January 23, 2011 – A new year, a brand new product review! Audio-Technica was kind enough to send me a set of their DJ headphones, the ATH-PRO700. I’ve been itching to try out a good set of headphones since the ones I’ve used to mix and listen with for the past 10 years, have begun disintegrating.

Because I check my mixes with a couple sets of in ear monitors, one of them being the Ultimate Ears Triple-Fi I reviewed last month, I haven’t been in a rush to replace my old headphones. When the ATH-PRO700′s arrived, however, I was eager to see if they would be a good replacement.

It helps to know that the ATH-PRO700 has been categorized by Audio-Technica as for DJ’s. As I’m sure you know, DJ’s are pretty rough with their headphones and need something that can withstand the punishment of gigging professionals. When I picked up the ATH-PRO700′s I was surprised by their weight. I normally look for the lightest set for comfort but I was surprised at how beefy these headphones are.

The headband is especially thick and feels like it could take a bullet. The closed ear capsules both fold and rotate completely which means that the headphones are easy to store (they come with a vinyl bag for storage) and are more likely to rotate than snap when put in an awkward situation; definitely a plus. I’ve heard that some have had issues with the swivel portion of the headphone cracking, but since I haven’t had the headphones for that long I can’t comment on that; they seem pretty well-built to me so far. The ear cups isolate the sound well, but a bit more foam would be nice as. For me at least, they pressed on my ear a bit.

The audio wire only comes off of one side which makes it more convenient to wear, especially when monitoring each ear separately. It’s a decently thick gauge, with an eighth inch stereo plug (a screw-on quarter inch adapter is included). The cord is sufficiently long for personal listening, but you might want an extension if you’re the dance-while-dj’ing type.

Ok, so how does this set of cans sound? Super bass flavour! These things have a tonne of bass, and pretty decent treble as well, although I found the mid-range lacked a bit of clarity. The ATH-PRO700 also get plenty loud, and with the good isolation from the cup design (although it could be improved even more with increasing the padding size as I stated before), these things are great for a noisy club environment.

The soundstage was distinct, though not as wide as I would have liked in some situations. Would I use these to mix on? Probably not, as the frequency range is boosted for a DJ’s ears. I would definitely use them to reference on when creating dance or hip hop music. These two genres are what the ATH-PRO700 are clearly designed for and while classical music might not sound great through these, dance and hip hop do.

The bottom line is that DJ aren’t necessarily worried about the same things as an audio engineer or audiophile; they want a loud, and great sounding set of headphones and the ATH-PRO700 delivers on those counts. DJ’s also want something that is rugged, and the ATH-PRO700 seem to be pretty well built. As some others have had issues with the headphones breaking, I will update this review if anything happens to my set, but so far they’re working out great. With a very affordable street price of around $115, I’d definitely check them out if you’re in the market for a set of headphones for dance and hip hop.

Audio-Technica ATH-PRO700

December 19th, 2010 – With the amount of cool apps coming out for iOS, there hasn’t been a whole lot of good hardware solutions for getting great sound in and out of the iPhone/iPod Touch. Sure there are some for plugging in a guitar, but they aren’t exactly the highest quality. New Signal Process, a boutique shop out of Portland Oregon, has released the NSP BreakOut to remedy that situation.

The BreakOut has an input to get your audio into whatever music apps you’re running in iOS, and an output to send to your outboard gear. There’s a gain knob and an on/bypass switch and that’s pretty much it; no muss, no fuss. You can buy the BreakOut for $115 at the New Signal Process website.

NSP BreakOut

December 13, 2010 – I recently received a set of Ultimate Ears TripleFi 10 IEM’s (in ear monitors) and I’ve had a few days to put them through their paces. The TripleFi 10s, as the name suggests, contain 3 drivers, each corresponding to the low, medium, and high frequency ranges.

Many earphones claim to go down to super low frequencies, lower than the normal range of human hearing in fact; in the TripleFi 10s Ultimate Ears says the can get down to 10 hz. While I have no way of objectively measuring if they can back this up, I can say that the amount of bass energy they were able to provide was surprising.

Over the years, I’ve owned dozens of earphones and headphones. I even had several iterations of the Panasonic portable CD players and tape decks (remember those?!) that had a motor in the proprietary headphones to shake them off your head. Honestly though, it was all for show because the bass distorted pretty easily.

I could almost feel the bass in my chest with these IEMs. Will they replace a nice set of speakers? Of course not, but when they are well sealed in the ear cavity, they provide a nice rich bass that’s quite warm. To ensure that you do get the best fit, Ultimate Ears provides 3 sizes of rubber tips, and a couple sets of expanding foam ones. While I use similar rubber ones in my Shure IEMs, the Ultimate Ears foam set is so comfortable, it has me thinking of installing a set on the Shures.

Aesthetically, the TripleFi 10s are beautifully designed. In practice though, I find the earphones a bit awkward. I realize that they must be big enough to support the 3 drivers and the proper porting, but they are about an inch long and don’t sit flush against your outer ear; in fact, they stick out a bit. I’m not sure why they did this as the competing Shure SE530 sits more flush inside the ear and looks better on your head.

But looks aren’t why you’re paying $400 (MSRP but retails for much less), for a set of IEMs; you buy them for the sound. In that department, the TripleFi 10s excel. These IEMs are the best sounding earphones I’ve ever used. At $400 they are a good buy, but if you find them for less, they are a MUST buy.

As I touched on before, the bass is rich and warm, but at the same time not overpowering. There is great detail in the mids and highs, without being overly boosted. The best part of the aural experience is that everything sounds cohesive. When I say this, I mean that everything sounds like it’s playing together in one room rather than all in separate booths and then stuck together.

I used an Apple Lossless file and compared the output to a set of Shures (to be fair, they are less than half the price, and not a class competitor) to see the difference. Formerly the Shures sounded damn good for their price, however when compared to the TripleFis, I found that the frequency range was sharply boosted and cut in certain ranges. This made the instruments seem more isolated from each other.

In contrast, the TripleFi 10s had a very smooth frequency range but still retained great detail across the range. This is not to say that they have have a flat frequency response, but they sounded very pleasant. If I were to fault them aurally, I would say that they show off a bit too much in the low to mid range. In some lusher mixes I found it a little overwhelming.

One thing I might mention is that if you aren’t used to IEM’s, you may find the vocals too far forward. While the vocals sound great on speakers with the appropriate space away from you, IEMs sometimes bring the vocalist into your head spacially. This is not a mark against the TripleFis as all IEMs and earphones suffer from this, but it’s something to keep in mind if you are considering taking the plunge.

While a nice headphone amp would definitely help, I feel that the TripleFi 10s can be used on a daily basis without. They’re quite comfortable (if a bit awkward when putting them in), well constructed, sound great and are well-priced at most retail outlets. If you are in the market for a set of nice earphones, I strongly suggest you check them out. Also, if you work in a noisy office like me, they block out a lot of ambient noise without even being plugged in. You also get the benefit of people not bothering you as much because they think you’re listening to music.

November 22nd, 2010 – Lately, I’ve seen a lot of crazy instruments being created, and especially a lot leveraging MIDI in interesting ways. Some of it is interesting in an eccentric and fun way, and then there are some that have the potential to be straight up game changing.

The most exciting I’ve seen in a long is Dylan Menzies’ O-Bow. In a nutshell, an optical sensor tracks an object, in this case a “bow” made of wooden dowel, and provides feedback for a modelled stringed instrument. In the video embedded below, the result sounds much like an urhu.

We’ve had wind controllers for ages, allowing more realistic modelled wind instruments, but even though strings are so common in productions, I’m not aware of any commercial device (I don’t really consider touch strips the same) that has attempted to emulate a string player’s bowing. Seems to me that bowing technique would be one of the first things that people attempted to bring into the DAW world.

Definitely check out Dylan’s video below to get an rough idea of what the O-Bow can do. Very exciting stuff!

O-Bow via Engadget

November 21st, 2010 – The multitudes of other “instrument” shirts from ThinkGeek must have been immensely popular because they keep cranking out new stuff. On the tails of such classics as the guitar and bongo shirts, comes the Synth shirt. It seems someone over at ThinkGeek has been paying attention to the Rockband 3 news.

The shirt ranges in price from $30 to $33 depending on size, and comes with a little belt-mounted “amp”. It’s back-ordered right now (on account of the awesomeness) but if you order now, it’ll ship by November 30th. Video embedded below of the shenanigans.

ThinkGeek via Engadget

October 10th, 2010 – Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on music on my freshly installed Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive so I thought I’d share a few thoughts on it from a music production perspective.

First off, the computer boots much faster than on a standard hard drive. I didn’t do any instrumented testing, however when started side by side by my friend’s identically spec’d Macbook Pro, but with an Intel 256gb SSD, it more than held its own. I would say, my boot time has been at least halved, and it was only a few seconds slower to boot than the SSD drive. Keep in mind that my system was also wiped clean with a clean install of Snow Leopard so that more than likely had something to do with the time reduction as well.

Once booted up, programs I access often, load quicker. If I have started a program already since boot up, the launch time is blazing quick. While programs always launch quicker after previously being launched, the speed increase is noticeable.

Alright, now down to business with how the drive performs when working on music. To be honest, I didn’t notice much, if any, of a performance difference. This is likely due to the fact that the speed increases from the hybrid drive are from read times, and not from write. When testing hard drive performance when writing audio to the same drive as OSX (which is not recommended as I posted before), I still experienced hard drive issues as expected. As always, it’s recommended that you write your audio to another hard drive.

Value-wise, the Seagate Momentus XT is a pretty good bargain. While much cheaper than an SSD, but more expensive than a standard 7200RPM laptop drive, the speed and size balance make it a much better value than either. If you have a little extra to spend, I’d definitely recommend the drive for day to day use but if you’re expecting a boost in speed for audio recording, buy a FW800 external hard drive.

September 18th, 2010 – The NS10, NS10, NS10; to a beginner it must seem that audio engineers have an infatuation with it. Indeed, the signature white cone on black cabinet is so recognizable, people who aren’t audio geeks might think all studio speakers look like that.

Earlier this week, I linked a Gizmodo article on the Yammies through Twitter (btw, add me here!). Later I figured that I might go a step further and provide a succinct review of the venerable speakers.

In what seems forever ago, I worked in a small studio where the producer swore by NS-10s. You know the oft repeated stories about how some engineers experimented with how many sheets of tissue paper (along with what brand, and ply count) were best for monitoring? Yeah, he was one of those guys.

Truthfully though, you really do need to use tissue paper over the tweeter. The speakers have such a pronounced mid-range that the tweeter pierces your ears like hot needles. I’m absolutely serious: the NS10′s are incredibly unpleasant to listen to. Not only that, the low-end is pretty weak (maybe something to do with the completely sealed design, although I’m not an acoustics expert).

That being said, some of my best mixes used the NS10. The mid-range for many engineers is the most difficult frequency range to deal with because almost every instrument has frequencies present there. Because the NS10 accentuates this range, it makes it easy to hear what is masking, clashing, and otherwise muddying up your mix. The bottom line is that the speakers are terrible for enjoying music but great for checking your mix against (you would probably want other monitors as mains, preferably something with bass).

Recently Jon over at AudioGeekZine had me over to his studio to chill out and make some noise, and he has a set of HS50M’s which are supposed to be the spiritual successor to the NS10′s. Unlike the NS10′s though, the HS50M’s possess an active design (the fancy way of saying that you don’t need a separate amp to drive them) which helps reduce the variability the amp brings to the sound. As Jon pointed out, and to which I agreed, the HS50M sounds completely different.

While I have read reviews that the HS50M can somewhat emulate the mid-range push of the NS10, it does so in a way that sounds completely different. The big difference is that the HS50M is a much better designed speaker and therefore sounds a lot better. Does this make it better to mix with? I’m not sure.

The HS50M sounds pretty good, but with a lot of my music requiring bass awareness, a proper set up would require the optional sub woofer. That brings the price up considerably, and puts it in the sights of a lot of competitors. The HS80M has a lot more bass given its 8 inch woofer (and costs less than the HS50M with the subwoofer), but I’ve read that they are not as tight sounding.

The NS10 is a great speaker for checking your mix, but you probably wouldn’t want one as your main set of monitors. That being said, I’d love to have a set again.

September 6th, 2010 – I’ve had my M-Audio Firewire 410 for a long time. I picked it up in 2004 when I needed a mobile recording solution and I still use it. Lately though, I’ve been having audio drop outs. The software mixer will register audio output, and the card itself will light up its LEDs, but no audio will play. I can unplug and replug the interface back in, and it still won’t register.

What’s especially weird, is that it will be already working and cut out. For example, I’ll be listening to my iTunes library and all of the sudden a song will cut out and I won’t be able to get any audio back. I used to restart my computer, but that was also a crap shoot if the sound would work again.

Apparently, this problem is not localized to me; I’ve read a lot of complaints on the forums about it with others who are on Leopard. M-Audio hasn’t updated the drivers since November of last year and since it’s a discontinued product, I doubt they’re rushing to fix it. I’ve completely removed and re-installed the drivers several times to no avail.

In the meantime, the only way to bring the audio back consistently is to go into the M-Audio software and change the sample rate, and then change it back. Doing so allows you to get the audio back without rebooting, or hotswapping the interface. Are any of you running into the same problems in Snow Leopard?

September 2nd, 2010 – Have you ever seen those sweet custom-molded earphones and actually looked up how much it costs to have them molded, on top of the price of earphones themselves? I don’t doubt that they’re worth the price, but I certainly can’t afford them. I do, however, have a pair of old Shure generic in ear monitors (IEM) that are in need of new sleeves.

Make Magazine has a tutorial on how to roll your own out of a 15 dollar custom molded ear plug kit. It’s a pretty cool project for an old set of earphones.

Custom Fit Earbuds via Gizmodo

August 24th, 2010 – Gizmodo has a pretty damning article on the state of cheap earbuds. In the article, it outlines how all the companies making fashion earbuds likely use the same manufacturer and don’t even have inhouse designers or engineers. Companies in China offer a-la-carte choices, and all you have to do is order a few thousand to sell, and you can have whatever you want made.

I’m sure you all know that this kind of stuff happens with cheap consumer gear, but what you may not know is that some companies that offer full catalogues of entry-level audio equipment are doing the same thing. There are a lot of cheap guitar pedals, and even audio interfaces floating around. I’m not going to call out any companies, but be careful and do your research.

The Secret Scam of Cheap Earbuds