Ear phones: your best friends, and how to choose them

That's a crappy title; Anyway if you travel a lot, or like listening to your music on your cell phone or mp3 player then you would've definitely given your earphones a thought. For me, I love cycling and I love listening to music while cycling(at a very low volume, of course). So my requirements were:

• Good Sound
• Comfort
• Durability

I used to use the Sennheiser MX 170's, they cost about Rs.500, they were great and really comfortable too; but after 2-3 months of use, they started jarring and soon there was a loose connection in one of the sides rendering them completely unusable. I was really disappointed. 

It was probably because I abused them really badly, like literally abused them. I used them when I was cycling, so they were getting tugged and moved around a lot and once I was done, I just stuffed them into my pocket. On the other hand, my friend has been using them well for over a year now, and he's had no complaints. 

<3

The ones I'm presently using, I am ABSOLUTELY in love with them. I've use the Klipsch S3's for over a year now, and they haven't failed to blow my mind since the day my friends gave them to me. They're insanely well balanced and they come in a nice pouch, so that retards like me won't store them in their pockets. 

Yes, they're a lot more expensive than the Sennheiser at around Rs.2300, but I feel they're worth every rupee.  

While we're on the topic of ear phones, I thought I would do something different for this post. I decided to ask my awesome friend Akshay Cadambi a few questions and post the answers in a sort of interview style. A little background: I met Akshay in the first year of college and we shared many interests including guitars and metal music. He's been playing guitar since his high school days and he still plays and records songs at home. He is an audio freak, so much so that he plans to pursue his graduate course in acoustic sciences and signal processing. Anyway, he knows a _lot_ about ear phones; so without further ado, here's the interview. 

---

Me: Which ear phones do you own? 

Akshay:     I currently own the Denon AH-C260.

---

Me: What research did you do before purchasing your earphones?

Akshay:     I specifically wanted in-ear earphones because I wanted to listen to music on the bus. I started off by identifying the earphones that were within my price range. I then scouted the internet for any and all reviews about these specific earphones. Things that were in my checklist were durability, because it would reside in my bag; comfort and isolation, because I'm going to be using it in a noisy bus; tight bass, but not too exaggerated; clear but not too overpowering mids; and highs that sparkle, but are slightly rolled off. Considering my budget I knew that I couldn't expect a massive sound stage and hence it wasn't a consideration in my search.

The Denons pretty much hit every box on my checklist, except for noise isolation and durability. To improve Isolation, I bought foam tips. And considering I'm a bit of a freak when it comes to keeping things safe, durability wasn't much of a problem. 

---

Me: You bought special tips for your earphones, tell us about them.

Silicone Tips

Akshay:     This was actually an add on that I started using about 6 months after purchasing my Denons. I found that the silicone ear-tips that came with them did not fit very well, and as a result, I was losing out on sound isolation, which was one of the main reasons I bought them in the first place. Additionally, I learned that the role of isolation is paramount in bringing out the bass response in the earphones. After a couple of minutes of use, the bass slowly starts to slip away as the ambient noise creeps in. So, in order to keep the sound consistent, I would have to keep pushing the tips in every one or two songs.

Foam Tips

I started reading about after-market replacement ear-tips, and not too long after that I ended up buying foam tips. While there are many types of tips available, foam tips, as a concept, seemed to appeal to me the most. Foam tips are essentially made of memory foam. The idea here is that you squeeze the tips into a tiny cylinder before inserting them into your ear, and a few seconds after you insert them, they expand to fill up the shape of your ear canal. This did wonders for noise isolation. The only minor trade off was that the bass response is slightly lacking in comparison to silicone tips. But considering the consistency in the sound I was getting, this was hardly a loss. 

---

Me:Any last words for people who want to buy new ear phones?

Akshay:    There are two ways you can buy ear phones. The first way, you just go out to the store and buy the most expensive set of earphones you can afford. If you like them, you're done. If you don't, tough luck. The second way, you do painstaking research looking for the perfect earphones for you. Considering the obsessive lunatic that I am, I follow the latter. This is solely because earphones are so subjective that most people forget to understand that you are looking for the best earphones for you, and no one else. Let me try to explain my beliefs, the processes that I follow and the notions that I have developed over the time I've spent researching earphones.

I am strongly of the opinion that before thinking about buying earphones, you need to really understand the sonic elements in the music you listen to. A lot of things play a role in an enjoyable listening experience: the listener's perception of the elements in the music, the elements existing in the music, and the earphones' capability to reproduce these elements. Of these, only two are in the listener's control, and the other is in the hands of the artist and producer. However, these are all distinct, and exclusive of each other. 

If you were listening to Rush's Counterparts album, you would notice that the bass-lines are really amazing, super crisp and almost have a sound definition that slightly resembles that of a guitar; and the cymbals sound really sparkly and precise. The idea is to identify and create this kind of intuition towards the different sounds that interest you within your music. This is the most important part, because knowing what interests you in your music would later help you identify that perfect earphone based on the reviews you read.

Next, you need to gain a general understanding of the part of the spectrum in which these elements lie. For example, if I was talking about the cymbals, a bit of google-ing would tell me that they lie in the higher part of the frequency spectrum, or simply, the highs. 
You then start to scout extensively for reviews of earphones that adhere to your budget and the form factor. If you're not used to reading earphone reviews, the adjectives used may seem a bit strange to you. But no knowledge is more than a google search away. This link is a good place to start to get an idea. If you really pay attention, you will start to see a correlation between these adjectives and the ideas you had about your music.

Geddy Lee, Bass player for Rush, Lead Vocalist, God

The idea, in general, is to match the earphones to your perception of the music. So when you see a review which says the highs are too sizzly, then its probably not the best for the aforementioned cymbal quality in Rush that I observed. Or, if the bass was described as thick, then i probably wouldn't imagine Geddy Lee's bass lines to be very crisp on them. Since reviews are subjective, a useful review is one that describes the aesthetics of the sound of the earphones. A review which talks about how 'good' the bass is doesn't really tell you anything about what the bass sounds like, except the fact that the reviewer really liked how it sounds.

Further, you need to be considering the comfort of the earphones. If you are looking at headphones, you can simply try them on and get an idea, but with in-ear earphones, stores normally don't let you try them on for hygiene reasons. Once again, you will have to resort to trusting online reviews. The general rule of thumb with online shopping is that if there are too many complaints, stay away from it! A good place to find reviews is head-fi. They have a comprehensive list of reviews for almost every set of earphones that exist. Also, you can ask many reviewers additional questions and they are usually nice enough to answer you. TotallyDubbed has some really great reviews on his website and he played a role in my decision on the Denons.

I have to say at this point that I'm no expert, but I have done my homework. So take what I say with a pinch of salt. And I hope you have just a great time looking for earphones as I did. 

---

What a great guy. I won't lie to you, there was a lot that I learnt from this interview. To summarize; 

1. Know what kind of music you listen to, and more than that but more importantly know what kind of sound you would like from your earphones. 
2. Take care of your earphones; I can't emphasize on this enough. DON'T STUFF them into your pocket.
3. Read lots of reviews, ask your friends, ask Akshay(his twitter handle is @AkshayCadambi.
4. After you buy them, don't be afraid to try different tips shapes and materials. Here's even a neat instructable about how to make your own foam tips! 

Let us know about your ear phone experiences by commenting! 

Today's #CheckItOut song is an absolute treat to listen to on headphones: it's Adolescents by Incubus!

Sigh..

Ear phones: your best friends, and how to choose them.

8 Bits of Audio

We've all played Super Mario, Excitebike and Contra, and we've all heard the really catchy songs, but how do they make them? I'm talking, of course, about 8 bit Audio!

Highly recommend you listening to this as you read this post :P

So what is 8 Bit Audio? 

8 Bit audio is a method of recording, storing and playing audio. The 8 in 8 bits stands for the number of bits assigned to each sample. 

To get samples, you need to sample the original song. 

'Sampling' is almost exactly like it sounds like; Imagine there's a long buffet line, and some of it looks great, but you are never going to be able to eat everything on the buffet line.. So what you do is, you walk from the beginning to the end, trying out just a little bit of everything that you like and then you give it a score in your head.
Believe it or not, that's the same principle used when converting analog audio to digital audio! Since you can't store an infinite number of samples on a finite space of memory, we go along the waveform of the song and at certain intervals of time, we 'sample' it.

The blue dots, are the samples, and 'T' is the time between each sample

And we store just the values at those points, and the time between each 'sample'. So now, we can reconstruct the entire waveform!

Of course, to store these values in computers and digital media; we store them in our memory chips, in the form of bits.


We know that a 'bit' is the most basic unit of information or computing in digital devices. It's actually the status of a switch.
A switch can either be 'ON' or 'OFF'. We use this binary system because we have these tiny electronically controllable switches called transistors. These transistor switches are so frikkin small these days, that modern graphics cards have more than 3 billion of them!

On a side note, the field of Quantum Computing is gaining some ground, of late. The idea is a bit can either be 1 or 0, but a qubit can be in ANY NUMBER OF STATES.
I don't even know what that means yet, but the evil geniuses at Google and NASA are getting together to try things, as explained in this vague yet entertaining video.

So anyway, the idea is, more the number of bits per sample, more the different 'versions' of samples that can be stored. It's like, having two coins, there are only four ways of arranging them, but having three coins gives you EIGHT ways of arranging them. Just like that, having eight bits to represent a sample would mean you have 2⁸= 256 different types of samples! And that's a good thing as you can see from the from the following picture:

Picture taken from a book called Introduction to Audio By Peter Utz

So we can see that from the very blurry picture above, that the more number of bits you use to store a sample, the more 'faithful' the output wave shape is to the original wave shape.

The first video games tried to use cassette tape or other ways to produce the background score, but these were prone to breakage and everything, so they decided to store the music on special chips. These chips had the samples stored in them, and the samples were accessed as needed, sent to a Digital To Analog Converter and they were probably amplified and sent to a speaker. 

These are the songs that we've all heard throughout our childhood(s?) and people still love them now! There's a whole mainstream genre called Chiptunes. And they are simply awesome. 

One of the most popular chiptunes bands out there is Anamanaguci:

                               

But really my favourite 8 bit song is this version of Aces High by Iron Maiden :D

                               

And you can find the 8 bit version of pretty much any song on Youtube, so go out and discover your favourite 8 bit songs my readers(?)!

Speaking of songs from video games, today's #CheckItOut song is Derezzed by Daft Punk, from the OST of the movie Tron: Legacy

                                   

and here's the 8 Bit version. ;)

xkcd - Audiophiles

Drawdio: Your very own simple DIY synthesizer

I've always loved making things, especially things that glow or make noises. If you're weird like that too, you'll love this project.

All you need is a pencil and few components from SP Road(if you live in Bangalore, else you can ask an EE friend of your's to point you to the place where 'you buy resistors and stuff')

The way it works is, there is a 555 chip on the circuit board.

The 555 chip is nothing to be scared of, it's just a chip that is used to generate square waves of your desired frequency and amplitude and this happens through pin 3.

You vary the frequency by varying the resistance between two pins(specifically pins 2 and 7). But the crazy thing about this project is that YOUR BODY is part of that resistance. So if you're a resistor, one hand is touching the contact on the pencil and your other hand is touching another part that you drew or flowing water or whatever. So the frequency of the sound changes as you change where your hand is touching!

I highly recommend that you try this out because it looks like awesome fun and I'll put a post if I get to make one of these too.

Check out the video of the awesome folks from make showing us how to make one:

Today's #CheckItOut song is a weird one that you could probably cover with your Drawdio, it's called Moisturize The Situation by Consider The Source!

People of Music Tech: Ray Kurzweil

The first time I heard about Ray Kurzweil was when someone showed me a TED video, I think, where he was talking about Singularity.

What's singularity, you ask?

Singularity is the point in the future when artificial intelligence will be finally better than human intelligence.

Exactly like the movie The Matrix.

Singularity also happens to be an awesome song by Textures.





It sounds like crazy talk but he makes a lot of sense, and he thought it was really important, and he co-founded of The Singularity University where people discuss the implications of Singularity happening, whether to prevent it, or whatever. And apparently other things.

He's also an inventor, a futurist and right now, director of engineering at Google. He's also written a lot of crazy books.

But what does he have to do with music?

So apparently Ray founded his first company at the age of 25, Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc and he invented the the first omni-font optical character recognition system and also the Kurzweil Reading Machine; It was a handy scanner that blind people could use to scan text, and the machine would read it out to them.

Now this is where Stevie Wonder comes into the picture; Stevie is an extremely talented and popular blind musician and it so happened that him and Ray were really good friends. One day they were talking about how the synthesizers and other electronic instruments were no match compared to the grand piano.

This is when Ray must have thought "Oh, we're pretty good at synthesizing sound from computers and stuff, I don't think it will be too hard to replicate the sounds of a grand piano", and later went on to start Kurzweil Music Systems.


They came out with their first synthesizer, the K250. It was the first electronic musical instrument which produced sound derived from sampled sounds burned onto integrated circuits known as Read Only Memory (ROM), and the cool thing was, you could update the software on these ROM's, which was pretty crazy at the time!
They now have more than twenty models of keyboards and synthesizers and they are used by many, many artists.

So thank you, Mr. Kurzweil for your contribution to music technology, other things, and for generally being a crazy mofo.

Check out Supersition by Stevie Wonder!

What is this Equalizer you speak of?

We've all seen it somewhere or the other; In media player applications or actual graphic equalizers on your home stereo system.

Shiiiny

But if you've always wondered what it is, read on, my wayward son.

Before I begin, you need to know a little bit about natural sound: actually a single bit that we always forget:

Natural sound is a signal with many, many frequencies.

But wait! What is frequency?

It is the rate per second of a vibration constituting a wave, either in a material (as in sound waves), or in an electromagnetic field (as in radio waves and light).

HOLD ON THERE A MINUTE. Why is sound a wave? I mean what is a wave?

She is waving

      

Ocean is waving

He is weaving

So, a wave just so happens to be anything that moves to and fro with a certain period and transfers energy through that motion. 

What many people forget(myself included) is that sound is just air particles compressing and expanding in free space. If there was no air, there would be no sound. And the energy of the compression and expansion is transferred with some loss to other air particles and that's why, more the distance, more the loss! 

So great! Sound is a wave!! And what's the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of a wave? 

Keeeeee...

Probably that. That's called a sine wave. It's smooth, it's beautiful, easy to imagine and hence easier to perform calculations on. Now the thing to remember is that, air particles are NOT travelling through space the same way as depicted(i.e; up and down and up and down and.. ) but, what is being depicted by the sine wave is the variations in air pressure with time! So if you plotted a sine wave with time on the x - axis(the horizontal axis) and magnitude of air pressure on the y - axis(the vertical axis), and you drew a sine wave in that graph and somehow replicated the variations around you, you would hear, exactly this.

Now that isn't very interesting, just imagine if all sounds that you could ever hear came from this video.

I assume that some of you might want to know what 'Hz' means, and that has to do with frequency. Frequency is just a fancy word that means 'the number of times a wave repeats itself'.  And specifically frequency in Hertz is just the SI unit for 'the number of times a wave repeats itself in 1 second'. 

Coming back to the point; natural sound is thus much more complex than simple sine waves. A sound you might hear might contain the sum of various sounds, and each of these sounds are sums of other sounds; by sums, I mean two signals added like this: 

So what you end up with is really messed up: 

WHAT IS THIS I DON'T EVEN

But, I have some good news! You don't have to worry about any of this because your brain takes care of everything for you, you spoilt brat! So now we know that natural sound is actually the sum of different waves of different frequencies.

So coming back to the actual point of this post; An equalizer is a device used to selectively 'boost' or 'weaken' the loudness of certain frequencies in a song. 

For example: 

This song, has a constant 'beat' going and has a constant guitar part too. So if you wanted the beats to be louder than the guitar part, we now know that the beat is really 'bass-y', meaning it belongs to the lower end of the spectrum and we give that part a boost.

If you wanted to increase just the amount of 'high' sounds there are, like the guitar, you can boost the higher frequencies.

So you guys can now mess around with the equalizer settings more responsibly and hopefully, you can find that one setting that you will fall in love with! For me, it's the smiley curve:

:)

I discovered it as a preset on iTunes, and use some variation of it almost everywhere.

Here's your #CheckItOut song of the day: Reset by Mutemath!