Because this’ll be too long for a tweet…

I don’t really care that much about iPods since I own an iPhone 4 already. Bummer to see the Classic go, though, as it’s nice to actually have enough storage space for all your music. I keep one in the car for this reason.

New versions of iOS look good. HDR photos are interesting, we’ll see how that actually plays out.

Bad
• Streaming only. WTF? One of the things I dislike about my current AppleTV is that my computer has to be on and awake for people in the house to watch movies that we already own. Solved with aTV Flash and an external hard disk, but I suspect it’ll be a while before the new Apple TV is hacked to match that, if at all.
• Same stupid-simple remote.
• No apps? Apple just released a device that cannot connect to the App Store revenue stream? Really? Weird.

Good
• Netflix
• Support for 30fps 720p. You know, like what a Flip or even an iPhone 4 produce, that a current Apple TV cannot play.
• 99 cent TV show rentals. Top Gear in HD, right? Right?
• Unit price. Even with the obvious flaws, for $100 I might get one anyway.

And then there’s the unknowns created by this. For instance, the status of the Apple TV I currently own is now in question. Will Apple continue to support it? Do I get Netflix on it now? 99-cent shows? Some information on this would be nice, and while this is not the thing you expect to hear in a keynote, I would like to know this stuff.

Next unknown: what’s actually running on the new Apple TV? Is it iOS or MacOS? I’m pretty sure my existing AppleTV run MacOS underneath. If the new one runs iOS, where are the apps? If not, will it still be as dog-slow as the current one?

About a week ago, my new Ascend Acoustics Sierra-1 speakers arrived and I had a chance to set them up. I have 30 days to decide if I like them, as Ascend is an Internet retailer and it’s hard to get to audition a pair. Here are my thoughts after about a week or so of listening (noting that I was out of town for about half of that week):

General
First and foremost, these are highly detailed speakers. Because my younger son was a light sleeper as an infant/toddler, I got pretty into headphones for a while. While headphones have their issues, the one thing decent headphones give you, much better than a great many speakers, is detail. These speakers, right out of the box, deliver headphone-like detail. This is far and away the most impressive thing about these speakers across the entire frequency range.

The best anecdote I can give is that my wife, not exactly an audiophile, walked in while I was listening. I asked if there was anything she wanted to hear, and she chose Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust,” a song our kids love and that she’s heard many, many times. After it was mostly done, she looked at me and said “There is more to this song than I realized.” Yes, she was hearing details she had simply never heard before.

Highs
I’m used to metal (or at least poly) tweeters; the Sierra-1s use soft-domed tweeters. There’s a certain zing you can only get from metal tweeters, but of course there’s often a cost of some harshness or fatigue. The Sierra-1 tweeters do an outstanding job of providing detail and wonderful imaging and soundstage, and without the fatigue. They’re very smooth, and handle music that other speakers hiss out as sibilance very well. They are not, however, quite as sharp as the harder-material tweeters that I’m used to, which is both good and bad. It’s like all the really sharp bits of the music have been rounded off. I’m not sure if it’s more accurate (probably for some things and not others), but it’s definitely different.

The place where these deliver the strongest performance is violins. Violins are, in my opinion, one of the hardest instruments to reproduce well, particularly in the higher part of their range. A lot of speakers (and headphones) turn even well-played violins into a screechy mess, or at least generate more screech than what I would expect to hear live. The Sierra-1s are, so far, absolutely magnificent at reproducing violins. If I keep them, they will almost certainly end up costing me money, as I’ll have to invest in more violin music. Darn.

The one downside of all this fabulous detail is that the Sierra-1s reveal flaws pretty effectively. Bad recordings and bad compression are made evident quickly. I don’t have a lot of music that suffers from bad compression, but there are a few 128 kbps tracks in my library, and they tend to stand out through the Sierra-1s. My previous speakers provided slightly less detail, of course, but were a little more forgiving as a result.

Midrange
This is where these speakers really, really shine. Vocals sound liquid smooth, and all the nuance (for singers that have any—I’ll admit I like some that don’t) is present. Whatever was done in the crossover for these speakers was done really well, because with most two-ways, there’s an audible dip in response where the drivers cross over (sometimes somewhere in the vocal range, yuck). I don’t hear it at all in these speakers, much to my amazement. Middle piano notes are crisp and clear, and electric guitars in this range have great punch. But it’s really the vocals that shine. My wife commented that “Freddy sounds awesome” on these, referring of course to Queen’s Freddy Mercury. It’s almost enough to make me an opera fan… well, not really, that would require the proverbial “act of god,” but that fact that I even thought it is a testament to how well the Sierra-1s do vocals.

Bass
OK, let’s be clear: these are bookshelf speakers with 5.25” drivers. My thought going in was “How much bass could they possibly deliver?” Well, so far more than I thought. The bass is far better than I could have imagined from speakers (and drivers) of this size. It’s tight and clear and without a doubt the best bass I’ve ever heard from a bookshelf speaker without help from a sub. They do a great job of generating sound like a floorstander while still being bookshelf-sized. I’m generally pretty skeptical about claims in marketing copy, but maybe there really is something to the bamboo construction. That or there’s some serious mojo in the drivers. Or both.

Now, while bass clarity and volume are good, the bass extension is not quite as good as the speakers they replaced; I expect this is due to the physical size limitations, but they definitely do not go as low. On the other hand, very little music really taps hard into that frequency range. My test track for bass extension is “Root Beer” from the American Beauty soundtrack, which has significant signal in the 25-40 Hz range, and the Sierra-1s don’t get much of it. However, I don’t think many bookshelf speakers do much better.

Of course, the trendy thing with bookshelves these days is to add a subwoofer. Frankly, I’ve never been a huge fan of subwoofers for music (though of course they’re integral in home theater) and these go low enough for most music that I will only very rarely miss the lowest bass extension.

Aesthetics
I ordered these in the “light cherry” finish because that’s what I thought would go best with the other wood in my study. It didn’t hurt that Ascend had that finish on sale for $160 off around the time I was planning on ordering them anyway. Anyway, not to put too fine a point on it, these are simply gorgeous. They’re made out of bamboo, not MDF, and the finish is light enough that you can see the grain of the bamboo. The finish itself is like glass, a really beautiful shine. The down side of this is that fingerprints are instantly visible; thoughtfully, the speakers come with a pair of white fabric gloves so you can handle them without leaving too many. Here, check out the pic:

My meager photo skills and cheap camera simply do not do justice to them, but as you can see, the finish is high-gloss—the reflection of the blinds behind the speakers is pretty clear even in this photo.

Also, you can see some CDs on the shelf on the right for a size comparison. Oh, that’s a Sanus SF30 stand that it’s on, by the way.

The Verdict So Far
Generally, I’m pretty impressed. Overall I like the Sierra-1s, but there is some adjustment. I have some tinkering to do yet, and lots more listening as well. The tinkering is that as you can see from the picture, these are pretty close to the wall/window, and the Sierra-1s are rear-ported. I think the overall tonal balance might be a little bit off as a result and the bass maybe a smidge boomier than optimal because of the placement. Ascend has specially-designed foam plugs to use in the rear ports for difficult placements, and I’m certainly going to give those a try once I get used to how they sound without the plugs.

However, even without the tinkering, as I said, I am so far pretty impressed with these, particularly for an $800 bookshelf speaker. During my 30-day trial I plan to also go out and audition some other speakers: Paradigm Studio 20, B&W 685, KEF iQ30 and maybe even the Klipsch RB-81, though I’m generally not a huge Klipsch fan. My home theater rig is PSBs, but right now PSB doesn’t seem to make anything in the right size/price range. These other speakers will really have to show me something to get me to send the Sierra-1s back; I will be particularly astonished if I find a rival in reproducing violins, but I’m going in with an open mind since I haven’t heard the others yet, and those are all generally favorably-reviewed speakers as well. So, while I’m impressed, I’m willing to be even more impressed by something else, though I’m not counting on it.

Setup Notes
This is my study, which is the home of my primary computer setup. Music is a mix of 256 kbps VBR AAC/MP3 (stuff bought through the iTunes store or Amazon MP3) and uncompressed. This is fed from the optical out on my Mac Pro into the outboard DAC built into a HeadRoom Desktop headphone amplifier, which routes the RCA outs to a NAD C740 receiver. This is obviously not super high-end or anything, but it’s definitely a cut above standard Best Buy-grade fare.

Background
This is only for the deeply interested reader; I put it last because it’s only marginally relevant to the review. Anyway, 20 years ago, almost to the month, my uncle gave me a pair of speakers that he built himself. He’s pretty serious about it and these are not just some slapped-together boxes. They were three-way speakers with Audax TW010E1 tweeters, 8” woofers, and a midrange with specs I don’t remember. These were highly capable speakers that served me well. However, since we moved into a new house in 2006, I’ve been less happy with them as my study (where they lived) is a cozy 10’ 4” by 11” with a substantial portion of that meager space taken over by bookcases. That is, the room is a little tight for them. I’ve wanted something smaller—like bigger bookshelf speakers on stands—ever since we moved in to this house. Space issues also mean that a subwoofer is not a realistic option.

The real problem, however, is that the speakers started to fail. In particular, the woofer surrounds were literally disintegrating:

Yep, time for new speakers. 20 years of good sound for free, though, is nothing to sneeze at!

One of the serious drawbacks of blu-ray is that it’s exceedingly difficult to rip a blu-ray disc into a form usable on, say, an iPod or AppleTV (not that an AppleTV can actually handle 1080p, but that’s a separate problem). Blu-ray folks understand this limitation, and so some blu-ray movies come with a “digital copy,” which generally is a DRM-protected MP4 movie file.

When buying blu-ray discs for movies I don’t have, I’ve tried to to steer toward those with a digital copy included. However, some movies apparently include a digital copy even though this isn’t made explicit. In particular, the copy of the The Matrix that I picked up on blu-ray includes a digital copy, even though it doesn’t say so.

The Matrix was the first DVD that I owned, and was arguably the “killer app” that really launched DVD in the first place. I’ve ripped it many times at different sizes and bitrates; this is the movie I used to use to see how much playing with the dimensions and bitrates of the rip affected the picture quality. So, of course, I have a ripped version on my hard disk for watching on the AppleTV. So I thought I’d take a look at how it compared to the digital copy which came with the blu-ray.

First, some information on the the files: the rip was done using Handbrake 0.9.3, 63% quality, full-size loose anamorphic. The resulting file is 2.77 GB, 838 x 352 pixels. The digital copy is 1.59 GB, 853 x 354 pixels. So the digital copy is a much smaller file, but some of that is due to the fact that the ripped file has the full Dolby AC3 5.1 audio in it, while the digital copy has only a stereo AAC track. Still, the video-only part of the ripped version is about 2 GB, so it is running at a higher bitrate.

But how do the results compare? Actually the difference is quite striking right as soon as you see the Warner Bros. logo: digital copy and ripped. The colors in the digital copy are obviously much more saturated.

However, the ripped version appears to be a little sharper than the digital copy, at least on rendering text. I suspect that this is a result of the higher bitrate in the ripped version.

A great illustration of the difference between the two can be seen in this shot of Trinity: ripped vs. digital copy. The colors are much different and the digital copy shows some banding (particularly around the flashlight on the right), which again might be a bitrate issue. (Note that this is less visible when it’s moving video).

OK, so last one, not in the Matrix, but in the “real world:” ripped vs. digital copy. As per the other, the ripped one shows more detail, but the colors are a bit different; perhaps slightly better in the digital copy.

So, you can judge for yourself if the digital copy is acceptable. My take is that it’s OK for how I’ll actually use it; that is, primarily on my iPhone. I won’t watch it on the AppleTV since in my living room I can watch it in blu-ray, and the BD is absolutely fantastic. Now, when I travel I sometimes hook up my iPhone to a TV, but that’s at best with s-video, so the slight loss in detail and lack of 5.1 audio is acceptable, and the smaller file size is welcome. Overall, I’m happy with the digital copy and now I really wish all blu-ray discs came with one.

The problem with Twitter is that I post stuff there that should also be blogged… So, a bunch of quick hits:

• I’ve been thinking about getting a netbook. Based on specs, since the Dell Mini 10 supports a hi-res (720p) display and a six-cell battery, it looks perfect—except for one extremely major detail: it can’t be hackintosh’d. Total bummer. So, I either need to settle for a Mini 9, which seems too small, go for an MSI Wind, or wait for whatever thing Apple has up its sleeve. We’ll see how long it takes Apple to pull the trigger on whatever that is…

• I’ve almost completely given up on Facebook because of Twitter. Why? Because Twitter is lightweight and the mobile clients are just as good, if not better than, the Web client. (I use twitterfon on my phone and Canary on the desktop, both are free.) FB seems like work every time I log on, but Twitter is so lightweight that it’s just easy.

• I’m finally going blu-ray with the Oppo BDP-83. No, it’s not for sale publicly yet, but I tried to get on the beta program and wasn’t selected, so my consolation prize is getting to order it prior to its public release. This will be my first foray into blu-ray, but I’m a long-time Oppo fan, as the home DVD player is has been an Oppo DV-981HD for quite some time. I’ll post a review on it after I’ve gotten to play with it for a while. It should come in time for next weekend, so don’t expect to hear much of anything from me for a while once it gets here. The TV might now be the weak link in the chain…

My brother recently emailed me this question, and I thought I’d share my answer:

Are there any wireless surround speakers that don’t completely suck? I don’t need something great, but just want to avoid triumphant crapitude.

Unless something has changed dramatically in the last couple years:

(a) There aren’t really “wireless” speakers in the first place, and
(b) They all still mostly suck, in principle, unless you’re willing to blow serious coin, and even then they aren’t going to be as good as decent wired speakers.

It turns out this is a more complicated thing to accomplish than you might think. Remember, to drive a speaker, you need two things:

1. Analog audio signal
2. Amplification for said signal

Getting an analog signal to a speaker not using a wire means you have to either use some kind of analog broadcast like RF, which will be crappy from a noise perspective, or something digital—newer systems use Bluetooth, I believe. While this will preserve the signal, this has two implications: [1] Your receiver either needs to send a digital signal to the speaker, which your current receiver doesn’t do (though some new ones designed specifically to work with wireless speakers will), or you hook your receiver up to a transmitter which has an analog-to-digital chip (ADC) inside, and probably not a good one unless the system is very expensive. [2] Something in the speaker has to covert back to analog. This means each speaker needs its own digital-to-analog conversion (DAC) circuitry, which again will either be expensive or suck (choose only one option).

Then, once you have an analog signal, you need to amplify it before running it through the actual drivers. This means each “speaker” also has to contain an amp, which requires power, meaning… wires. You’ll need to run a power cord to each speaker. Also, there is no such thing as a good power supply that is also small, meaning the amp part, to be any good, can’t be little. The upshot of this is that you’ll need somewhat big surrounds which require plugs. (The actual amp inside the speaker can be reasonably small if it’s a digital amp, but I bet whatever $200 option Sony has instead uses the worst analog amp in the known universe, but at least it’s a small one.)

So, every wireless speaker will need: signal receiver, DAC, amp (requiring power), and then drivers, and the thing that takes what would normally be your speaker out needs an ADC and a transmitter. That’s a lot of components, and doing all of these pieces reasonably well can’t be especially cheap. Or rather, if it is cheap, that means that there is a lot of opportunity for really crappy components, which doesn’t bode well for sound quality.

The other problem here is that all of these steps take a little bit of time, meaning you’re probably going to have phase lag. That is, the sound coming out of your surrounds won’t be in phase with the sound coming out of your wired fronts, center, and sub. You might be able to mitigate this a little by setting appropriate channel delays all around, but that’s a tricky calibration problem. Newer and more expensive receivers will do this for you (they come with microphones that you move around and the system sends test signals to ensure good calibration), but I suspect you don’t have one that does.

Thus, a lot of reputable speaker companies won’t even bother trying to do this; your entry-level audiophile companies like Paradigm, B&W, Mirage, etc. don’t. Of course, I’m sure all the mass-market companies (e.g., Sony, Panasonic) have such things, but I’d be stunned if they don’t all produce triumphant crapitude, as you so colorfully put it (great turn of phrase, by the way).

It’s probably easier to just hide the wires.

I have an Oppo DVD player which I like a lot, but it turns out I hardly ever use it anymore now that I have an AppleTV. I just rip the movies and watch them on that instead. Every once in a while, we’ll rent a hi-def movie from iTunes, which looks terrific. And, of course, I’ve been thinking about going hi-def in the home theater more seriously. First, I was waiting for the HD vs. Blu-ray war to shake out, and that’s done. I figured when that happened the price on Blu-ray players and discs would start to come down. Well, it mostly hasn’t. The players have come down a little, but not much. I got to thinking about it again a while back when Oppo showed off their upcoming Blu-ray player. I figured I’d just wait for that.

But now I’m not so sure. With player prices still not great and disc prices still double that of DVDs, some are now saying that Blu-ray is dead. There are some compelling points there. Really, if the cost of Blu-ray discs isn’t going to come down to being only a few dollars more than DVDs, how can Blu-ray succeed? Yes, Blu-ray looks better than even upscaled DVDs, but not enough better to justify that cost for most people. Based on the argument there, it doesn’t look like disc costs are coming down anytime soon.

So now I’m not so sure. I’m not really a big gamer, but a PS3 would give me Blu-ray and even if Blu-ray tanks, at least I can play games on it. Of course, I’m not much of a gamer, so I’m not sure about the appeal. Or do I just wait for the Oppo, which will at least be a fantastic upscaling DVD player as well? Or just wait six months and see what, if anything, is happening in the blu-ray market? (And if I do that, what do I ask for for xmas?)

It’s a quandary. An entirely insignificant one, to be sure, but hey, maybe someone with a PS3 can comment on how it performs as a blu-ray player. Is it comparable to a stand-alone player? I would ask how it performs as an upscaling DVD player, but I’m not sure I care anymore…

I got a pair of these for Xmas and I’ve used them quite a lot, so it’s well past time for a review.

First, why Senn MX75s? Well, I know earbuds aren’t really the best choice in terms of sound quality, but I find that the convenience factor is sometimes too much to overcome. So, for couple years, every time I headed to the gym or out do do work in the yard, I had my Sony E888s in my ears. The E888s are excellent earbuds (you know, for earbuds), but my pair were literally falling apart. Not the foamies—I have a small stockpile of replacement foamies—but the actual housings are starting to come apart. I don’t think they’re designed to handle sweat.

The MX75s are “sport” earbuds and are supposedly designed explicitly to handle this kind of thing. So how are they?

Comfort
The differences between different ear buds are not, in my experience, as big as the differences in comfort between different full-size headphones. That said, there are differences. The MX75s have this interesting thing they call “twist-and-fit;” basically, there’s an extension above where the bud goes in your ear canal. This seems weird at first, but it’s actually great—it really does hold the bud in place, which is particularly important when doing something active. The MX75s come with different size outer rings on the buds as well as two different sizes for the twist-and-fit pads, so these should work well for a range of ear sizes.

Convenience
The cable is extra sturdy and somewhat stiff. It comes with a little rubberish semi-rigid plastic pouch for storage. Frankly, I’d much prefer a winder like the one that came with the older MX400s.

Sound Quality
This is, of course, the main concern, and I’ll admit that I was a actually a bit surprised here. I didn’t expect much from these; basically, I was expecting these to be sweat-proof MX400s. Happily, they’re better than that. They have both more and clearer bass than the MX400s. Now, they’re still earbuds, so there’s a limit to bass, but these have pretty decent bass performance for earbuds on that score. The highs are also cleaner than the MX400s. Mids are also improved; definitely less murky than the MX400s. That is, the MX75s are better across-the-board than the MX400s. That’s as it should be, since these are more expensive.

So, how do they stack up against my long-time earbuds of choice, the E888s? Here, they’re not quite as good—but they’re closer than I expected. The E888s have a small advantage on the highs—a bit more sparkle, as it were—and the bass is better-defined on the E888s. The mids on the two are very comparable. Again, I’d give the edge to the E888s, but again, the margin is smaller than I would have guessed beforehand. The E888s are better—noticeably—but the MX75s are at least playing in, well, certainly not the same ballpark, but at least one that’s vaguely nearby.

If nothing else, the MX75s are certainly good workout earbuds for $35 (that’s the current U.S. price on Amazon).

Yes, I miss the improved sound quality of the E888s, but I have to say, in the gym, I miss it less than I might have thought. I guess that may be in part because I watch more movies now (hooray for video out on the iPod) and spend less time just listening to music. That is, I don’t listen to these buds under the most demanding conditions—which is really the whole point of earbuds in the first place. If I’m listening critically in a quiet environment, I’m going to be listening to speakers or full-sized cans anyway. For sweat-heavy on-the-go places for under $40, the MX75s certainly fit the bill for me.

Somewhat unintendedly, I recently acquired an Apple TV (for this story, see the postscript). As a UI guy and a long-time Apple guy, what do I think?

First, there is no way I would have considered this before the 2.0 update. Having a device designed to work with a home theater which didn’t natively understand 5.1-channel digital audio is a failure out of the gate. But, with the 2.0 version and the magic that is HandBrake, one can digitize DVDs with full 5.1 audio and stream them across the home network quite nicely. (And yay for MetaX also for tagging.)

So, my initial impressions. I suspect that some of the things I don’t like are actually fixable, but these are my initial impressions after having the thing for a week:

• The whole idea of having your whole audio and video library available all the time at the home theater—the main purpose of the thing—is Way Cool. I’m sure there are other gizmos which provide this basic functionality (more or less), so I’m mostly going to comment on things which are either especially good or which particularly need work.

• Basic setup is incredibly easy, even for an Apple product. Plug in the relevant cables (and supporting full HDMI means a single cable from the Apple TV to the receiver), input a five-digit code into iTunes on the main home machine, and that’s it; it just works. Now, I have CAT5 ethernet wiring in my house so there was no wireless to set up, but still, that’s not bad.

• More advanced configuration, however, could be better. I really want to change the order in which things are sync’d with the ATV. It’ll let you put photos on first, which is good, but I’d like to give music priority over movies and TV shows. I’d also like for there to be some way to exclude things in my iTunes library from showing up on the ATV; because now I have two versions of most movies in my library (a low-bitrate stereo version for my iPod and a high-bitrate 5.1 version for the ATV), I’d like to not see doubles of everything on the ATV. Similarly, on the ATV, I’d like to be able to have more organizational control, such as sorting my own movies into categories rather than having one enormous list.

• One thing I didn’t think I’d like nearly as much as I do is using the ATV for photos. We recently took the kids to DisneyWorld and I immediately sync’d the photos to the ATV and we all sat around looking at the new pics. This really is a great way to look at photos.

• The simplicity of the Apple remote is great and all that, but I find that I’d like more controls. I control my home theater with a Logitech Harmony 550 (and it knows the ATV remote codes, which is nice) and I’d like to be able to make use of more buttons. In particular, I’d like to be able to navigate the huge lists with numeric keys rather than having to scroll forever. Also, entering text using this remote is an exercise in annoyance. (As my brother pointed out, this is hardly surprising; after all, this is the company of the single-button mouse.)

There’s one kind of goofy unintended consequence of Apple using the same remote for everything, too. I often have my laptop out in the living room, and I’m constantly having to quit FrontRow which has been launched by me navigating the Apple TV. Kind of annoying, actually.

• We haven’t rented a movie (yet), so I can’t comment on that, though the UI for doing so is certainly clean and easy. They’re a little pricey, but the fact that some titles are in HD is good, and I don’t think we’ll rent that many. In fact, because of this we just dumped our movie channels, and I bet we spend less on rentals than we did on those. It’s nice that the high-res format war is over, but Blu-Ray players are still way more expensive than they should be so I’m not willing to go there just yet. Frankly, I might not be for quite some time if HD rentals are so easy and if the library expands.

• If you think YouTube videos look bad on your computer, you really don’t want to see how awful they look on a big screen HDTV. Jaggy hell.

Overall, I’d give the Apple TV something in the B/B+ range. It’s good but there’s definitely room for improvement.

Postscript
So, why an Apple TV now? First, the timing is good, as the 2.0 ATV is now out, the 0.9.2 release of HandBrake understands 5.1 audio in a way that works with ATV, and the new version of Airfoil also now supports Apple TV. The main reason, however, is that my A/V receiver (an old NAD T751) kind of gave up the ghost and I wanted something which offered at least some protection against future changes in digital formats, so I went with the Denon 3808CI. (The protection against future format changes is that the 3808 has an ethernet jack and can download new firmware to itself quite easily.) In order for the warranty to be valid, of course, one has to buy from an “authorized dealer.” This is stupid, as of course the “authorized dealers” basically don’t offer discounts. However, one of them was running a promo and offering a free 40G Apple TV in lieu of a discount, so I went with that. A nice excuse, really.

I do a fair amount of air travel; in 2007 I flew about 50,000 miles without leaving the U.S. As a human factors guy, I know that the airplane rumble contributes to feeling fatigued as a result of air travel. I don’t like having things in my ear canal (I apparently have some skin condition in my ears and they always irritates the skin in my ears) so IEMs (that’s “in-ear monitors” for the non-headphone crowd) are not a good option for me. So, active noise cancellation (ANC) was a possibility. I wasn’t sure about all this but years ago I got some cheap Aiwa noise-cancellers as a gift and I’ve never looked back, active noise cancellation is for me.

So, I’ve owned, and been reasonably happy with, the Sennheiser PXC250s for some time. I got them on sale at MacMall for $90 back in 2003, which was pretty much a steal at that time. That was the only PXC model at the time. The PXC 250 is simply the Senn PX200 with Sennheiser’s active noise cancellation.

A little while back, Audio Technica released a new entry into the ANC party, the ATH-ANC7. Sennheiser also release some new players like the PXC 450 (which I understand to be the drivers from HD555 in closed form with Senn’s ANC circuit). The PXC 450 is a bit on the spendy side and has gotten some negative reviews, so I wasn’t all that interested in them, despite the fact that I really like the Senn HD 555/595 sound signature. I asked for the ATH-ANC7s for Christmas and my wife obliged.

So, now I’ve had them for a couple months and they’ve been on a few plane trips (including two transatlantic flights); how do they stack up against my tried-and-true PXC250s?

I should preface this by saying that Sennheiser and Audio-Technica are currently my favorite headphone manufacturers. My main cans at home are Senn HD595s (the better 120-ohm model), but when I need a closed can, I go for my ATH A700s. So this is a shootout between two companies I’m predisposed to liking.

I’ll face them off on a number of attributes. However, first, details on my usual air travel rig:
• 5.5gen 80G iPod video
• SendStation lineout dock to bypass Apple’s attenuator
• Xin Supermicro amp
• Custom mini-to-mini cable (made by Norm of “Vibe” amp fame)

Portability
This one goes hands-down to the PXC250, no contest at all here. They fold up into a pretty small little package and Senn provides a nice zippered cloth case which also has a zippered pocket on the outside, which is perfect for the dock adapter and SuperMicro. The ANC7s fold kind of flat and also have a nice zippered hard case, but the thing is probably almost three times the size of the Senn case and doesn’t have as nice a pocket.

Noise Attenuation
This is more or less a tie. Due to their small size, the PXC250s don’t block out very much sound without ANC engaged. This means they don’t muffle mid-range and higher sounds very well. The ANC7s are much more substantial and do a better job with that. However, the Senn ANC circuitry is flat-out better than the ATH circuitry. With no audio being fed into the headphones at all, switching on the PXC250s just completely wipe out airplane rumble. The ANC7s do pretty well, but not as well as the Senns. Now, with any kind of music playing, the rumble is pretty well masked by the music so it’s not a big deal, but I know the Senns have the better ANC circuit. The ATHs, however, do a much better job with the screaming baby three rows back because of their superior passive noise cancellation.

Annoyance Factor
I’m not sure what other term to use for this. Basically, I want to give a point to the ATHs because the physical setup of the Senns is kind of irritating. The ATH is physically bigger, and the over-ear unit also houses all the electronics and the battery. Thus, you can put on the ATHs and have no cables coming from them at all, so if you just want the noise attenuation and don’t want to listen to anything else, you can do that without having to mess with anything else. The ATHs also take a standard mini-to-mini cable so you cable freaks can recable if you want, or anyone can replace the cable if it breaks. The Senn setup is not so slick. The cable that runs out of the ear cups goes a ways, then there’s a unit about the size of a candy bar which houses the batteries and ANC circuitry (including the mic), and then there’s a few more feet of cable ending in a mini plug. So when you’re wearing them you have to find a place to clip the candy bar thing. I have thus gone to wearing shirts with breast pockets when I fly just so I have some place to clip the stupid thing.

Comfort
This is again a no-brainer. The Senns are feather-light and very comfortable; I can wear these babies for hours without any discomfort. The ATHs are reasonably comfortable headphones, but they just cannot match the Senns. After about two hours I need to take breaks with the ANC7s. The place where this really matters is sleeping; I find it very hard to fall asleep with the ATHs on, but this is not a problem with the Senns.

Sound Quality
So, which one sounds better? The PXC250 is based on the PX200, which is just simply not one of Senns better-sounding cans; both the highs and the lows are a bit rolled off with the PX200 (yes, I own a pair of those, too). I think the PXC250s sound better than the PX200s, though. I know it’s the same driver but the PXC250s are a little more lively. The highs have more sparkle and the bass is not so weak, though the mids are still emphasized. The ANC7s have the Audio-Technica sound signature to them, which means the mids are somewhat recessed overall. Overall I think the ANC7s sound a bit better; they’re a little more detailed and involving than the PXC250s and definitely have more thump for you bass-heads out there, though I would give a slight edge to the Senns for classical and acoustic music.

It should be noted, though this should be a surprise to nobody, that both of these sound dramatically better than any Bose NC product and they cost less. I’ve listened to both the QC2 and QC3 in stores and they both sound like crap, especially for those prices.

Driveability
That’s probably not a word, but you headphone geeks know what I mean. The Senns are 300-ohm cans. With ANC on, they’re not quite as quiet as that, but even still, they aren’t all that easy to drive. With ANC on and no amp, putting the iPod volume on max still isn’t all that loud. This is why I got the Supermicro in the first place. The ATHs, on the other hand, while also not super easy to drive with ANC off (260 ohm), are much better behaved unamped with the ANC on than the Senns. They do improve when amped, as most headphones do, but not as much as the Senns. In particular, the ANC7s are adequate for watching movies without an amp, where the PXC250s need one even for that.

The Bottom Line
So, which headphone do I like better? I’m kind of on the fence, as there are obvious tradeoffs. I think in the future for transatlantic flights I’m taking the PXC250s because of the comfort and size advantages. (Coming out of the UK you only get one carry-on total, and that includes laptop bags, so space is at a bit of a premium, and I’m rather hoping to make trips to the UK more regularly in the future.) But for domestic flights I’ll probably go with the ATHs.

Postscript: What is ANC?
This is for those of you who don’t know anything about active noise cancellation. ANC is a pretty cool idea. Basically, there’s a microphone on the outside of the headphone which listens to the noise around you. A circuit takes that input, inverts the phase, and feeds that into the audio signal passed into the headphones. The result is that the outside noise is “cancelled out” of what you hear. Phase inversion is a little tricky and only really works at low frequencies. So, for instance, ANC doesn’t really block out voice all that well, particularly high-pitched voice. The good news, though, is that it’s the low frequencies which have an easier time passing through solids. (You know, when someone’s got the music too loud in their car with all the windows closed, all you can hear is the bass; the low-frequency stuff.) ANC is generally very good with any kind of constant, low-frequency rumble, like jet engines.

Or, as Daring Fireball put it, “Where by ‘launch’ the mean ‘pre-announce with no estimated ship date or pricing.’”

However, the best comment on this that I saw was on Engadget from user General Public: “[J]ust curirous. Does Zune come preloaded with virii, or do we have to wait a while for them to be written??”

Gotta love it…