I’m sure most of you aimlessly meander through life searching for a means to listen to your music in a whole new way. In an ever growing ear bud/IEM market, differentiation and standing out in the crowd is becoming harder as the market becomes saturated with what seems like a million look-a-like ear buds, headphones, etc. In your meandering ways, have you ever come across a cute little dog, perhaps a weiner dog and wondered if you could saw him in half, cram some armuratures into his little halves and then stick those halves in your ears? (Sick…I know). Well, if that thought did in fact ever cross you mind, you can now feel at ease as you wildest wish is now possible thanks to the Weinder Dog Earbuds. These little buds are that cute little halved pup crammed full of audio components that aim to make your ears sing….er…listen with glee. While they will certainly single you out in a crowd, I’m pretty sure the ridiculous design combined with the super low price of $12.95 means these are more novelty items instead of a more serious “audiophile” grade item. Audio quality and all common sense be dammed, if these buds are calling your name, head on over to Patina and plop down your dough now.
Source: Geeky-Gadgets, Nerd Approved, Craziest Gadgets
I would consider myself an audiophile. I love music, all kinds spanning across many genres and many languages. Whenever I hear someone blare a song that is of horrible quality, it makes me wince and I find myself noting every flaw that I can hear. When possible I try to get at least 256kbps mp3 or even better…AAC for my music downloads that go on my portable devices. For desktop use I use flac as I have several terabytes of storage so I have more than enough room for the large file sizes. However, I am apparently of a dying breed. According to an article on Oreilly, the younger generation that is leading the digital music revolution could more or less care less about audio quality as they think mp3′s sound perfect. Now granted, if you have a 320kbs mp3 file, I even have a hard time discerning it from a lossless file many times. But it’s sad and shocking a the same time. How can they think that a low quality mp3 file is good? It’s nothing to lose sleep over really as long as when the music industry eventually moves to a more digital only method in the year 3011 that they don’t forget the loyal and vocal audiophile group out there. But the article brings up an interesting point; do the “audiophiles” of a particular time period gravitate towards the method of transmission that was available at the time? For the golden oldies it is vinyl and large file sizes. For the new generation it is either flac, aac, or mp3 with an mp3 player of some sort. Clearly very different formats each having their pros and cons. What are your thoughts. Do you think audiophiles are a bunch of quacks? Or do their arguments have some merit? What are you? I highly encourage you to stop by Oreilly as the article is a very good read that will make you sit back and ponder about all things digital.
Source: Tech Dirt
