Reviews & Impressions – Page 3

Sennheiser HD595 Full Review

So, over the course of the last (almost) year, I’ve made a lot of comments about the HD595s that have become my primary cans, but I haven’t gotten around to writing one big detailed review. So now I’m finally getting around to it, spurred on in part by the recent chance I had to listen to a lot of different cans through a lot of different amps at the Headroom tour stop in Houston.

I want to say up front that I really like these cans, but this will not be a purely one-sided review. There are very legit reasons for people to not like these cans and I want to be as clear as I can about them.

So, off we go. Oh, one very important thing to note: I was an “early adopter” of the HD595, which means I got them before the now-famous Senn factory fire, which means my set is the 120-ohm variety. I don’t know exactly how they compare to the 50-ohm version as I’ve never A/B’d them.

Equipment and Music
My current rig consists of:
* A Sony CDP-601ES player. This is now a “vintage” player, circa 1993 with one of the early Sony 1-bit DACs in it.
* A 1st-generation Headsave Classic with OPA627s.
* I’ve also driven them from an iPod both directly and through a Xin Supermicro (v6)

I’ve had these for a long time now so the music is, well, my whole collection, which ranges from new age solo piano and guitar to AC/DC and Tool to chamber and symphony classical to techno and electronica. I listen to only a small smattering of jazz and rap and exactly zero country and opera. A good slice of my critical listening for review/comparison purposes is based on my Audio Test Mix.

Non-sound Considerations
Ergonomics
I find these cans to be the most comfortable I’ve worn for any extended period. They have velour pads (which I prefer to leather or pleather) and a nicely padded headband. To get them to sound their best you have to position them so the headband is slightly more forward on your head than most other cans, but this doesn’t affect comfort for me. Based on short tries with other cans I’d say the high-end Beyers are in a similar category. Some people do report some head clamping but fortunately my head isn’t big enough for me to have experienced this. They’re light for full-sized cans which really helps.

The cable is one-sided on the left, which I prefer over y-cables. However, the cable is a little light for my tastes and tends to snag more than I’d like. The slightly rubbery plastic covering doesn’t help with this–I’d prefer a heavier cable with one of those cloth-like covers.

Build Quality and Appearance
These are a little bit funky looking, kind of extra-modern. The grayish green color choice is not something I would have picked, but I guess it’s not that bad. I like the Senn logo underneath the grilles. Build quality seems good; they feel solid and I don’t worry about damaging them in routine handling.

Sound
Obviously, the most important part of the review!

The big draw of these phones that brought me to them in the first place is that the reviews generally say that these phones split the difference between the (to me) overly harsh and bright Grado house sound and the dark and laid-back Sennheiser house sound. These are extremely well-balanced headphones. That’s a good-news, bad-news story. The good news is that they spit out a very faithful reproduction of what’s fed in. If you like it really bright, the recording has to be bright. If you like it bass-heavy, then the recording will have to be bass-heavy. For me, this is what hi-fi is supposed to be all about; fidelity to the input. However, if you want your headphones to color the sound in a particular way, these are not the way to go. For me, this is a positive, because it means these headphones sound good across a wide range of music. While I listen more to rock/electronica than anything else, I do listen to acoustic/classical enough of the time that I wanted a headphone which doesn’t sound bad going there (a real weakness of the Grado house sound in my book).

Bass is tight and clear but not overdeveloped. Bass extension is good. I will admit that there are times when I would like a little more bass from them; I tend to tweak the volume knob up just a little bit when I hit a recording where I really want to focus on the bass.

Mids are very well-balanced. The Senn “house sound” cans (the 580/600/650) sounds to me like there’s a little bit of a push in the lower mids which the 595s do not have. I think these perform particularly well on female vocals and piano because of the balanced mids. Detail is terrific, ambient sounds are clear and placeable. The drawback here is that the mids can be a bit grainy. This is particularly exacerbated by bad recordings and compression artifacts. I’ve never heard them through a tube amp but my suspicion is that these might not synergize well with the distortion generated by tubes; tubes may make these sound even more grainy. Any tube fans want to comment on that?

Highs are clear and detailed, energetic but not overpowering. In classical, I do like quartets, which means the violin can sometimes be miked rather close. Cans with treble harshness can make such recording sound screechy but the HD595s handle violins very well. They resolve detail very well in the upper register and cymbals actually sound like cymbals.

Soundstaging is excellent. To me it’s a little deeper than the Senn 580/6×0 soundstage, but definitely not as wide. I’m constantly impressed with how good the soundstage is. These sound a little sharper than the traditional Senn flagships, but they’re definitely not as full-sounding.

Finally, they’re not too hard to drive but amping them does indeed make a difference. They sound good unamped out of my iPod, but they definitely sound better amped. In particular, bass energy is much better with an amp.

Redux
The thing about the 595s is that they do almost everything well but they aren’t the best at anything (except maybe comfort if you don’t get clamping, which some do, but comfort is so individual I’d be hard-pressed to suggest everyone would find them the comfort champ). Kind of a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I think that’s why some people really don’t like these; for every application, there’s probably something better in this price range.

So, if you listen to entirely rock or hip-hop (maybe techno), these might not be the best choice. If you can get past the comfort issues (which I can’t) with Grados, well, Grados are hard to beat for involvement and energy. The 595s bank in somewhere around the SR225-SR325 price range depending on what kinds of deals you can find, so for the same money you’re in a pretty nice spot in the Grado line.

If, on the other hand, you listen to entirely acoustic or classical (especially symphony), your money is probably better spent on something from the Senn 580/600/650 family. The classic Senn sound is more lush and full and I would recommend those over the 595s for classical. The 595s come in kind of in between the HD580s and the HD600s on price (again, dependent on what deals you can find).

So, if instead of $250 for one pair, you have $500 to spend on two cans, you can drop $350 on your primary desire and $150 on your secondary cans, and you’ll definitely be better off than if you try to do everything with the 595s.

However, if you listen to a wide variety of music and only have the budget for one good set of headphones, I really think this is a very strong option, particularly if you’re really into detail and can stomach a bit of grain in the mids to get it. They are indeed more lively than the classic Senn house sound, but they’re not as forward as Grados (or other cans like the Sony CD3Ks) so they hold up dramatically better for music that isn’t happy with ultra-forward presentation.

OK, so what did I miss?

Review: BBEdit

This has been brewing for a long time. I’ve been a BBEdit user for a long, long time (over ten years) so it’s a piece of software I know really well. And when there’s an update, I always bump into the reviews on MacUpdate or VersionTracker. And a lot of those reviews just strike me as wrong in a variety of ways, so I wanted to offer my (highly-opinionated) take.

The most common criticism of BBEdit is that it’s expensive. $179 is indeed a lot of money for a text editor. The thing about it is that I spend an awful lot of time editing basically raw text, and I bet most computer users spend more time doing this than they realize. It’s not unusual for me to handle raw HTML (which I want to mirror to an FTP server), a shell script, a post or two on a Web forum and some kind of tab-delimited data file all in the same day. Then there’s the occasional something weirder, like maybe a LaTeX or Python source file on a CVS or Subversion repository. Or maybe I want to crack open a raw XML file to see how it’s structured or what some of the contents are. Oh, and of course sometimes I want to compose email not in my mailer to make sure I don’t send it out without thinking about it for a day or two first. (Don’t divert me on the nonsense of styled text in email.)

So, first there’s HTML. One of the most inane criticisms I’ve ever heard is that BBEdit isn’t a WYSIWYG editor. Yes, that’s right, it isn’t. In fact, there is nothing which is really a WYSIWYG HTML editor! That’s because your precious HTML will be rendered by different browsers with different screen resolutions, window sizes, font and font size settings, and even underlying rendering engines. (Side comment: If you’re trying to micromanage all these things for the user, you’re doing him/her a huge disservice and wont’ succeed very often anyway.) So this is a stupid criticism. If you want to know what the file will look like in a particular browser, open in it that browser. I probably have five or six browsers on my machine at any given time–why do I need my editor to have an HTML rendering engine in it? Of course, one motivation for this might be workflow-related, not wanting to go out to the file system and drag the file to the Web browser. Well, BBEdit has commands for rendering the current file in a browser, or even all the browsers on your machine–and this command, like all commands in BBEdit, can be bound to whatever keystroke you want. So much for WYSIWYG workflow.

BBEdit’s ability to support HTML is truly outstanding. I learned good old HTML 1.0 in like 1994 (egad) and I still edit the tags directly. But I find that I don’t always remember the syntax for tags which weren’t around “back in the day” and I certainly never remember the hex codings for colors other than black and white. BBEdit gives me context-sensitive, single-keystroke access to dialogs which understand the tags (and do the Right Thing based on the DTD at the top of the file if it’s there) and remind me of the syntax and give me popups for things I don’t remember like color. It also has great CSS support (a real boon to those of us who get the idea, but never bothered to learn all the syntactic details). SubEthaEdit and some of the other free/cheap programs are great, but I’ve not seen anything close to this in any of them. (Disclaimer: I don’t do PHP–yet–so I can’t say how well it supports that.) Things like being able to save a copy of the current file (I like to have one local copy and one on the server) directly to an FTP server without leaving BBEdit is just icing on the cake–and I love icing.

Of course, the reason I started using BBEdit in the first place (circa version 2) was to edit C code. Well, I never program in C anymore (too low-level) but I do write occasional shell scripts and Python code and every once in a long while I need to read C or C++ code. BBEdit is a great programmer’s editor, with terrific features to support this activity. Most such features are now pretty common in alternative programs such as function popups and syntax coloring, but like the HTML tag editors, I’ve never seen a “diff” which even comes close to BBEdit’s. And if you can’t see where a really good diff would be useful, you need more hours programming. Built-in support for CVS and Subversion also greases the wheels on things like this. BBEdit also has very good integration with the underlying unix of Mac OS X and is a terrific environment for shell scripting, which is useful for me because I’m a bit rusty not having done much of this since grad school (though I’m happy to have it available again).

I also spend a fair amount of time munging data files generated in my lab. These are almost always tab-delimited text files, and are sometimes fairly large. Commands for processing duplicate lines and lines which meet a specific criterion are extremely useful in this context. This is where BBEdit’s excellent support for regex-based search-and-replace is really key. If I want to look at a specific data pattern and clip out all lines which contain that pattern across hundreds of files, it’s easy to do this in BBEdit. I have yet to see this be made easy by any other GUI-based editor. (I suspect some form of emacs can do this, but I never got too into climbing the emacs learning curve.) One of the critical pieces of this functionality is BBEdit’s terrific AppleScript support. Programming your text editor may seem like a weird thing to do, but BBEdit has a lot of the right primitives for doing a lot of the things I want. Some of those things would be done probably almost as easily with things like Perl (which I haven’t bothered to learn yet because the syntax violates my aesthetic sense so badly) or Python, but I’ve been using BBEdit to do those things for so long that they seem more natural to me in BBEdit, plus I don’t have to burn any code on things like selecting only certain kinds of files or subdirectory traversal, since all that’s built in. Cheap alternatives like TextMate have some nice features, but they lack this. (Note: TextMate’s macros are nice, but I strongly prefer my recorded actions to be handled in AppleScript so I can call them, or parts of them, from other apps.)

There are all kinds of other cool things in BBEdit that I use all the time. One of them is the “change case” command. I could not count the number of times I’ve opened BBEdit just to paste in some text and munge it with the “change case” command only to copy and paste it back somewhere else. A small thing, I know, but small things add up over the years. Another thing I bump into all the time are line endings, now that Macs are split-personality old-style machines with some files having Mac line endings and some with unix line endings. BBEdit handles this in an elegant way, and most importantly, is scriptable.

The other common complaint is that BBEdit is becoming “bloatware.” Well, yes, there are a lot of features and menus and the menubar is pretty long if everything is enabled. But unlike Micro$osft Office, which is the poster child for bloatware, I actually use a great many of the features in BBEdit. I admit I probably under-utilize some of the powerful features others rave about–I don’t make as much use of the Glossary as I probably could–but I really do find that many of the features are, in fact, things that once I get my head around what they are, I find them more useful than not. And if you don’t use CVS or Subversion or Text Factories, you can turn those menus off. OK, yes, there are 31 commands in BBEdit’s “Text” menu, but I can honestly say I’ve actually used every single one of them. I can certainly see, though, how someone just downloading the demo to check it out might find the plethora of menu options and preferences somewhat daunting. But there’s a reason for all of it, or nearly all of it, at least for me.

Have there been bumps in the road? Sure, there are occasional BBEdit versions which are a little glitchy (8.0 comes to mind, though I can’t even remember what small weird problems I had). But BareBones releases bug fixes quickly and is more responsive to customer input than any company I’ve ever seen. If I send email to the president of the company, I not only get a thoughtful answer, but he remembers who I am. Wild.

So, yes, BBEdit is expensive and has an awful lot of stuff in it. Those two things are related, but in my mind, related in a positive way. Of course, I’m academic and I’m pretty much only paying for upgrades anyway. Regardless, I’d pay full price out of my own pocket to keep this application around. It’s just about the only application which I have launch at login, because I know that if I’m going to use my machine for more than 20 minutes, I’m probably going to use BBEdit.

Now, having said all that, there are a few things I’d still like to see in BBEdit, but none of these are show-stoppers:

• Live, or as-you-type, spellchecking. The current version (8.2.1) of BBEdit has something kind of close, but it’s still not what I want because I still have to remember to invoke it.
• Specific support for editing vBB/UBB-style tags. Yes, they’re stupid, but some forums use them and won’t take HTML. Too specialized and stupid, I know.
• TextFactory menu and Subversion support. Oh, wait, those are the things I asked for in version 8.1 and now I have both. Never mind.
• Code/section folding. In my mind, lack of this is the most legit criticism on the boards. This is one place where TextMate does have a real advantage. I’ve wanted this ever since I saw the some early prototype of the Dylan IDE (don’t ask) in like 1991.
• Oh, there’s another cool feature in Smultron I’d like to see, which is .Mac syncing of preferences (and things like grep patterns and such).

Review: Garbage Bleed Like Me

Funny to see the split on opinions about their previous album BeautifulGarbage. First time I heard it, I thought it was weird, but still good. Just different. Apparently a lot of Garbage fans were put off by it. Now, I’ll admit I still think Version 2.0 is their best disc, but that doesn’t make BeautifulGarbage bad. I like BG better than their first disc.

Anyway, I’ve been through Bleed Like Me probably a dozen times now and it’s decent, but nothing to write home about. As mentioned, some of the tracks are really simplistic (lots of choruses which simply repeat the same phrase over and over); overall it’s certainly not as complex an album as BeautifulGarbage. While simple, though, some of the tracks are pretty catchy. It is definitely more of a rock album than BeautifulGarbage and probably more than even their first two.

Taken as a straight rock album, it’s good but not a huge standout. I really like Shirley’s voice, which is worth a lot. Now that Curve is no more (sniff) and Kate Bush is long retired, Garbage is the flagbearer for female lead singers for me. I like her edgy and loud, so I don’t care much for most of the mellower tracks of theirs. However, I do sort of like the title track. I think the top track, though, is “Why Do You Love Me”–Shirley seems to be channeling Debbie Harry on that one. Yes, that’s praise. Other standouts for me are “Bad Boyfriend” and “Why Won’t You Come Over” (despite being one of the repetitive-chorus tunes). There are losers on this disc as well, which I won’t single out by name.

So it’s an OK disc. There are certainly some good tracks, but it has it’s share of weaker ones as well.

Quicksilver

Pretty much any time someone watches me over my shoulder use a Mac I control, they see me do something with Quicksilver and they ask me what that was and how did I get to wherever I got so fast. If you use a Mac–and of course you should, even Paul Graham thinks so, and for good reasons–you really should download Quicksilver and check it out. What is it? Well, the problem here is that it’s difficult to explain. It’s a launcher and a search tool and it’s a whole bunch of other things, all wrapped into one. I know that doesn’t sound very exciting, but once you use it you’ll be amazed that you ever lived without it. Really. Honest. Just get it and check it out. Be sure to download many of the plug-ins, because they enable many of the things which make it so cool, like integration with the Address Book.

Impression: Apple’s Pages

I’ve had the chance to use it a bit, and so far I like it. It reminds me a little of my all-time favorite word processor, MacWrite Pro, which never got updated for OS X, in that it’s a word processor with an extra bit of page-layout functionality. Not a lot–it’s not designed to compete with Quark or InDesign–but just enough to make it easy to do two-columns with a one-column header or figure without botching it up like Word.

My biggest quibble so far is that it turns on hyphenation by default. Yuck.

I guess the other knock on it is the media browser. Images are tied to the iPhoto library, which doesn’t help me because most of my writing takes figures which are not in file formats supported by iPhoto, like EPS or TIFF or PICT.

But otherwise, well, looks like things are going to be tough for Mariner. Mariner does have some advantages, like more advanced search-and-replace built-ins (e.g., zapping linefeeds) but I can get a lot of that off various Services now. Plus I won’t have to put up with all of Mariner’s drawing garbage when viewing at odd zooms like 110%.

(original date: 2005.02.28)

Review: Sennheiser HD595

(originally posted to Head-Fi on 2004.06.28)

Hmm, well, I’m sure I’ve mentioned some bits and pieces of this elsewhere, but let me go through my decision process on how I ended up with the 595s, and my impressions now that they’re here.

I was, as you know, running CD780s unamped, though off a decent NAD headphone jack. The CD780s are truly fantastic for the whole $35 I paid but they’re… well, they’re sloppy. Transients aren’t crisp, soundstaging isn’t very good, flabby bass, etc. And the mids are a bit recessed. So, given I picked up a little consulting money recently, I decided it was time to upgrade.

I figured on my current budget I could go for something like a PIMETA and either 580s or fork out extra for 595s. (I didn’t even consider Grados because the Grados I have heard just did not impress me in terms of performance on classical, build quality, and especially comfort. Not sure why I didn’t consider Beyers–I guess I’m just a Senn kinda guy. A year ago I hadn’t even heard of Sennheiser. Another Head-Fi victim! :-p )

Anyway, I went with the 595s over the 580s for two reasons: [1] easier to drive so the PIMETA should be enough, and [2] I do listen to more rock/electronica than I do classical & acoustic, but I do listen to both. I wanted a phone that would be slightly better for rock/electronica while still being tolerable for the other stuff. According to various posts here (including pp312) that’s what the 595s should give–something in between the 580/600 laid-back sound but not quite as bright and aggressive as the Grados. Oh yeah, and I hate y-cables and the 595s have a single cable rather than a y.

So, I got them Thursday and broke ’em in for a couple days and have been listening a bunch this weekend. So far I’m very impressed. The transient issues I was having with the CD780s are totally handled and the soundstage is FABULOUS–I never expected headphones to have this much soundstage! Mids are of coursre much better, as the 595s are very balanced (you’ve been told that before); they handle a wide range of material very well. They are truly stunning on acoustic solo piano: it really sounds like you’re in the room with one; I was quite shocked at how good this was. And yet they are still fun with more aggressive rock/dance music.

If I was going to nitpick, I’d ask for a smidge, and only a smidge, more bass. I find myself wanting to just slightly nudge up the volume knob when I’m trying to get into a bass-heavy piece. That, and the cable seems a bit flimsy–I’d like it to be a little heavier just so it won’t loop on itself and catch on stuff so much.

They are also VERY comfortable, though not quite in the “strap pillows to your head” way that the 780s are. I love that aspect of the Sonys, but even the 780s feel heavy after a while. The 595s don’t go on quite as soft and fluffy like, but they fit on very comfortably and are very light, even over extended periods. They stand up to multi-hour listening better than anything I’ve ever tried.

Of course, take this with some grain of salt; I’ve never seriously listened to the 580s or 600s. Maybe at the meet next month I can have them go head-to-head with 580s or 650s or something.

Nor can I say how they compare to the 555s since I haven’t heard those at all. I went with the 595s over those because a couple folks here said “smoother treble” and to ward off future upgraditis.

Not as direct a comparison as you wanted, but I hope that helps some, blessingx.

Review: PSB SubSonic 5

(originally posted to audioreview.com on 2003.05.05)

Overall Rating
5 of 5

Value Rating
4 of 5

Product Model Year:
2002

Summary:
I have PSB stuff all around for my HT: 4Ts up front, 8C center, 1B surrounds. However, I thought the Sub5 was a bit pricey for a 10″ sub so I considered a couple others like the Paradigm. Truth be told, I didn’t find the comparable Paradigm much different–probably a little louder, but not quite as musical. For pure HT use, I might have gone with the Paradigm. But since I do music as well, I went with the PSB. My living room has a funny shape to it and is entirely open to the kitchen in back, so while the “standard” sub to go with the setup I have is a 12″ (the Sub6), for me, this is more than enough. This thing can easily rattle all the windows in the room when something in a movie explodes–no power issues for me.

Strengths:
More musical response than others in price range.

Weaknesses:
Not quite as loud as others in price range

Similar Products Used:
Paradigms. Also listened to consumer-grade stuff like Infinity and Polk, which isn’t even in the same class–avoid.

Review: NAD T751

(originally posted to audioreview.com on 2002.02.07)

Overall Rating
5 of 5

Value Rating
4 of 5

Price Paid: $600 at Happy Medium

Product Model Year:
2000

Summary:
I’ve been a big fan of Proton/NAD for some time, and so naturally I listened to the 751 when it was time to go to home theater. Good call. Very good DACs with the expected NAD clean amplification. As others have mentioned, NAD concentrated their efforts on getting it to be clean, not on lots of idiotic DSP modes. This is one of the only HT receivers in this price range that also features solid music-only two-channel performance (I thought this was a particularly weak point for the Denon models). Very clean NAD sound in all modes, not just HT.

Other people have complained about the remote, but I have a universal remote for my whole system anyway and I rarely have to use the NAD remote. When I do end up using it, it doesn’t seem all _that_ bad.

The one thing I don’t like about it is the delay when you switch inputs while the unit searches for a digital signal. Kind of annoying.

Composite to S-video conversion seems pretty OK to me–this only comes up with the VCR for me, since all my other sources are S-video anyway, and we don’t watch much on VHS anymore.

I have this set up with PSB speakers all around: the Image 4Ts up front, the 8C center, and 1B surrounds. I highly recommend the NAD/PSB combo. NAD and PSB are owned by the same parent company and share the same “performance first” design philosophy, and work together very well.

Strengths:
Sound quality, including 2-channel mode

Weaknesses:
Lag on input switching

Similar Products Used:
I auditioned Onkyo, Denon, Yamaha as well.

Review: 2002 Mazda Protege5

(originally posted to carreview.com on 2002.02.06)

Overall Rating
5 of 5

Value Rating
5 of 5

Price Paid: $17000 at Jeff Haas Mazda

Summary:
Somewhere on here, I have a review of my wife’s 1999 Protege LX, which I always really liked for what it was. However, the car has no balls and doesn’t have the hauling capacity of even a simple hatch. I was resigned to having to fork out a ton more cash for a Passat wagon, all the while wishing that Mazda would just make a wagon version of my wife’s car, but faster. Then BAM, they did it. Kudos to Mazda. Exactly the right car at exactly the right price.

Strengths:
* Handling. Man, I do love the handling.
* Versatility. I can carry five, or stuff, or five and some stuff with the roof rack. Excellent.
* Comfort. Great seats, enough room in back for rear-facing baby seat.
* Styling. I’ve never owned a car that got this much attention before.
* I like the leather-wrapped steering wheel and white dials.
* Good ergonomics on the stereo.
* I never thought I’d have any use for a moonroof, but I love it!
* Handling. It’s just so sweet around the corners.
* Excellent brakes, especially with EBD.
* Mileage is decent, particularly for how fun it is to drive.
* Doesn’t suck up the whole garage, amazing considering how much interior space there is.
* Good ergonomics on the cruise control.
* Reliability. Not a single problem so far, good chance that’ll continue.
* Friendly torque curve, especially with the stick.
* Did I mention the handling?

Weaknesses:
* Cupholders suck.
* Center console/armrest is too small for both of those tasks.
* Only one intermittent wiper setting.
* Door lock sticks up into arm when you rest it on the door.
* Speakers and speaker placement leave a lot to be desired.
* Rear defroster should be on a timer.
* Car should be 4″ longer to give a smidge more room in cargo area.
* Gas fill on the wrong side.

Similar Products Used:
I also liked the Subie Impreza TS wagon, but the backseat is too small and I didn’t want to pay the extra bucks for AWD, which I don’t need in SE Texas.

Review: 1999 Mazda Progege LX

(originally posted to carreview.com on 2001.07.13)

Overall Rating
5 of 5

Value Rating
5 of 5

Model/Year:
1999 LX

Summary:
In 1999, it was time to replace my wife’s old beater, a 1985 Chevy Citation with 135k miles and no AC–we were moving to Houston, so AC was a must, and this was her first new car. As we were starting the decision process, the auto show came to town and we got to sit in and bang around everything in this price class. I wouldn’t have even thought of the Protege (great job marketing this, Mazda) if we hadn’t seen it at the show. And wow, am I glad we saw it at the show!

This car is amazing for the price. The interior space, especially the back seat, is amazing for such a small car. The handling is spectacular. We’ve put 34k miles on it in two years and haven’t had a snag–but don’t listen to anecdotes on reliability: every car has some winners and some lemons. Look up the numbers on this car and you’ll see this is a reliability champ. My wife routinely gets 33+ mpg commuting (mostly highway). We’ve added a baby since we bought it and it’s perfect for the little one as well; I can’t even imagine trying to work his car seat with base in the teensy back seat of a Corolla.

The only thing I’d have done differently if this car were primarily for me and not for my wife is that I would have gotten a 5-speed or upgraded to an ES, or both, as the car lacks zip with the automatic. This bothers her a lot less than it does me.

Car & Driver rated the ES version of this car as the best small sedan they’d ever driven in 1999, and in 2000 they rated it above everything in its price class. This is no accident. Unless you really require something substantially bigger, I can’t imagine why people would spend more when the 2001 ES version of this car can be had for around $17k, pretty much loaded. Reasonable car payments are a Good Thing, and I don’t feel like I’m sacrificing. C&D said it well: “This is a car that does everything well. And it has spirit. BMW verve for less than half the price. What’s not to like?”

In fact, I like this car so much that my next car will also be a Protege, but mine will be a Protege5 with a 5-speed for the extra zip and little extra bit of hauling capacity.

No car is perfect, though, and I did list a few fairly minor complaints; those are all things Mazda could fix and it would add almost nothing to the cost of the car. It’d be nice if more other people knew what a great car this is, too.

Strengths:
Handling, reliability, interior space, fit and finish, great standard features, nice exterior styling, good price relative to closest competitor (Civic), great big trunk, comfortable seats.

Weaknesses:
Minor stuff only: crappy Mazda marketing, only one intermittent wiper setting, no trunk release on remote, windows should have darker tint, center armrest is too low and small. Not as zippy as I’d like with the automatic (buy the ES or a 5-speed, or both)

Similar Products Used:
Looked at everyting in its price class for 1999, nothing was as good. Nothing. Civic was the next closest.