“When I’m alone, in my phones…” Well I can relate to that (thanks St. Etienne) and even say my new headphones are a life saver. Bolted down to a chair in the middle of a bustling software development department, perfectly positioned for the acoustics to amplify the sounds of programming babble and nasal snot sucking, it’s hard to block out the noise and concentrate on my own work. I usually just plug in dangly cheap earbuds, but unless I really crank it I can’t hear much detail from the music, and I get a ton of detail from all the chatter outside of the music. I know the clunky headphones are great for getting deep into the atmosphere, opening up nuances, and blocking out the outside. But I must have geothermal earlobes because they start to bake like a pan of hot fudge brownies after a few minutes. Has anyone invented liquid nitrogen cooled head cans yet?

My wife splurged on my behalf and got me a set of noisemuffs to take to work. I see practically everyone else doing it, so I won’t feel out of place. I just keep a bucket of ice at my desk to slip in when the heat redlines, but it’s a good tradeoff. It’s great to hear the bassline again! That’s the first thing to go when you skimp on power and good eqipment (just before hearing loss from all that focused noise). I’m going back through my set of MP3s to hear what I’ve missed all this time. Usually it’s a tremendous pain to mount dorkphones on your cranium just to listen in on some sappy tunes, so it’s sufficient to tune into Pandora or your Amazon Cloud Player collection with flimsy plugs squeaking in your ears. It’s laughable to think of packing a portable CD player around, along with your set of a thousand discs.

Amazon and iTunes should really concede that we’re all going to listen to their MP3s on low-end hardware (or worse) and encode for low expectations, like 32 kbps. Then they should give a flat 25% discount on the cost alone just for cutting out the entire bass range. No bass, just mid-range and tweaky treble. Who engineers for nuance and a bassline anymore anyway? I miss the large format packaging too, with all the massive yet grainy photos of the band in bell bottoms and buttons open down to the chest fur. Ok, for the full price of a legal MP3 download, how about high bit rate and a pdf download of album artwork and liner notes? Sometimes a printable prop, like a Kiss ‘Love Gun‘ or a Metallica cease and desist letter?