Headphones

This is totally not related to anything. I just had a sudden warm loving feeling towards my headphones, and I needed to communicate it. I love them so much. They are Philips SHE-9500 in-ear headphones. They come with 3 different sized rubber cones, so you can fit them to your ears. They kinda jam into your ear canal (I know, it sounds painful, it's not). But they completely seal off your ear, so all you can hear is your music. It works really well, I can't hear my phone ringing 2 feet away from my head, and I never notice when people come into my office either. The sound quality is very good. I imagine I could probably spend a lot more and get something even better.

I've always been impressed by the bass that they can produce. They have a bass port design, so there is an opening on the back side of the headphone, and that allows the bass to react more naturally, which it can't do when jammed into a tiny ear. The result is a great frequency response range, and minimal loss of volume in the low frequencies. Sure, it's nothing compared to listening on my system at home, where the bass has an entire room to fill, and the speaker cones can be measured in full inches, and the power measured in hundreds of watts. But it's great for my office.

That makes me think about how it's been a long time since I've had the chance to just sit down and focus on listening to music. I used to do it all the time, especially in college, when I had all the time in the world. Now I mostly listen to music as a background to doing something else. I listen while I work, while I write, while I clean or mow the lawn, etc... So I don't give the music my undivided attention. When you actually sit and listen to the music, you can catch a lot of details that you've never heard before, and come to appreciate the finer points of the music you listen to every day.