Selecting the best headphones

HD 428 and HD 515

About me and my music interest:

I am a avid music listener. I listen to music (Trance, Hip Hop, House, Pop, Rock, Metal ...basically everything depending on mood) while walking to work ,back from work ,while working, while driving, while browsing , sometimes while sleeping too. I currently have 5 earphones.

• Some basic Headset that I got from India which now doesn't work.
• My iPod nano first generation earphones
• My Creative in-ear earphones that I got free with my laptop almost 3 years ago
• My Samsung in-ear earphones that I got with my Samsung Captivate phone.
• My Insignia Stereo Bluetooth Headset that I use with my phone and iPod nano most of the time.

I use the iPod earphones at work to listen to songs when I work and my Insignia Bluetooth headset while walking to and from work and when at home I use the Creative earphones.

Among these I love the Bass and audio quality on the Creative Earphones the best. The only problem with these are that I cannot keep it on for long duration of time. I feel that Around Ear Earphones are the most comfortable ones.

The type of headphones available in the market:

There are basically three types of headphones when it comes to fitting. They are:

• In-Ear : These type of earphones go into your ears and give you the best bass and audio quality.Pros: Highest Bass and Audio quality, isolation from outside world, Cons: Safety issue due to isolation, Might become the cause of long term hearing impairment, might get uncomfortable after long listening sessions 
• On-Ear : These type of earphones have your ear sized cushions that sit on your ear and give you a little more comfort than in-Ear Pros: Comfortable, Safe listening Cons: might get uncomfortable after long listening sessions, not enough isolation from outside noise. 
• Around-Ear : These type of earphones have ear cups that cover your ear completely and isolate you from the outer world just like in-ear do but are the most comfortable. The around-ear headphones are sub divided into two types (by Sennheiser atleast) Pros: Most comfortable, Isolation from outside world, Reasonably high bass output and very good audio quality. Cons: Bulky, Expensive, 
• Closed Cup : These type of headphones isolate you and give you a noise cancellation kind of feel and deeper bass than the open-aire counterpart. Pros: Good Bass, Isolation from outside world. Cons: Safety issue due to isolation, 
• Open-Aire : These type of headphones are open. In the sense that you can hear the outside world and the outside world can hear what you are hearing. Not the best bass but has its reasons for having such a feature. Pros: Safe, Higher audio quality Cons: Disturbance to others, Probably not good at noisy places.

Shortlisting the Choices:

Though I had 5 earphone/headphones with me, I wanted to get one of the best Headphones for myself because I wanted to enjoy High Quality audio with comfort so I decided to get Around-Ear headphones. 

My first choice was obviously the obvious one - BOSE. but I didnt want to spend 100s of dollars for a pair of headset. My budget was a max of $100. I came around the a deal from Newegg.com where the Bose Around Ear Headphones were just $79 (originally $129) . I was immediately attracted to it but the reviews were not very impressive. All of buyers who reviewed complained about the build quality of the headband on it. And I agree because by just looking at it you can tell that it is very weak and easily breakable when bent. I thought maybe I should wait a little bit more for the Thanksgiving sale for this price to drop down further :)

My second choice was Sennheiser. I have used Sennheiser headphones when I worked at Juggle.com and they are pretty good. I came across a deal where the Sennheiser HD 201 was for $15 ONLY. I am a high bass fan so I did my research to figure out if this headset had the bass I needed. What I found was that most of the reviews only compared the bass on this model with its higher models, so it was kind of hard to tell how good it was. 

I then noticed that the HD 202 is just a few dollars more than the HD 201 so I shifter my mind from the lowest end model to a higher end one. Then I compared it for Bass and then I reached the other models - HD 205, HD 280 Professional, HD 448, HD 428, HD 333, HD 438, HD 515, HD 510, HD 555,HD 600, HD 800. Most of them were under the $100 budget limit on amazon.com with 2 years manufacturer warranty. I went ahead and compared each and every one with each other and then compared them with Bose. Some of the reviewers mentioned Sony Headphones also to be good. 

I went thourgh cnet.com first but they were very technical and I did not know any technical stuff about the headphones so I skipped to forum, discussion and reviews on various sites. I spent around 2-3 weeks and read over 500 posts and reviews to decide what I wanted to buy. I think that was very thorough though I like to make my own decisions by doing the test and comparison myself instead of listening and basing my decisions completely on others views. :)

The Sennheiser HD 280 Professional was the most highly reviewed / rated headphones in most of the forums. They are what the professional musicians would prefer and next was the Sennheiser HD 555 which is built with lots of super technologies like E.A.R. which has Enhanced channeling and Acoustics. The Hd 280 was over my $100 budget plus didnt look like the model I wanted. So my next choice was HD 555 but it was $99 which is ok but I wanted to explore more options. So I did some more research and compared them to a little lower end models pricewise and quality wise.

One of my friends on twitter (@snehasis) helped me out in deciding the starting point for my search. He suggested to go for HD 448 which was the best value for money according to him. This model is a Closed Cup model while the HD 555 was a Open-Aire model. I wanted to be more clear on this so I googled and found a good explanation to this. Briefly, Open Aire is good for Acoustics and Resonance decrement and decreases the stresss on the ear. the only thing I liked about Closed cup was that most reviews said it has deeper bass compared to the Open Aire counterparts (HD 500 series).

The 500 Series are good for the people who can tell the difference between the smallest beats. Basically for an Audiophile (Maybe I am because I was able to tell the difference :p). After doing all my research I decided to get the Sennheiser HD 515 which was comparable to the HD 555 and better than the HD 448  and CHEAPER!!! by $40 :p

Most of the forums kept saying that Bose is good but overhyped and pricey. Sennheiser is better for personal audio (headphones) market. Bose is great in the Speaker System market. If anyone asks me what home theater audio system would be your dream system answer would obviously be BOSE but headphones, for now, Sennheiser. :)

The purchase:

I ordered the Sennheiser HD 515 and received it on Thursday. I immediately after reaching home from work unpacked it (after collecting it) and started my trials to see how good those are. The first bad impression was that it didnt have the high bass feel that I wanted :(. I used my two earphones output to compare it with my Creative in-ear phones. The Creative was the winner in Bass but the audio quality when I was hearing to Indian songs was A M A Z I N G on the HD 515. 

I was once again in a dilemma whether I should keep my $60 headphones or replace it with the HD 428 which was the same price but supposedly had better Bass output due to its closed cup design. After again wasting some time in research comparing 428 with 515 I decided to order the 428 too and compare it with the 515. I wanted to test these within this week so I ordered with 1 day shipping. I received it on Friday itself! Super fast shipping by Amazon.com I got it 1 day earlier than the estimate Ordered Thurday night and got it Friday morning!

As soon as I received the HD 428 and opened the package, I was surprised to see the differences. The build quality difference was clearly visible. The Hd 428 has a very thing cable compared to the 515 and the cushions were made of cheap plastic cover kind of material on the 428 unlike the cloth/sponge kind of finish on the 515. And the 428 ear cup size was smaller than the 515 thus making it kind of irritating to the ear.

When played and listened to the differences, I didn't feel any Bass difference in them plus the 515 was much better in audio clarity and quality. So, I after testing for around 1 hours decided that HD 515 is here to stay.

After all this now I feel I have made a good decision in buying the HD 515. Its good in audio and comfortable. maybe in future I will get a Bose and compare it with this :P.

Thank You for reading through all this.

Creating partitions in a 64bit Windows 7 Home HP laptop.

The Story:

2 days ago, my friend received his first HP personal laptop. It had a Intel i5 M430 processor, ATI 5450 graphics card with 512 MB dedicated graphics, a 500 GB 7200RPM HDD with one huge C: partition, a recovery partition and HP Tools partition.

The friend wanted me to create multiple partitions for him like I did on my laptop for optimal performance. So, I started doing it for him but after a few failures realized that it was a 64 bit OS and it needed a different version of the software I have been using all these years.(Paragon Partition Manager). While trying to create the partitions I lost all the existing partitions. This post is about how I recovered the system to a working state from a non-working state.


How the situation arrived:


The HDD had a HP Tools partition, a recovery partition with a .wim file and other system files which restored back to how it was before and a C: drive with the rest of the HDD space for windows 7 home premium.

I installed Paragon Partition manager 9 to resize the C: drive which already had the windows OS installed. But this software failed because it was a software not built for the 64 bit systems. So I used the EASEUS  partition manager software and resized the windows partition (C:) to the required size and freeing up the rest of the space, without needing to reinstall the OS.

Next step was to create the other required partitions (D, E , F ....etc). This wasn't happening as expected. Both the softwares were not allowing me to create more partitions out of the unallocated space on the hard disk. So after a lot of time waste doing trials, I ended up using the Windows inbuilt partition manager (Start-> right click (my computer)-> manage -> disk management ) to create the rest of the partitions. Before making the changes it warned us that we will be not able to boot from any other partition other than the one we are currently in. i.e. If we have other OS we will not be able to get in, because it was going to convert the partitions into DYNAMIC partitions.

I then thought, we do not have any other OS so just lets go ahead with this. But, I was wrong. After restarting the PC, we not only lost the recovery feature provided by HP but also lost the windows which was working fine.

I was in a situation where I couldn't restore windows to its previous state or restore from the recovery partition but had to get this working for him. I took it as my responsibility to restore it to working state because I corrupted it.



The time taking process of restoring:


First thing needed to reinstall the windows was to have a recovery disc which we didn't have. So, I googled for Windows 7 Home premium x64 ISO free and downloaded the available free ISO and burned it to a disc and installed the windows in his pc. It was working fine but with lots of missing drivers and missing functionalities what he got when he first received the laptop.

The dynamic partitions that were created were giving lots of problems in restoring the recovery partitions. I tried various methods to restore the .wim file from that partitions and write that image back to the C: to get back the version which was originally provided. After a lot of trials I managed to retrieve the wim file from the recovery partition which was inaccessible. Then tried to write it to the C: but this didn't work.

First thing was to find a 64bit version of the imagex application that is used to apply the image onto a partition. So googling for it got me the version I needed. After applying the retrieved image to the C: , it still didn't work as expected. I kept getting errors about boot errors 0x000000f. I tried various methods to fix this (bootrec.exe to fixmbr and diskpart.exe to re-partition) but no success. I even tried ubuntu and fedore live discs to use their disk partitioning utility but all were leading me to a state where I would have to delete the recovery partition completely. (I needed this partition to recover and be available in the future to my friend for recovery).

I then after lot of thinking re-installed windows 7 again and deleted the D E F ...etc partitions due to which the disk converted into dynamic disk. I looked into Google to convert a dynamic disk to a basic disk type and read a lot of articles on how and what dynamic and basic disk types are and how they effect performance and functionality and customization . Then converted the disk type to basic and tried to restore the .wim again but that again corrupted the master boot record.

After all this failures and the time being 11 PM on Saturday, I decided to install the the windows again and make it working for him without trying to restore from the wim image. I installed windows 7 home premium without any problems this time and was able to successfully find all the drivers and created all the partitions he wanted and was able to reactivate windows this time by calling the Microsoft product activation hotline.



Conclusion:

I wasted a lot of time ( almost 24 hours) on fixing this nonsense issue which I have fixed many times in the past. I could have done what I did at the end much earlier than when I actually did it but I wanted to experiment on this new x64 environment so it was worth the time spent. Basically I finished what I was working on and result was positive. :) Working Windows 7 with genuine software in it :)





What I learnt and enjoyed:

• I waste a lot of time fixing things which I know how to fix because I look for perfection.
• Microsoft has started providing free legal downloadable ISO since Windows 7
• Learnt new things about the partitioning systems (Dynamic disk and basic disk types)
• Got exposure towards Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK)
• Learnt how imagex differs from dism and other tools provided in the Windows AIK
• Learnt that x64 systems will give you a lot of headache compared to x86 systems during software and driver related tasks.
• Realized that most of the new systems have USB device booting options. (previously only few had that)
• Just like when we moved from IDE to SATA disks we had issues with installing windows xp (because they didnt have SATA drivers by default) , the move from x86 to x64 systems have some issues with partitions, OS installations and software
• Got to brush up my skills on system maintenance and work on my favorite passtime/hobby
• Other things that I researched due to this "project" were
• Differences between i3 i5 and i7 processors and the differences between them and core 2 duo family.
• Differences between windows home , professional, ultimate (read again to remember better)

Overall I loved this waste of time. I could have done more important things but doing something what I love is better than doing something that I need to do is good for me, I think (at least right now thats what I think :p)

If you have any questions related this topic or any other topic please ask me. I know I haven't gone too much in detail about how I did everything here so please ask me if you want to know any more details. This was just to share my experience :)

Thank you for reading.

The long search for a song ends after over 10 years

How it began:

Me and my lil bro got interest in music around the year 1997-1998. Before then we didn't have any specific interest in songs. Our dad used to play his collection (Michael Jackson, Boney M, Geroge Michael, Bee Gees) and we used to just listen to it.

First Level: Music System

Our first audio cassette album that we bought was "Aqua - Aquarium" (Rs.125) and first Audio CD was "Michael Jackson's - Blood on the dance floor" (Rs.599). Those were very expensive back then but well worth it!

Next Level : Channel [V] and MTv

We used to watch some awesome music shows on Channel V and MTV. Our favorite show on [V] was "Turn on t[V]" and on MTv was "Non-Stop Hits". Back then it was all English songs, no Hindi songs in India. Me and my bro used to sit in front of the TV and connect the TV with our music system to listen to our favorite songs out loud.

We had a lot of favorite songs. We used to buy the cassettes with the hits in it (Now 5, Max 4 etc.). We started remembering artists and their songs. We got so used to listening songs that we could tell the artist by just listening to the songs or voices in the songs.

Lost in time:

There were a few songs though which we heard once and loved but never got a chance to hear again. These were the songs whose tunes were stuck in our head for years together and we couldn't figure out 'who the artist was' or 'what the song name was' or 'what the lyrics was'.

New Generation of search:

As the years went by, new technologies and websites like Youtube emerged, in which we were able to find some of the songs from our list of "tunes in the head" by just entering some of the words from the song.

For example: one of the words from a song stuck in my head was "....Smashing...." so I searched for it and found "smashing pumpkins" but wasn't sure if it was the one I was looking for. I heard each and every song of theirs' to find the one I wanted and I found it. And realized that the song had no lyrics with the word "smashing" in it anywhere. The word in the song which I was thinking to be "smashing" was actually "perfect", LOL.

But one song was still creeping in our heads... what was it? :

Slowly as the years went by further, we found most of them. BUT there was one music video which was stuck scene by scene in our head and we knew just two words from the songs which sounded like "...Paaale Paramu..." (doesn't even make sense, right?) . The video had two kids travelling all over the world on a Magic carpet like the one in Aladdin. We tried the same type of search for this song too. i.e. searched for the keywords and we even tried magic carpet ride etc but no luck :(.

Its been 13 years since we first saw that video and that video and tune is still stuck in our head.

How did I come across it:

Since a past few years with the upcoming of online radio, I have started listening to songs 24x7. I Work, eat, and even sleep with music on the radio.

THE DAY! - April 7th 2010 (almost 13 years after first hearing the song)

Today I was listening to one of the electronica station on iTunes and I came across a remix song which seemed to have the tune which I have been looking for all these years. I noted down the name of that song and did a youtube search and found the original song with DVD video quality and there it was!!!!.

I was getting chills and a great sense of accomplishment when I found this music video after 13 years of looking for it. Now I feel like one of my biggest tasks in life has been done. :P I cant even think of any other song which I have been looking for and haven't found.

There was a question in my mind as soon as found it.

"What next...?"