Headphones!

[Elmer Elevator <bobmer.javanet@rcn.com>]

I think Sennheiser open-air "cans" are the best. Besides their superior
full-frequency music reproduction, you can hear someone in the room behind
you yelling "FIRE!" or "Here's the $50 I owe you!"

For rich symphonic music, you'll be astonished how much richer listening
through a pair of top-quality headphones can be. You'll hear entire sections
of the orchestra playing crisply as individual instruments, where
loudspeakers blurred them. Information you never heard before on your
favorite recordings leaps at you.

Speakers have an enormous amount of work to do to get the music through
their big elements, through the air in the room, bouncing around through the
distortion of walls and ceilings, to your ears. Everything conspires to
degrade the high frequencies, the dynamic range, to defeat all the work
musical perfectionists like GG tried to do in the studio.

Good headphones are far more efficient, a far more successful way to get
music from the CD player to your brain.

And ... if you're destitute (as music lovers often are), you can temporarily
avoid the collosal expense of top-quality loudspeakers AND a power amp, and
just get along fine for a few months with a great pair of headphones plugged
into the pre-amp phone jack. Particularly in an apartment/flat or dormitory
situation. Nobody calls the cops over headphones. And cops don't give you a
free pass just because you were playing "Lohengrin" at 2 a.m. rather than
Nine Inch Nails. The world is ignorant and unjust.

Elmer

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Juozas Rimas <JuozasRimas@TAKAS.LT>
>To: F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU <F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU>
>Date: Wednesday, August 07, 2002 3:35 AM
>Subject: Re: GG and Marriage
>
>>>Kate mentioned a friend who does not like Glenn's playing.  How many
people
>>have this problem at home?
>>
>>HINT: headphones? (arguably the best possible sound quality)
>>
>>Advice:
>>1) choose high quality headphones with soft "sponges" around the ears to
>reduce extraneous noise
>>2) if the headphones are expensive, make sure you are not allergic to the
>>material the headphones are covered with (I once bought quite cheap but
>>impressive Kenwood headphones and shortly found out that my ear skin is
>getting
>>irritated, although I never had problems with other headphones)
>>3) make sure you sit in your room facing the door - otherwise you may be
>>unpleasantly startled if your spouse or someone else comes up  >:)
>>
>>But personally I prefer stereo systems. I'd use headphones constantly only
if
>>household were extremely annoyed by my musical tastes...
>>
>>Juozas Rimas Jr (not the one playing)