Headphone Review: Audio Technica ATH ANC7B Noise-Canceling Headphones

Buy from Amazon.com | Amazon UK | Amazon FR

I don’t travel much, so I’ve never needed noise-canceling headphones before. But recently I had a need for them: there is construction right next to my home, and it should last for several long months. In addition, there’s a small stream next to my house, and it is, at times, noisy enough that I can’t listen to music outside with normal headphones.

To this end, I looked at what was available, and asked some colleagues (notably my Macworld colleague and headphone specialist Dan Frakes) for some advice. Many people recommend Bose’s QuietComfort headphones, but they’re a pricey $300 (actually much more here in France), roughly twice as much as the Audio Technicas I bought.

So, how do they sound? Pretty good, actually. The noise canceling is efficient and works well even without listening to music. When I just want silence as they backhoe is digging outside, they cover most of the noise. When I listen to music, the soundstage is good, with decent detail, but they are a bit bass-heavy and treble-weak. I don’t like using EQ on an iPod, but when I’ve got them plugged into my stereo, I alter the bass and treble settings.

These headphones come in a practical carry case, have cables that unplug from the headphones using a standard jack, and come with two such cables. They’re light, not too hot to wear, but they’re not very big. I have large ears, and they just barely fit, pushing my earlobes a bit upwards, but not to the point of discomfort.

I’ve not tried any other models, but can compare them with other headphones I have. They don’t have the best possible sound, but they do what they are designed for, and are affordable. So, if you want something that is an alternative to the pricier Bose models, you should try this one out.

Headphone Review: Sennheiser PX 100 II-i

Buy from Amazon.com

For the past few years, my headphone of choice for listening to music on my iPods was the Sennheiser PX 100, a lightweight, inexpensive headphone with surprisingly good sound for the money. A month ago, however, the cable just before the jack broke, and it was time to replace them. The PX 100 has had excellent reviews for years, and was well appreciated by users and journalists alike, but is no longer made. I turned to the PX 100 II-i, a third iteration of the model, which is the most recent version of the headphones, released last year.

Like the original PX 100, the PX 100 II-i is a folding headphone, with a small on-ear earcup. It’s light, there’s no pressure on the ears, and they are fully open: you can hear everything around you. This headphone is excellent for listening when you’re outdoors, where it is important to hear sounds, especially if you’re walking in the city. They do not, of course, limit any sounds, so if you want headphones that do this, you will need to look elsewhere. (I’ll be posting a review of a recently purchased noise-canceling headphone soon.)

The sound quality of this headphone is, as I’ve mentioned, excellent for its size and price. New with this model is an inline remote control that works with iPods and other iOS devices (as well as Macs, and, perhaps, other computers). You can change the volume, and pause what you’re listening to, and, with a double-press, skip to the next track. This remote is also a mic, if you have an iPhone (which I don’t).

However, a valid question is whether it is worth some $25 more just for this remote. (The Sennheiser PX 100-II is currently selling for $65 at Amazon; it is the same as the PX 100 II-i, but without the remote. The PX 100 II-i sells for $90.) I find the remote useful when I’m listening to music both outdoors and even when I listen to my iPod in bed. My iPod touch has an external volume control, but my iPod classic does not. In addition, the controls are positioned about 8 inches from the headphones, so they are easily accessible. Nevertheless, it’s a bit of a premium to pay just for a couple of buttons. (Though it’s certainly more useful if you have an iPhone.)

My only gripe is that the cord itself is rather flimsy, and I’ve already gotten it snagged on doorknobs a few times. It comes out of just the left side of the headphones, unlike the PX 100, which had a double cord that met in the center. That is a bit odd, as all my other headphones have a central cord; that may explain, in part, why I’ve been clumsy with it.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with the PX 100 II-i. I use it often – either when listening to my iPod outdoors, on my daily walk, or, at times, when watching a DVD on my laptop. The sound is clean and crisp, though the bass is weak, which is to be expected from such a small headphone. (I don’t listen to a lot of bass-heavy music.) If you want good sound in a light, folding headphone, the Sennheiser’s PX series is great choice. Either the PX 100 II-i with the inline remote, or the PX 100-II without it, will provide you with great sound and comfort.

Note: no review unit was provided; I paid for these out of pocket. For the record, I have another Sennheiser headphone – HD 580 – and I’ve only once been disappointed by Sennheiser’s products.

Why Use VueScan?

I just got a new scanner – a Canon CanoScan LIDE210. I’ve used Canon scanners for many years, and have always been satisfied, but my current (now previous) scanner, an LIDE70, was about six years old, and relatively slow. I want to scan some books, and I wanted something that is faster.

The LIDE210 claims to scan letter-sized documents in 10 seconds; this was born out in my tests using the scanner’s own software. But I wanted to try out VueScan, which is said, by some, to be far superior to general scanning software. When scanning the same type of document, just to save as an image – with roughly the same settings as the Canon software – it took about a minute to scan. The program may have advanced features for scanning photos, but I don’t plan to do that. At most, I’ll be scanning CD liner notes to use as album art.

So, are any of my readers VueScan users? If so, what do you see in the program? Any idea why it is so slow? Am I perhaps missing something?

Disappointed by Sennheiser’s Wireless Headphones

I’ve long wanted wireless headphones. Not only to listen to music at home without wires, but to listen outdoors, controlling iTunes with my iPod touch and Apple’s Remote app, being able to flip through anything in my music collection, rather than being limited to what’s on my iPod.

Many years ago, I tried wireless headphones, but the static from interference with my home phone was terrible. But recently, having seen very good reviews for Sennheiser’s current wireless headphones, I ordered the RS 180 model, which is the best of three available. It offers transmission of up to 100 meters (line of sight, of course), and has, apparently, the best sound quality of the three models.

Alas, all was not as expected. In spite of what many reviews say, there was a very noticeable hiss coming from the headphones. I tried turning off all my wireless devices – my AirPort base station and my phones – but the hiss was still there. Either these headphones were getting interference from somewhere, or I had a defective unit.

I bought these from Amazon, and I was hoping that I could contact Sennheiser for technical support, to find out if there was anything I needed to check. But Sennheiser does not offer any technical support; none at all. Tech support for their products is provided by the reseller, and Amazon is certainly not the one to go for with this type of question.

So I was left with two choices: return them for a refund, or for exchange. It so happened that when I went to process the return on line, the headphones were not in stock, and wouldn’t be for 1-2 months, according to Amazon FR. Oh well, here’s a fine example of a tech company not only losing a sale, but getting a pissed-off customer at the same time. I have two other Sennheiser headphones, and I like them very much, but the next time I buy new headphones, I’ll find a brand that does offer tech support in case I do have any problems or questions.

Looking for Scanner Recommendations

Someone I follow on Twitter has been posting about making a DIY book scanner. I found the idea interesting, but realized that this could help me with a problem. I have a number of old books I want to read (old being 30-50 years or so), and it turns out that I have an allergy to something in a number of these books. So I thought that if I could scan them to PDF, then read them on my iPad, it would solve my problem.

The scanner I have is a 5-year-old Canon LIDE 70. It’s sufficient for the rare documents or CD inserts I scan, but it’s very slow. If I were to scan books – from 200 to 400 pages each, and there are, currently, a half-dozen of them – I’d want something faster. I’d also want something that could handle the book scanning process without my having to stop and validate settings, save files, etc.

So, does anyone have a recommendation for a not-too-expensive scanner that would do what I need?

Home Theater, “HD” Audio, and What I Don’t Understand

I find the whole home theater thing a huge frustration. The number of cables I have to use to connect a blu-ray player, an Apple TV and a satellite TV box is astounding. The amount of time I had to spend to set everything up and getting it working correctly is also far more than it takes to set up a new computer. But I’m getting increasingly confused. Something happened recently, and I can’t figure out what is going on.

I bought a blu-ray player for my son’s birthday in October. It was a Sony, and there was a promotion through which I sent in a proof of purchase and got three free movies on blu-ray. Nothing extraordinary, but one of them (Gran Torino) was a movie that I had wanted to see. I’ve noticed since that, with all three movies, I can only get stereo sound; I don’t get any kind of surround sound. The movies have sound in either Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD, and, as far as I can tell from my documentation, my blu-ray player (bought a year ago) supports these formats. However, it seems that they only support the multi-channel audio through HDMI.

My amp – also a Sony – doesn’t seem to work with audio coming over HDMI, so I have everything going in digitally via co-axial cable or Toslink. Because of this, if I understand correctly, I can only get stereo sound with blu-ray disks. (My amp does seem to recognize that it’s getting 6 channels, displaying, for example, “DTS 3/2.1″ on its LCD when the sound starts.) Does this mean that my amp – about three years old – is already obsolete? I’m certainly not going to buy any more blu-ray discs if I only get stereo sound; the picture quality is better than DVD, but not by that much (here in France, DVDs are 576 px, compared to 480 in the US).

What irks me most, though, is that these new patented sound formats are forcing people to upgrade their equipment to be able to use new media. All DVDs have options between stereo and 5.1 sound; why don’t these blu-ray discs offer another 5.1 sound format that is compatible with older devices? Also, as I look at new Sony AV amps, I see that not all of them support these “HD” formats, and one has to go to a fairly high price to get such support.

I’m quite confused. Why are blu-rays being sold that provide an inferior sound experience? I only have a few – a box set of Band of Brothers, which has 5.1 sound that I can here, some classical music DVDs, which all have 5.1 sound options that work for me, and these three new ones that I got for free.

If anyone could help me better understand why I’m not able to get decent sound, I’d appreciate it.

Follow-up: After a few hours searching, I came across a forum post discussing a solution to the same problem. I reset the sound fields on my amp (whatever that means), and it is now playing the 5.1 track. In another forum, I saw the following:

If a disc has a TrueHD track it has to also contain a DD 5.1 track too. This can be either visible on the menus or hidden so it looks like there isn’t one. Either way the player will simply use the DD 5.1 track for legacy outputs, it doesn’t down-convert.

So apparently there is backwards compatibility, even though it’s not clearly indicated on the discs’ boxes.

Here are the devices I have. Should anyone search via Google for the same issue, this might help them find a solution. The blu-ray player is a Sony BDP-S360, and the amp is a Sony HT-DDW890.

Improved Searches on Kirkville with Relevanssi

I’ve recently installed the Relevanssi WordPress plug-in, by Mikko Saari, to improve search functionality here at Kirkville. WordPress’s searching, out of the box, pretty much sucks. It just returns a bunch of stories, with no context for the search terms, and no filtering of the results in order of search relevance. If you have tried searching here in the past, you probably didn’t find what you were looking for; or didn’t find what’s really there in all my posts and articles.

Relevanssi solves this problem by providing a relevance-based search engine, which sorts search results on a page with short excerpts and highlights your search terms. (These are options that can be tweaked in the plug-in’s settings. I chose to use 100-word excerpts and yellow text background for highlighting.) You’ll find that searching now is useful here. If you’re looking for specific books, music, iTunes features or iPod tweaks, try entering a couple of search terms in the box to the right and see what turns up. Thanks to Mikko for developing this plug-in; it’s very useful, and I think a lot of other WordPress users will want to try it out.

BBEdit – The Text Editor for Processing Words – Updated

I wrote the following back in 2005, and I felt it needed updating. I use BBEdit regularly, for more and more writing tasks, and I feel it’s one of the best tools on the Mac platform. While I don’t write much code, much of my writing includes code, such as HTML tags, so BBEdit makes it easy to deal with ordinary text and code together. Read on…

Like many writers, I perform a variety of tasks that involve producing and processing words. For some of these tasks, I am free to choose the tool of my choice, whereas others have external constraints that require me to use a specific word processor. And that specific program is Microsoft Word. But many tasks allow me to choose the tool I want to use. BBEdit, from Bare Bones Software, is becoming the text editor I turn to most often when I have only text to process.

When writing computer books, Word is the de facto standard: while you might be able to use Unix/Linux tools with certain publishers, most of the books I’ve penned are built on Word templates, which contain specific styles set up by the publishers so they can easily transfer the text into their page-layout programs. In addition to these styles, Word is the best tool for tracking changes and comments, as well as passing texts through the complex review process that computer books undergo.The same used to be true for articles I write for Macworld magazine. Macworld recently shifted from Word templates to a tag-based system, which allows me to write in any text editor. Word is still the standard for tracking changes, comments and queries. (How I wish there were a text editor that could handle change tracking and comments the way Word does…)