Review: TaoTronics True Wireless Ear Buds

My beloved LG Tone headset died recently after 3 years of hard use. It appears that the follow on units aren't of similar high quality, so I went looking for new headsets. The TaoTronics won the race because of a feature that I couldn't find anywhere else: the charging case for these ear buds also double as a battery bank for your other electronics!

The case with earbuds comes to 97g. The Anker 3350 mAh battery (same capacity as the earbuds charging case) comes in at 80g. So for 17g more you get a pair of wireless earbuds as well, which is a bargain any way you look at it, especially if you use the coupon code I found (which seems to have expired) to get them for $30 instead of the regular $46. Wireless earbuds are easy to lose, and also easy to damage (e.g., by getting them wet or dropping them), and these are IPX 67 certified, meaning that they're waterproof enough for rain.

The earbuds come with 8 different sized tips for customization, and are just a bit uncomfortable (not as nice as the Moto Hint+ I used to own). The charging case has two seats for the earbuds which are magnetized, so you can't screw up the positioning of the left and right, and even if you did, the charging indicators wouldn't flash, which would tell you that something is messed up. I was concerned that these would be a massive pain to take out and use while cycling, but in practice they weren't bad at all. Certainly the case means much less fumbling than say, the single-ear hook pieces seen in Premium Rush.

The sound quality is just good enough for gym use. The music is listenable, and audio books are just about this side of comprehensible while cycling with only one earbud in your ear. (Don't ride with both ears blocked!) For phone calls, the  response time between pulling it out and answering the call is so long that I've missed a few phone calls because of this, so now I just answer the phone with the handset and then if it's going to be a long call I pull the ear pieces out and plug them into my ears (the transition is fairly easy). For phone calls, it definitely is not as good as the Moto Hint was.

When touring, the most common use case for these is that you're riding around in circles trying to find where your AirBnB is and need to call the owner. These are good enough for that so you can listen to spoken directions over the phone while your host is directing you to their house. The second most common use case is as an emergency charger for your flashing front light, your radar tail light, or your phone. At 3350 mAh these won't charge anything quickly, but is great for topping up your battery lights during a playground stop, or keeping your phone from going dead while you frantically search for a hotel for the night.

There might be other true wireless ear buds with better sound quality, better microphones, etc., but the combination of price and features on this set means I won't bother with others. How long the batteries in the earpieces last is a different story --- I was forced to retire my Moto Hint+ not because the charging case went dead, but because the earpiece batteries could no longer survive a phone call longer than 15 minutes.

In any case, if you're a touring cyclist, get these. Recommended.

Review: How Music Works

I bought the audio book version of How Music Works without knowing who David Byrne was, or even being a fan of the Talking Heads band. a testimony to what having a ton of good reviews coupled with a good sale would do.

I started listening to the first chapter and it blew me away. This was clearly a guy who'd thought hard and deeply about music, with a beautiful statement on how the music venue (ranging from the jungles ans savannah in Africa to the club venues like CBGB) affected the music that's produced. I was impressed and immediately looked up who David Byrne was and listened to a few songs by the Talking Heads.

Part of the book is strongly autobiographical, detailing how he was inspired by Japanese kabuki and other Asian performing traditions to stage his famous Stop Making Sense concert, where stage sets would get moved in during songs, starting from a bare empty stage to a full on band. I even watched the concert for myself, and even though many of the songs didn't move me, it was quite clear that every move had been thought through and rehearsed.

One shock I had was when listening to the Talking Heads David Byrne didn't sound anything like the audio  book's narrator. I shouldn't have been surprised, but maybe you would be too.

Many of David Byrne's sympathies are exactly where mine lie, so I'm afraid you're going to consider my review of this book biased. He rails, for instance, against the dominance of classical music in music education. He notes that the faults of music notation mean that nuances of non-classical music such as groove just don't make it into notation, and hence many classical musicians just cannot "rock". Not only can't they perform like a practiced musician of the genre, they literally cannot hear the difference. Despite that, children get educated classically because that's "harder." He points out that music education should be redirected towards self-expression and composition, rather than an over-emphasis of technical expertise and replaying older pieces. He thinks that rich people donating to operas, symphonies, or ballets as a balm for their guilty conscience is pathetic, and expresses sarcastic surprise that real criminals and mobsters didn't get into that act, since it's obviously been so successful for the billionaire CEOs who would donate to the opera house while laying off rank-and-file workers.

I could go on and on about the great stuff I learned in this book. But it's best if you just discover it for yourself. If I had any stereotypes in my head about "dumb rock musicians who can only write repetitive lyrics but can't hold complex thoughts", David Byrne wiped those caricatures clear off my brain by the second chapter and proceeded a complete re-education campaign. He even has a chapter on how to grow a musical ecosystem which sounds like it would be much more effective than the frequent prescriptions in business magazines about "how to grow the next Silicon Valley".

That's not to say that he doesn't have his flaws (in doing research for this review I learned that he broke up with the rest of his band during an interview with a newspaper, hardly the act of a non-self-centered rock star), but I feel like I learned even more from this book than from the well respected (though classically-oriented) Great Courses entry. That makes this book highly recommended and a no-regret purchase.

Long Term Review: Sony WH1000XM2

When I first reviewed the Sony WH1000XM2, I hadn't used them on an airplane. On the flight to and from Europe this time, I used them on the plane. Wow, they are amazing on an airplane. They've completely cut out the airplane noise. Music sounds great.

And comfort? Bowen hates headphones, and he grabbed them from me and tried them, and never gave them back to me, falling asleep with the headphones on his head. I was so happy that he fell asleep and I got to steal them back.

If you fly on a regular basis or have a long flight ahead of you, these are the headphones to get. Highly recommended.

Review: Sony WH1000XM2

During the holidays there was a sale on the Sony WH1000XM2. I picked it up with the intention of returning it if it sucked or didn't provide sufficient noise cancellation. My prior experience with noise cancellation was that they distorted music severely, and the result wasn't pleasant.

The Sony comes with a nice carrying case, and touch surfaces for most normal operations. (There are just 2 buttons) There's also a stereo headphone wire for times when you don't want to rely on bluetooth but want to just plug in the headphones. The reason to do so would be for higher quality playback: there's a distinct difference between bluetooth playback and using the headphone jack.

The noise cancellation works. I put on the headphones to work on the bike, and no amount of screaming from Bowen would get through. As far as being useful for phone calls, they work fine too, despite not having a mike. One peeve I have is that the headphones won't serve as microphones when plugged in. Sony just couldn't be bothered to include the microphone input on the headphone jack.

The headphone is also compatible with the new and more sophisticated LDAC or APTX-HD bluetooth connectivity for better music playback. Since my phone isn't compatible with either, I couldn't test this. But the most important reason to own this headphone isn't the sound quality. It's that nowadays I rarely get to listen to music in a quiet environment! In a quiet environment, my 15 year old Sennheiser HD600 are great (my custom PC has a nice headphone amp built in). But the rest of the time, the Sonys simply are better, bluetooth or wired.

Needless to say, I didn't return this headphone set. Recommended.

Review: How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition

How to Listen to and Understand Great Music is misnamed. It really should be labeled: The structure and form of Western Music. I don't really fault Professor Greenberg for this: it's quite clear to him that "Great Music" is restricted to those composed by Dead White People. I'll admit to mostly being a music philistine: I hated my piano lessons as a kid, and rarely understood the point of Mozart. I labelled all instrumental-only music as "classical".

Well, Professor Greenberg taught me a lot:

• "Classical" music is actually a misnomer. There's "Baroque", "Classical", "Romanticism", and "Modernism." These labels apply to various epochs roughly corresponding to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Debussy. Each of these epochs had unique characteristics that were reflected in the music. I was actually surprised that I could learn this because at one point during the program Greenberg played a piece of music and asked the listener to guess what epoch it came from and I actually got it right.
• Beethoven really does sound different from any composers before him. His music, unlike that which came before, actually does represent extra-musical content. I tested this by playing a Beethoven symphony to Bowen, who did promptly ask: "What does this music mean?" Which is not a question that usually comes up with other instrumental music.
• Professor Greenberg is a fan of Opera. Despite his immense enthusiasm, I still can't stand it. Despite his picking what he thinks are great musical pieces to listen to, I'm afraid I agree with one of the characters in John Steakley's fabulous novel: "Opera is for vampires. The living prefer rock and roll."
• Life during the middle ages was tough. One of the composers had 20 children, out of which only 2 survived to adult hood. Many of them died young (Mozart at 35), and even when they were alive had poor health and frequently the medical care hurt them. Greenberg did not shy from providing excellent coverage of the composers' lives, which made them far more interesting as people than I would have thought.
• The piano technology got hugely better from the 1600s to the 1800s. That's why in Mozart's symphonies, whenever the piano played the rest of the orchestra had to pipe down: the piano simply wasn't loud enough to compete with the other instruments in the orchestra. By the time you got to the 1800s the concert grand could hold its own against the orchestra and the symphonies written then didn't have to pipe down the rest of the orchestra as much. I wished Greenberg covered more of this since it would have been interesting to see what other technological changes in instruments affected composition.
• Dance music (waltzes, etc) is not considered "Great Music", so I don't ever have to listen to them even if I was a music snob.

Conclusions that Greenberg didn't mention but that I drew for myself:

• The various forms of music (e.g., Sonata Form) were really designed for music that was written in a pre-recorded era. That's why, for instance, Sonata Expositions frequently feature repeats of the themes. In a pre-recording era, you weren't going to listen to a piece of music repeatedly on demand, so each musical piece would have to repeat its themes during the exposition so the audience could hold it in their heads. This practice doesn't stand up in recorded music, since if you were to listen to the pieces repeatedly (e.g., if you listened to any of the numbered symphonies more than once a week), the expositions quickly become boring and feels like the composer's condescending to your intelligence. Greenberg vehemently demands that repeats be played exactly as written (and there's definitely a purist approach where that's correct), but I can definitely see why these already long pieces can't compete with shorter musical forms (e.g., Rock & Roll), which evolved in an era where recorded music that can be (re)played on-demand is the norm.
• Classical music was used as the catch-all for Western instrumental music forms because it was the pop music of the day. The middle class was starting to happen, which meant that regular people could become amateur musicians and learn to play well enough to demand easy-listening pieces.
• The need to express individuality and originality drove composers from Beethoven onwards to slowly abandon the traditional forms of instrumental music. What makes most modern instrumental composers unbearable to most people (e.g., Schoenberg) was when composers completely abandoned tonality.

I learned a surprising amount over the 42-lecture listen. The biographies of Beethoven, Listz, Tchaikovsky, and other composers were fun and added a lot of life to people behind the music. There were several pieces that I'd never heard before that I made notes to hunt down to listen to, and of course, I discovered that I'm a Beethoven fan and not a Mozart fan.

Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that Great Music should be restricted to those instrumental pieces constructed in the past. Certainly for today's "repeated listening" environments, I think many popular music genres out-compete the so-called classics for good reason. Nevertheless, if you have the time, I'd definitely consider Professor Greenberg's lecture series well worth a listen.

Review: Panasonic Ergo Fit Earbuds

The Playstation Vita supports bluetooth, but in a funky way that disconnects every time it goes to sleep, and occasionally finds it difficult to pair. I wasn't willing to spend a lot of money on dedicated headphones for it, so got the Panosonic Ergo Fit  Earbuds, which had great reviews on Amazon.

The ear buds are surprisingly comfortable and do a reasonable job of sealing out outside noise. What's really nice about traditional headphones using the traditional headphone port is that the power requirements are minimal and the devices last forever, whether they're smartphones or PS Vitas.

For $8 + tax, these are a great deal. In fact, I wish I'd sprung for the version with the inline mic so it can serve as a backup for my regular bluetooth headsets.

Recommended.

Review: LG Tone 750

It was inevitable: I left my Sony SBH-52 in my pocket and it went into the laundry. The darn thing is water resistant, but IPX-68 will not guarantee survival in a washing machine for an hour. This forced me to dig up the LG Tone 750 which I got as a promotion a year or so ago but never even opened the box.

This was my first time using the "around the collar" blue tooth headphone format. Compared to the SBH-52, it has the following advantages:

• It falls off when you take off your shirt, so you're not going to accidentally leave it in your pockets.
• It's too big to fit in your pockets, so you can't accidentally leave it in your pockets.
• The headphone never gets tangled up. In fact, most of the time I leave them dangling from the headset instead of snapping them back into their magnetic mounts, and they don't even get tangled.
• The buttons are easier to manage. In particular, the "call" button activates Google Now, which is very cool. The play/pause fast-forward buttons are all easier to find and remember because they're placed on separate sides of the headphone.
• There's no display. This turned out to be a great feature, as it forced LG to provide battery level announcements, etc., whenever you turn on and off the headset.
• It's smart about the playback. For instance, if I pair this to my Moto G, and then plug in the headphone jack to my car, I can still use the buttons on the headset to control the music even though the playback's being done by the car's loudspeakers.
• The collar is a much more convenient location than the clip the SBH-52 provides.

Against this, there are several disadvantages:

• You can't use your own headphones. This would suck if the built in earbuds sucked. But they don't, so I'm OK with it.
• You can't use the LG Tone while charging.
• The volume control is practically non existent. Pushing volume up or down doesn't seem to do much. The default volume is fine, but I found myself having to reach over to the phone's volume control whenever I wanted to turn it up or down.
• It's not a great cycling solution. While cycling, the device bounces up and down on my collarbone. This sucks. I cannot use this while riding any significant distance, but if it's say, riding to the local store to get milk, it's still usable.

All in all, the disadvantages are more than outweighed by the advantages, so I'd recommend this headset. 

Robinson: The Original and Three Covers

This is one of those posts that I write to myself for future reference. I'd been listening to Robinson (by Spitz) in the car when driving Bowen around, so he picked up on it. Then during a youtube session, we found a video performance on Youtube:

OK, so a random Japanese pop song, right? But no, Debbie Gibson (of all people) actually produced an English version cover:
That blew my mind. But my favorite cover of this song has got to be Goose House's duet, with two singers and 4 instruments. That's really worth checking out (watch the motion of the guy's right leg --- talk about multi-tasking):
If that's not to your taste you can go for the a Capella version:

6 Months Report: Learning the Flute

I had a couple of goals when learning to play the flute. The first was to see how hard it really was to learn an instrument. The conventional wisdom is that you should learn when you're a kid because it's much easier to learn motor skills as a kid. This is of course bollocks. For instance, there aren't any examples of anyone under 5 being able to even try to play a flute, simply because the lung power and muscles required to form an embouchure aren't there.

Now stories abound about how it takes weeks to even be able to make a sound on the flute. To my surprise, I was able to play "Mary had a Little Lamb" in under a week. It turns out that like any new motor skill, flute playing is dependent on repeated extended practice. If you put in a half an hour a day for a month, you'll get there. If you want to accelerate it, you'll need an instructor who can grade your pieces and provide you gradually more and more challenging pieces.

As an instrument, the flute is far far better than the piano. I never understood slurs because the piano doesn't really lend itself to them. A flute, however, has a clear difference between a slur and a separated note. A piano has to be played sitting down. There are clear studies showing now that sitting down is very bad for you. A flute, however, can be played standing up, walking around, or moving from sitting to standing as you see fit. I can't see forcing a little boy to play the piano as anything but sheer torture. (My perspective is that forcing anybody to do anything is a bad idea: read Producing Excellence if you want to really find out what it costs to really make it into the top leagues in classical music)

My secondary goal was to see if I could get good enough at a new instrument in half a year to be able to achieve a decent amount of fluency: I needed to be able to play any song I knew that fit within the octave range of the instrument. The flute has great range, so it turns out that I can pretty much play anything I've heard and memorized. (It's no big deal: you've probably memorized a ton of songs, from TV themes to movie soundtracks --- anything you've heard about 10-20 times is probably something you've memorized, whether you know it or not)

It turned out that this wasn't that hard. On the flute, it's a matter of being able to hit the high notes consistently (or for some people, the low notes --- turns out that for me, low notes were easy but high notes were tough). To be able to play any song well requires practice, but I can actually now compose reasonable melodies on the flute spontaneously, which indicates for me that I've reached a comfortable level with it.

So all in all, I think the only reason the meme "it's easier to learn as a child" is even mildly realistic is that while your spouse might tolerate crappy lousy playing from the child that came out of her womb, she might take offense to you butchering an song within ear reach. But for a determined adult, it's probably far easier to learn a new instrument than for the equivalent child. With that, I have even less incentive to "tiger-parent" my kid into piano.

Music Lessons

Living in Silicon Valley sometimes feels a lot like living in Singapore for one reason: sometimes, it feels as though people around here (the ones with kids anyway) engage in competitive parenting more than any other sports. At one point, someone told me about how she forced her kid to practice music in order to earn hours at video games. And then there's the mandatory after-school Chinese language lessons (for those who are Chinese). There's nothing like useless jumping-through-hoops hyper-competitive parenting to make kids resent the subject.

You hear a lot of junk science about how this is supposed to teach kids self-discipline, or teach them to persevere to be good at something. There's also the frequent comment that it's harder to learn music as an adult. There's the real-science behind it mentioned in Brain Rules for Baby, which discusses how about 10 years of music lessons is correlated with better understanding of emotions or empathy. (I don't remember which)

Anyway, Xiaoqin said, "if those parents like music so much, why don't they learn the instrument themselves instead of making their kids that way?" My tip for kids is to make this bargain with their parents: they'd spend precisely as much time practicing their instruments as their parents spend playing Bloodborne. (Those kids who want to have mercy on their parents can choose an easier game like Uncharted 2 instead) (No, I'm not afraid of my kids doing this to me --- I've been secretly practicing video games)

In any case, I grew up hating piano lessons as well, just like many other Asian kids. Thankfully, my parents let us give up on those lessons before any permanent damage was done: I'll never love classical music, but at least I can enjoy some music.

In any case, I'd always thought that I'd enjoy the flute. I bought a tiny white recorder-toy for Bowen, and could play a few tunes for him, but the recorder's range is pretty limited. And then during a re-watch of Battlestar Galactica (we knew to stop at Season 3, Episode 4), I heard Wander My Friends, which captivated me. Coupled with my wife's comments about learning an instrument, I decided to buy a cheapo flute and a book and try to learn how to play.

A few days into it, I realized that learning an instrument from a book was a recipe for giving myself bad habits, and engaged an instructor for private lessons. A couple of weeks of practice later, and I'm beginning to hit high notes. Most of all, I'm now actually able to play tunes that I like, albeit not mistake free, and perhaps at a halting tempo. (I've long been able to play anything by ear, with minor experimentation, so this is not a surprise --- my sight reading skills are still piss-poor, however, mostly because playing by ear has made me neglect those skills)

The flute's a much tougher instrument than the piano: rather than just working your fingers and hands, you have to form an embouchure. Worse, the embouchure varies from note to note, so you're changing the embouchure and your fingering at the same time, which makes for challenging practicing. On the other hand, it's a much more fun instrument than the piano.

For one thing, you don't have to sit! I never realized how much I disliked sitting in front of a piano until the day I realized that the flute didn't have to be played sitting down. I can stand and play, walk around and play, and generally move around. The instrument is portable, and if I ever got really good at it, I supposed I could hike and practice at the same time. If you're a cyclist, hiker, sailor, a piano is a ridiculous thing to bring with you on trips, but it's entirely feasible to bring along a flute, or its cheap but robust relative, the fife.

So a couple of weeks later, my cheapo flute developed an air-leak that made me unable to play certain notes. My instructor looked at it and asked me how much I paid for it. When I told him, he said that he was surprised that it even made any noise at all. He recommended that I upgraded to the Gemeinhardt. That darn thing cost $300, but it was a revelation! Now I can easily hit every note I can form a decent embouchure for, and I could now play Wander My Friends. The day it arrived I spent a couple of hours playing it because it was so much fun being able to play whatever I wanted without the instrument getting in the way!  I was never that motivated as a kid! Note that the technical practice still sucks. It's still boring to repeatedly play the same piece over and over again, and it's still annoying as heck to fail for 4-5 days until suddenly everything clicks and you can do it on the 6th.

So the argument that it's easier to learn music as a kid doesn't really pan out for me. As an adult, it's easier for me to tolerate having to do technical exercises in order to get better. I've learned to reward myself by playing tunes I like after I'm done with the technical exercises. I also have low standards. I'm not going after orchestra-level performance: I'm playing for my own satisfaction and fun. When it gets boring, I stop.

And of course, Bowen after seeing me play, wants to play too. But even if we start him on lessons (most music instructors will agree that 5 years is about the right age to start, not earlier), there's no way I'm going to make him practice or let him treat music as anything but fun. Though having read this answer on Quora, I'm tempted to force him into music lessons and use math or cycling as a reward instead.

I think as far as music lessons are concerned, the advice written by Antoine de Saint Exupery from decades ago applies, more than anything else:
"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

Review: Sennheiser CX 200

My favorite headphones for on-the-go sonic isolation are still the Etymotic In-Ear Monitors. Mine are several years old and still going strong. Being a parent, however, means that those get increasingly little use, because complete sonic isolation isn't actually what I want, since I need to hear my kid. Moreover, putting on and taking off the Etymotics is an involved operation, and frequently I just need easy-on/easy-off use.

Enter the Sennheiser CX-200. These are relatively cheap, retailing at $18, and you can occasionally find a deal for under $15. They're twist in, and you get a little bit of sonic isolation, but not so much that you can't hear your kid (or your wife). They're light and easy to carry, and not bulky at all, though on a plane you'd still rather have the Etymotics.

The sound quality is decent, though of course if I'm at home, I'd much rather use my PortaPro or PX100s. But you can't buy the PX100s any more, and the PX200s that replace them have terrible reviews and cost a lot more. The PortaPro, meanwhile, sounds great but is really bulky, so you're not really going to carry them out of the house.

Of course, these beat the heck out of the ear buds that came with your phone, iPod, or other portable music player. So if you're still using those, I'd recommend these as an upgrade.

Review: Kinivo Bluetooth Headset

My Ericsson MW600 died from the inevitable: it was so small that when it was left in my pocket for a laundry run it was put through the washing machine and didn't survive. Sony promised to honor the warranty, but for whatever reason my MW600 didn't make it to them so I never got a replacement. So it's back to the drawing board and looking for a bigger bluetooth headset that I won't accidentally leave in my pockets.

The Kinivo BTH220 looked a lot like my old beloved SBH-500, so I ordered it. While it looked like the SBH-500, it's actually quite a bit more compact, with swivels built into the earpieces so the whole device collapses down to a small package. The battery life is pretty good --- I have yet to have to charge it more often than once a week (or even every two weeks), and it gets used often enough that I never think about it.

The biggest problem is that it can' pair with more than one device at a time, but in practice, that's not as big a deal as you might imagine, since I pretty much pair it with my phone and leave it that way. Sound quality is decent, but the big problem is with voice. The microphone pickup isn't as well designed as the SBH-500, so if there's any noise at all the other side has a hard time hearing you. I've used the headset a lot for hour long interviews in quiet rooms, and it works great. But outside of those situations don't expect it to perform.

I managed to snag a deal on one of the deal-a-day sites for $20. But even at the full Amazon price of $30, this won't break the bank and so far has lasted long enough that I'd buy another if this one died tomorrow.

Recommended.

Review: Sony Ericsson MW600 Bluetooth Stereo Headphones

My beloved Samsung SBH 500 Bluetooh Headphones died a year or so ago, and it's been a chore finding a suitable replacement. In the interim, I made do with wired headphones, but the last straw came when my ham-fisted handling of the headphones finally created enough wear on my N1 that the headphones just wouldn't stay in the headphone jack, creating sudden music stoppages.

The Sony Ericsson MW600 is by far the most promising of the bluetooth stereo headphones I've tried recently. The best thing about it is that it isn't a fully integrated headset with headphones. Instead, it's a blue-tooth receiver and microphone that turns any standard set of headphones into a bluetooth headphone! Yes, that means my beloved PX100 are now blue-tooth compatible, which grants me no end of delight. Now, this also means you can't be like Uhuru from star trek and hang the headset off your ear, but in practice, any set of ear buds would let you just plug one ear in and clip the microphone to your shirt/blouse so you can talk while hands free in the car or on the bike.

Pairing: the process was straightforward, and I had no problem pairing the MW600 with my Nexus One, my Nexus 7, and my desktop PC. Selecting between them is a little tricky, since the touch strip is a little finicky (and the LED display is difficult to read outdoors), but I managed it. The sound quality is nothing short of amazing. Unlike the SBH500, which tended to be finicky outdoors, the MW600 does not care whether it is indoors or outdoors. There's a built in radio receiver, which also sounds pretty good, even indoors.

The cons? The volume control is a touch strip, and is not great. The forward/back/play/pause buttons aren't clearly delimited, and can be easily confused. I expect that to be no problem as I get used to it. There are reports on the internet that the clip is fragile. I expect the last to hit me eventually, but I've got a bunch of superglue handy.

In any case, I'll be keeping this headset, unlike the other headsets I've sent back. Recommended

First Impressions: Belkin Bluetooth Music Receiver

My two year old Roku Soundbridge's wifi card failed, and it's impractical to run an ethernet cable out to where the entertainment center is, so I disconnected it (some day, I might find a practical way to run it), figuring that I would use the PS3 to stream music.

The reality, though, is that it never happened. There's something silly about having to turn on the huge ass screen just to listen to music, so when one of Amazon's lightning sales gave me the Belkin Bluetooth Music Receiver at $20, I jumped on it despite the mediocre reviews about the range, sound quality, and the need to mod the product to get decent range. I figured I'd return it if it turned out to be no good, or mod it if the range was inadequate for my tiny home.

The product arrived and to my surprise, the power connection on the unit was the same as the very first version of the kindle, which meant that my gomadic system would work with it in the car, for instance. I plugged it into my system, paired it with my Nexus One, and away I went. To my surprise, the music sounded decent. Not "blow the doors off great", but on the other hand, no one had stuck a CD into the PS3 for ages, which is what it would take to get great sound. Furthermore, the Google Music UI on the phone gave me access to all the music in the cloud, with only a minimal delay for streaming.

I then tried pairing the device with XiaoQin's LG Optimus V. That device paired but did not connect. After a bit of frustration, I long-pressed the device selection on the Android screen and turned off the "Phone Audio" for the Belkin, at which point the connection went off without a hitch.

I was expecting to have to modify the device (read the Amazon Reviews for the details), but it turns out that in my tiny home, the range is just fine. What's sweet is that a bluetooth laptop, for instance, could just as easily stream to the device.

All in all, this is an incredibly cheap replacement for my Roku Soundbridge, and for $20, a more than good enough replacement for it. I still will eventually want to find a way to plug the Roku in, but for now, this works just great. Recommended.

上松秀実「時代」- One of the more powerful Greenpeace music you've never heard of. =)

This is definitely one of the strongest new songs I've heard in a while. I found it while trolling around Youtube looking for some of Nakajima Miyuki's singles, and found this song by accident. The lyrics (both untranslated and translated can be found here). This is definitely one of those Greenpeace songs in theme, and her vocals are nothing short of astonishing!

Even better, she composes her own melody and writes her own lyrics. Definitely check it out!

Review: Roku Soundbridge

After the prior disappointment with the Logitech Squeezebox, I decided to give the Roku Soundbridge a try.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much. The vacuum fluorescent display looked cheesy, even on Amazon's web page, and the remote definitely wasn't the snazzy WiFi-compatible one that the Squeezebox had.

The good news is the packaging is very nice. Not nice the way Apple defines it, where unboxing is supposed to be an experience in itself, but nice in the way that I like it --- the plastic box snaps open, pieces aren't wrapped in fancy packaging, and it comes with all the cables I wanted. Even the power plug plays nice with my power strip.

Unlike most dedicated audio systems, there aren't RCA jacks but instead there's just a 3.5mm mini plug. That didn't bother me, since I already had one of those plugged into the receiver for MP3 players, phones, etc. I already had a Firefly server running on my NAS, so I plugged it in and turned it on.

The setup process is intuitive and easy, and really short. Select language, region, time zone, and the wireless network. Then the system reboots itself, and automatically picked up my Firefly server! Sweet! Streaming 320bps VBR MP3s, it sounds great, and I can't complain. It even displays the Japanese song titles on my Miyuki Nakajima tracks!

The downside is I have to create playlists on my Firefly server instead of just importing it from iTunes or Media Monkey. I can live with that. I paid $165 on Amazon's web-site just 2 days ago, but it looks like the price has gone up. Even at $199, though I'll give this little machine an enthusiastic 2 thumbs up. Highly recommended!

Yes, I'm aware that the Soundbridge is an orphaned product, but seriously, if I got 3-5 years out of it, it'll be money well spent. Maybe someone will steal the design and make a clone. Something this good deserves a second chance.
[Update: Greg says you can buy the Soundbridge at Roku's store for $130. At that price, it's a steal.]

Review: Squeezebox Duet

Short summary: DO NOT BUY. STAY AWAY

When I first bought a nice stereo system, someone recommended that I try a Squeezebox. I didn't bother because in the apartment, my computer was so close to the stereo I could just plug it in, so why bother.

Well, now I have a house, and the office with the equipment closet (NAS, wireless router, cable modem, and the EEE PC running Skype) is far away from the living room, so something like the Squeezebox makes sense. I ordered one and got it on Thursday, hoping that if it worked out, Lisa wouldn't have to deal with CDs while I was in Japan.

The box contains 3 items: a charging cradle for the controller, the receiver, and the controller. The first sign that the product was sub-par in quality was that the cradle was too big for the controller. What this meant was that when you put the controller in the cradle, the controller wouldn't charge! I had to resort to tearing up little pieces of paper and wedging them into the cradle so that the controller would have a good contact with the cradle's charging posts. This felt very silly, since if Logitech couldn't get their manufacturing act together, they should have used a simple, mini-USB port on the thing, skip the cradle, and everyone would be happier.

OK, then I had to install the SqueezeCenter software on either the EEE PC or my NAS. I installed it on both just to see which one would give me a good experience. Both installations went very smoothly --- products that rely on servers are usually nightmares, but this phase of the install went really well and I started looking forward to it.

I then connected the controller (which runs over WiFi, not infra-red) to my WPA network, started playing music, and all was well. Well, all was well for about 15 minutes. I showed the controller to Lisa and she loved it. Then midway through one of the songs on our playlist, the controller said, "Music stopped." That's it. An attempt to play got us nothing. The SqueezeCenter also would do the same thing. I rebooted the controller, and it got stuck at "connecting to Music source". I let it sit overnight, and woke up the next day to find all was well again.

For all of 15 minutes, then the controller started dropping out of WiFi. This time, though, controlling the receiver from the SqueezeCenter software worked. But the whole point of the deal was to be able to run music from the controller! My guess is that Logitech cheaped out on the Wifi Antenna for the controller (which is insane, given the price, but companies have been known to do insane things). I did a quick web-search and discovered that indeed, this was a common problem, and not isolated to just my house (which has great WiFi coverage everywhere, as you might expect --- it's just not that big!).

Well, at that point, I quickly packed everything backed into the box, printed an Amazon return label, and shipped it back. Logitech made way too many poor decisions in this product.

The standard system for this kind of stuff, according to people who would know, is Sonos. But at $1000 for a basic system, that's insane! I could buy another EEE PC, have it connect to the Firefly server, and dedicate to playing music, and still have enough money to buy a round trip ticket to Zurich for that! (Sure, the EEE PC won't have a remote, but I think I can write code to allow anyone to control the EEE PC from another PC)

I think my next step (to be done after I get back from Japan) is to try the Roku Soundbridge. It won't have as nice a remote controller, but it also won't break the bank either. If anyone has experience with this, let me know.

Why I love YouTube, part whatever!

I found this clip just randomly trolling YouTube...and wow. I watched it twice before realizing I absolutely loved the song. I love the beginning, "no matter who you are, no matter where you are at the point in your life, you're going to need someone to stand by you"....absolutely true..but I love how they took all the covers from the artists they enlisted and mixed them together so absolutely beautiful.

Listening to this song is a religious experience! The Grandpa Elliot portions are just so gorgeous...great voice, great passion in his singing....music folks probably don't need me to tell them this, but the layering of this song is just so beautifully delicious I can't help but get into the song....when they get to the African female chorus, I was almost to the point of tears at the sheer beauty of the song...the video just cements how great the song is....when you look at how the voices mix together, the various instruments, and how they mix each voice to be backing, lead, chorus...its just sheer perfection as far as I'm concerned..

But don't get me wrong, the video part of this song is so important...you can see the passion of each artist...the Grandpa's eyes rolling in to his head, Clarence's sheer power as he's singing...the various instrumentalists (the russian in particular is superb...so stoic, so serious, his chords so stirring!)...

The producers of this mix seem to be part of a bigger movement..Playing for Change...well, they've got a customer lined up for them once they release the DVD and soundtrack for their movie.

First movie I'm going to buy review unseen =).

Ah..the powers of YouTube..and they wonder how they're going to monetize YouTube, sometimes the answer's right in their eyes, I think.

Highly recommended video!!

Miyuki Nakajima

People who hang out with my brothers and I know that we are musically omnivorous --- one example of that is that I enjoy Japanese music, despite not knowing enough Japanese to get out of trouble (thanks to a year of Berkeley's language lab, though, my Japanese accent is good enough that even Japanese folks think I know more than I do). Now, you might think that I got to like Japanese music in Japanese class, and you'd be wrong. Or perhaps I picked it up in Singapore, and you'd be wrong too --- we didn't get access to a lot of Japanese music until we got to the US.

What did happen once we did get access to Japanese pop music, though was that we realized how much of the Chinese pop music we heard in Singapore owed its origins to music produced by some Japanese artist. It was very disconcerting to realize that the same music (with translated lyrics, even) was being heard in multiple languages around the same time in Asia, thanks to the hegemony of music companies such as EMI.

One of the results of this mixed-mode musical sharing is that (as in this example video) music videos in Asia tend to be subtitled --- in the language that they are sung in! This is very helpful if you're trying to learn the language, but for someone who knows both Chinese and a little bit of Japanese, it's also fascinating. For instance, in this video at 2:01 (and other times --- it's part of the chorus), she sings, "私は大丈夫", meaning "I'm OK." Now, most folks know that 私 means "I" (female form) in Japanese. But in Chinese, the same character means "private" --- you can see how "private" evolves to "I". 大丈夫, however, is typically only used in Chinese in the context 男子汉大丈夫, which translates (roughly) to "A manly man." I'm always entertained by these almost, but not quite matches between Japanese and Chinese. (The last two characters by themselves, 丈夫, means husband in Chinese)

In any case, as you can tell from this song, "Maybe", the Japanese aren't shy about mixing English in, just so you can get a little triple-language action there. I'm a fan of Miyuki Nakajima, and this video shows why. She's not particularly pretty, but she's very expressive, and at the very least, her songs tell a story and she tries to tell it visually (though again in classically exaggerated Japanese fashion). Enjoy! (My favorite song of hers has an English title, "With", but I can't find a good enough video to post)

K.D. Lang is Amazing Live!

Although she's never been my favourite singer or performer, I've always appreciated K.D. Lang because of a few hits she had. Constant Craving, Miss Chateline, mostly stuff from her Ingenue album.

When tickets came up for her show at Oakland, I jumped at the chance and snapped them up. They were good seats too, 20 rows or so from the stage, and its supposedly the hall where the Oakland symphony plays at, so the acoustics must be pretty darn good.

Well, I wasn't disappointed. It was absolutely amazing.

The one thing I didn't realize about K.D. Lang when I listened to her is that her voice is literally an instrument. Its not a quality that's easy to describe or something that you can train, and very few people have it (or else all the American Idols would have gone to a school that made them all have it). Its not quite operatic, but its probably one of the most powerful voices I've ever heard. Her voice will literally move you, like a good bass system does. It touches you somewhere on the inside just like hearing something low and resonant.

I guess for most people, the closest thing would be to listening to Sarah Brightman's Time to Say Goodbye, where you don't really care so much about the words as much as what she displays in voice virtuosity. K.D. Lang is exactly like that as well, just in a different tonal quality!

And this is probably something you only get live.

Most of the time when she was singing, she would sing off the mic, as if she knew that if she sang into the mic, she'll break the sound system or something. Half the times I felt like she probably didn't even need the mic!

Her song set list was incredibly well chosen, somber because of the passing of prop 8, but delightfully hopeful. In case you didn't already know, K.D. has outed herself for a very long time, her audience shows it too with a myraid of marriage proposals (she declines), and love affirmations. =)

Her band is also worth mentioning. I don't know how long they've been touring together, but they're absolutely amazing as well. She had a band of four, one drummer, one guitarist, one zitarist/lead guitar/banjo player/syth guy, and one primarily keyboards person/synth guy.

They would switch out their instruments almost every song and it was a delight to see them be such a great backdrop to show off K.D.'s voice.

In short, if you have a chance to see her life, go! Even at 47, with the way her voice is, she will doubtless amaze you with the power that is her voice!