It's Too Damned Loud!

There's no shortage of reports of consumers experiencing hearing loss from using the earbuds that come with just about all of the popular media players on the market currently. By putting the speaker so close to the eardrum (better known as the tympanic membrane, and I've included an image of a normal one in this post to show you how thin and delicate it is), the audio does sound better, but it comes at a substantial price, better known as hearing damage. The better earbuds that come with the form fitting, outside noise blocking rubber inserts are even one step worse.

While this experience is hardly scientific, I wanted to share it anyway. When I listen to my Zune 80, I generally use Sennheiser earbuds. However, I had noticed that even with the volume set to 1 (the lowest out of a possible 20), it was still too loud. Sure, the earbuds look cool, and fit into a bag easily, but how cool are that set of hearing aids gonna look twenty years from now?

As I was going to be working outside for a while, I decided to dig out a set of more old fashioned headphones. They said Sony on them, and I think I had gotten them with a Walkman purchase several years ago. I plugged them into my Zune, and to my surprise, at the volume level of one, I couldn't hear anything. I seriously had to crank the volume up to a level of 7 or 8 in order to comfortably listen to the music. Even at the higher volume setting, the audio was still substantially quieter than the earbuds at the lowest setting.

While this was entirely subjective, and no decibel meter was used, I suggest that unless you want to pay for braces on the teeth of the child of your local audiologist's kid, I'd chuck the earbuds that came with your player, and use an old fashioned pair of headphones. Newer isn't always better.

Jonas

Guitar 2.0

I'm always intrigued to look at how profoundly the internet is changing so many aspects of our society. Here's a personal example of how it's changing the way I interact with my music.

Back in "the day," (late high school and college), I got into playing the guitar. After learning some fingerings from a few books, I was rockin' along to some favorite tracks. Actually, it was a labor intensive process. You see, there wasn't much sheet music out there for the latest albums I wanted to play. Also, what was out there was rather expensive. Not only was the sheet music expensive when you could find it, but they often included it in a songbook by the artist so to get the one song you needed to purchase the entire anthology of music by a particular band. This got real old, real fast for a starving student (ok, ok, I never went hungry, but that's another story...).

The least expensive way to be able to play the song was to listen to it, and by trial and error we'd grab the chords. I say we because it was tons easier when this process was done with another person to help refine the chords. The problem was that much of the music was still on tape, and fast forwarding to find that particular track, and then replaying the same spot took too much work as well. All in all, if I got to play more than one or two songs a week, I was doing really well.

I hadn't picked up a guitar in far too long. However, I realized that with the internet and my computer, this had gotten far easier. For the first step, getting some music notation, there are tons of sites where users publish the chords for a particular song. This week I've been playing with guitaretab.com. Looking on Google, it's easy to see that there are tons of sites that do this, and I won't be running out of things to play anytime soon.

The other key step is that now I don't have to deal with the cassette tapes anymore. With mp3's it's a lot easier to find a song and click play than to rummage through cases of tape, to then find that the tape wasn't rewound, and then to have to find song 3 of 6 on that side which could easily take a couple of minutes for each track selected, or even longer when I'd realize the missing tape was out in the car. No, this is now push button simple, and even more convenient. Of course, putting the tracks on an iPod would also be another simple option, and plugging it into a set of speakers, but I've been doing it from the desktop so far.

About the only thing that hasn't gotten easier is the actual playing. Does anyone know how to do an Am9 chord?

--Jonas