Bought a pair of TDK earbuds apparently designed by some
fellow with a doctorate in earbud design (I assume. He’s called Doctor Dray or
something like that. I surmise he’s some distinguished English audiophile who
could tell the difference in quality from leads made with slightly different
alloys) mostly because they were the most decent sounding pieces I could find.
I’d bought a pair of generic, unbranded ones a week earlier and they’d sounded
like someone shitting straight into my ear.
Well it turns out this particular pair the doctor must have
made for that hippity hoppity stuff or something because the low end is
stupidly powerful, so much so that it drowns out any kind of proper singing or
progressive/solo guitar work, which makes up the vast majority of my music. As
a result, I’m forced to switch my iPod 6th gen Nano (which I got for
20 bucks from a friend who “got it from his cousin”)’s EQ to Treble Booster in order to get decent
sound sound definition. I’ll admit that with this setting it’s pretty good, better than most generic
brands I’ve used though not quite as full bodied as my old Samsung pair which I
foolishly left in my track jacket pocket when I put it in the wash. Also,
TessaracT’s music sounds quite oddly muted, though it sounded very normal in my
Samsungs. It doesn’t do this with any other artist’s stuff, or even any other
djent songs.
Another, upshot of this is that treble boost consumes
battery power like crazy! I just discovered this after barely four hours of
play, right as I’m psyching myself up to listen to the latest episode of The
Cracked Podcast (which became my favorite podcast with its first episode. Go
check it out now, the back catalogue’s still just five episodes thick, so
there’s not much catching up to do) when the ‘Pod (does anyone call it that? Or
will I have a mob of angry malophiles kicking down my door soon?) tells me I
need to plug in. For comparison, I’ve been on 18 hour bus trips listening to
back-to-back podcasts and audiobooks and
to loud, techy death metal while I catch some approximation of sleep (I
can’t sleep when I can hear the drone of an engine), and never once got that
message.
To make things worse, it’s a typical evening in Zimbabwe right now,
meaning we have no power, so I’m reduced to the ridiculous situation of
powering up my laptop just to charge the ‘Pod (dear Jobs forgive me if I have
taken the name of thy product in vain), and writing this post in Word to pass
the time and it has just* occurred to me that I could have been listening to the
podcast using iTunes (‘Tunes?) all this time. This post really has no point
anymore, so I guess the moral of the story is that anything worth doing is
worth a hand in the bush.
_________________________
To make this worth your while, here’s my favorite TessaracT
song. Enjoy.
They cut the second best part of the song – the chilled out
trail after the super techy bridge – out for this video. Here’s a full version. In fact, check out the full Concealing Fate if you're up for an excellent 25 minutes. It's absolutely beautiful.
_________________________
*P.S. Honesty compels me to tell you that I didn’t *just*
realise this. I realized it somewhere around the beginning of the second paragraph.
