worsens the muddiness of the sound. I can't help but wonder if Bose wants to co

mpletely erase mids from the sound spectrum. Are they not good enough? Bah.

So after all that, what do they sound like overall? Well to sum it up, muddy bass, muddy mids, the mids and bass tend to "mix," and as a result of that mixing just causes the overall sound to mash up and sound bad. After all I've said though, I do like the design they're doing. Why though? Well imagine if they (or some right-minded audio company) did a three way design with these same types of passive radiators. That way they could separate the lows, mids, and highs, and they could give the passive radiators only to the lows. This way the bass can still be powerful and loud without screwing up everything. A larger bass driver wouldn't hurt, though.

Update: Here's a picture I drew the other day after bothering to finally install Photoshop.

Edit: I forgot to mention that I also tried the JBL Duet 2.0 speakers while I was there. They retail for $50 and I liked them much more. They weren't a whole lot bigger, but just about everything about them sounded better. Well played, JBL.