All Things Audio

Bose home theater speakers are widely known as the best you can buy. This is a true statement. Bose home theater speakers are overpriced ripoffs. I also believe this to be a true statement. Sadly, the first statement is true because of Bose’s amazing advertising and not because of any truth in the actual belief. It seems to me that almost everyone who doesn’t know much about audio, but buys their home theater stuff based on what they’ve heard, thinks that Bose systems are absolutely the best, even if they have done zero comparison with better systems. I used to think this way too, a long time ago. In recent years they’ve had a bit of a lashback as the geek crowd who are a bit more “in the know” gained voice along with the rise of the Internet, but the misconception (in my opinion) still remains quite prevalent. Hopefully if you’re interested in Bose, by reading this post you’ll at least gain a healthy dose of skepticism enough to go and do your own listening (which is always good to do when buying speakers anyway) before taking the plunge.

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Oh, my speakers came in today! I got myself a pair of Dynaudio BM5A’s, but unfortunately the cables I ordered (just a pair of TRS to XLR cables) haven’t arrived. Sigh. So I cleared my table, setup the speakers… and I can’t listen to them. They look nice on my desk, but I didn’t buy them just for that!

This is something that’s been going around. It’s interesting. I also took it before he had the full stats features and scored similarly, but here are my results:

It seems to me to be much more of a music memory test than a test for tone deafness, but I suppose even if he isn’t testing for the “tone deaf characteristic” directly (whatever that is), if it works, it works. Anyhow, just a fun little link.

Ever hear that phrase? If you’re in a church that’s transitioning from traditional hymn-based worship to something more contemporary, that’s probably one phrase you’ll be hearing quite a bit. The first time you hear it, you usually hear it without the “the” at the beginning, and you usually hear it when someone (younger usually) suggests that your church start to incorporate drums into worship, and someone else (older usually) objects.

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Just came back from a practice today, and my ears were hurting at the end of the session. Now don’t get me wrong, I love my in-ear monitors. I have a pair of Shure E4’s (I have a mini-review here) and they’re small, portable, and just sound good, but after a while, they start to hurt my ears. I’m almost tempted to get a pair of good closed headphones to use for practices (maybe these?), and only use the E4’s when we’re actually at a gig. Another option might be to get custom molds for the E4’s. They’re expensive (around $100 I hear), but I guess that’s cheaper than the other set of headphones. Then again, I’d use the other headphones more often, and it’d be useful to have a good set of closed headphones for studio work. Hm…

I started a little site a while ago, thinking that I’d do a couple of reviews of audio equipment that I use, but it’s difficult to find a lot of time to do lengthy reviews as I’d like. Plus really it’s not the place for random thoughts about things, lacks the ability to add comments, and so on. A blog is really a better medium for that sort of interactive discussion (assuming I get any readers at all, haha) and in general enables me to write snippets without feeling the need to have it all complete, well-formatted, etc. So… I’m here.

I purchased two guitar stands a while ago, and I figured I’d write a brief little post on them, since they’ve treated me well so far. Of course, guitar stands aren’t anything special; it’s pretty hard to go wrong with anything that’s fairly popular. I’ve always used the big tripod stands (like this one) before, and have had a relatively good experience with them, but those have always been the church’s stands, not mine. I wanted my own that would be easy to carry back and forth. I ended up going with a pair of Fender folding guitar stands, one for electrics, one for acoustics.

If you look at some of the pictures, you’ll see they’re similar to the common foldup music stands, and I was a little worried about them being flimsy, but actually they turned out to be quite sturdy. One of the legs on the stand for electrics did get a tad loose, but it hasn’t been a problem, and it’d be easy enough to tighten it up if desired with a small wrench and a screwdriver. They’re quite compact when folded up–I keep the electric one in front pocket of the bag I use for my POD XT Live, and it fits quite nicely.

The only problem I have with them is that neither fits my bass terribly well. While sticking my bass on it works just fine by itself, if I have a cable plugged in, I have to carefully position it to make sure it doesn’t slip and fall off. I had no such problem with the old tripod stands where the padded legs of the stand came straight out (as opposed to angled as with these stands) and were closer together. Oh well. Maybe I’ll pick up a different stand for my bass sometime.