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If music be the food of love
Thursday, March 17th, 2005 12:14 pmToday I decided that I would have music on my trip to work, having splashed out the readies on a shiny, new Sony NW-HD3.
The trip proved to my satisfaction that people who wear headphones whilst travelling on the Tube - or at least the underground sections, ie. most of it, are either fooling themselves, deafening themselves, or making some kind of fashion statement. Once you get underground and on to a train, any pretence of listening to music in any meaningful form is pointless. You just can't hear enough of it to enjoy it. Oddly, this is more true of the Victoria Line than it is of the Northern. For some reason, the former, whilst being decades newer than the Northern, is a great deal louder; the underground acoustics and track rattle are noticeably more intrusive than on the older line. I don't know why that should be.
And there's nothing like trying to listen to music to make you realise just how loud the background noise is in a central London street, too. I've noticed sometime back, that it's almost impossible to use a mobile phone in Victoria Street, particularly, unless you have a newer model with a speaker phone, or are prepared to saunter onto a quieter backstreet. It seems this is equally true of music on headphones, though to a lesser degree. Coming out of the underground onto Vauxhall Bridge Road, it was barely quieter than the Victoria Line. Mind, the street sweeper machine had a hand in that.
Nonetheless, I am impressed with my new purchase, which is smaller than a packet of cigarettes, but has a 20G HDD on it. And Sony's proprietary recording format is pretty good, too. I copied some MP3s to the machine last night, and then ripped a few CDs into ATRAC format, which was both quick and created much smaller files at no obvious quality loss. I have read that some people don't like the sonicstage software. I do. It's easy to use and intelligent.
For some reason, the machine doesn't do playlists, but that's not a problem for me, particularly. If I want to listen to more than one album, I can set it to "play all" and shuffle. And if I want to keep it to a single genre, you can make pseudo playlists by creating compilation CD entries. Same thing as never no mind.
Until you can hardwire the audio centres in your brain to bypass your ears, though, you ain't ever going to get to listen to decent music on the underground.
The trip proved to my satisfaction that people who wear headphones whilst travelling on the Tube - or at least the underground sections, ie. most of it, are either fooling themselves, deafening themselves, or making some kind of fashion statement. Once you get underground and on to a train, any pretence of listening to music in any meaningful form is pointless. You just can't hear enough of it to enjoy it. Oddly, this is more true of the Victoria Line than it is of the Northern. For some reason, the former, whilst being decades newer than the Northern, is a great deal louder; the underground acoustics and track rattle are noticeably more intrusive than on the older line. I don't know why that should be.
And there's nothing like trying to listen to music to make you realise just how loud the background noise is in a central London street, too. I've noticed sometime back, that it's almost impossible to use a mobile phone in Victoria Street, particularly, unless you have a newer model with a speaker phone, or are prepared to saunter onto a quieter backstreet. It seems this is equally true of music on headphones, though to a lesser degree. Coming out of the underground onto Vauxhall Bridge Road, it was barely quieter than the Victoria Line. Mind, the street sweeper machine had a hand in that.
Nonetheless, I am impressed with my new purchase, which is smaller than a packet of cigarettes, but has a 20G HDD on it. And Sony's proprietary recording format is pretty good, too. I copied some MP3s to the machine last night, and then ripped a few CDs into ATRAC format, which was both quick and created much smaller files at no obvious quality loss. I have read that some people don't like the sonicstage software. I do. It's easy to use and intelligent.
For some reason, the machine doesn't do playlists, but that's not a problem for me, particularly. If I want to listen to more than one album, I can set it to "play all" and shuffle. And if I want to keep it to a single genre, you can make pseudo playlists by creating compilation CD entries. Same thing as never no mind.
Until you can hardwire the audio centres in your brain to bypass your ears, though, you ain't ever going to get to listen to decent music on the underground.