Subject To Change

I’ve recently been watching, and rewatching, some TV shows. Some good, some bad. When I say good, I mean the best TV show I’ve ever seen actually - The Wire.

Now, I enjoy some cop shows. Not many, but some. People kept telling me how good The Wire was and I’d keep telling them I’d watch it some time. And finally I caved in and got it. Well, I got season 1. Thought I’d give it a watch, tell the people who’d told me I had to watch it that I’d seen it, it wasn’t bad and get on with things. So, I stuck season 1 on and watched it. Then i got season 2. Then 3…4…5…

There’s no one thing that makes The Wire as good as it is. Sure, the acting is excellent, but there’s a lot of shows with good acting. The script is excellent, but there’s a load of some (remembered some of the other shows I’ve watched recently, sorry) good writers out there.

What makes The Wire the best show I’ve ever seen is the fact that everything about it is: a) excellent, and; b) totally believable. It almost felt like watching a dirty, nasty, gritty documentary apart from the fact that the stories were so well told that they’d never happen that perfectly in real life. And it’s not just a cop show. It’s a show about a city. About politics, crime and society. I could happily eulogize for hours about this show, but I’ll leave you with two words: WATCH IT.

On the flipside of my recent TV watching is something else people have been bugging me to watch for ages - Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Once again, finally I gave in and borrowed the DVDs from a friend.

Now, after watching The Wire, I was expecting a bit of a comedown, a bit of a jolt back to the reality of TV normalcy. But not quite this big a jolt.

Buffy and I don’t get along. In fact that might be sugar coating it. I hate it. I hate the writing, the characters, the acting, the music (apart from one song in one episode). Nothing about it engaged me. The dialogue was awful, badly written and stilted, though the acting “talent” saying the lines certainly didn’t help. I’m going to stop writing about Buffy now, otherwise this will turn into a Yahtzee style rant, and I can’t talk as quickly as him.

As far as the second part of the title goes, I’m hungry. There’s a reason for this - I’m on a diet. There’s a reason for this too - I’m overweight. There’s probably a reason for this too, but as this isn’t a psychology essay we’ll skip that bit.

So, having decided to lose some weight I’m hungry. I still eat, don’t get me wrong, but now I eat food that’s not fun or filling. Food has gone from a pleasure to a nasty, low fat, low calorie, high fibre chore. And it doesn’t even fill me up.

I’d love to say I’ve given up drinking and smoking too, but I need those to cope with my boring diet.

I think I have a problem…

I’m addicted to headphones. When I get bored, I buy headphones. Or headphone amplifiers. I now have…more pairs of headphones than I care to admit to.

There’s the Alessandros. They’re lovely. Sparkly, with that great Grado fun sound. I love these headphones, they’re great for most types of music, but they can be a bit fatiguing with their sometimes over-sparkly high-end.

There’s the Equation RP-21s. Great closed pair of cans, look as daft as can be when you’re wearing them but they kick out a nice sound and have excellent immersion.

There’s the Koss Porta-Pros. They’re a fun, funky lil pair of portable headphones but they’re open, which can be an issue in the great oudoors.

There’s the MylarOne X3is. My fave IEMs, they have a nice bass kick, but they’re fragile.

So I just bought a pair of AKG K81DJs. And they’re really neat too. They were kinda bass heavy until I took out the foam pads. And they were uncomfortable until I “modified” the headband (read “bent it with a fair amount of brute force.”) And now they’re great, and destined to become my standard outdoors can. They isolate well, they sound excellent, especially for rock and metal, which is my main fix when I’m on the train to work.

You wanna know about the amplifiers? Well, I have a crappy no-name one that actually gives a decent enough sound and is rugged as heck. Then there’s the Total Airhead, which is my standard portable amp, it  gives a nice boost to the AKGs and delivers a fairly nice soundstage without eating too many batteries. And then there’s the iBasso D1, combined amp and DAC which runs from a USB port on the PC and delivers lossless music to my cans of choice at the time via ASIO4ALL and Foobar2000. You haven’t lived til you’ve heard Nine Inch Nails in FLAC through that setup with a pair of Alessandros stuck on the end…pure bliss…

So, yeah, my name’s Flossie and I’m a headphone-aholic…

Before I begin, this isn’t a post about how immoral the RIAA and the ilk are, so don’t bother reading this if you think I’m pulling out a soapbox here.

It’s about my music and my money. Mainly about the amount I spend trying to hear the former better by throwing the latter at it.

I bought some new headphones. For anyone who knows their stuff, they’re Alessandro MS-1s. Imported from the US, no less. And they sound flippin’ lovely

But then I started thinking about how much I spend on music…there’s the mp3 players (ipod Classic 80GB, Creative 60GB, Creative 30GB, Creative 4GB flash, no-name 2GB flash); the headphone amps (no-name British made one and iBasso P2), the DAC (iBasso D1), the headphones (the aformentioned Alessandros, the Crossroads MylarOnes from Korea via Singapore, the Sonys)…

Now, I can justify all these purchases. To me they all seem worthwhile. But to a colleague, who likes music but isn’t into it like I am, these purchases were more than he could take. How could I justify spending that much on headphones?, he asked. To me, spending £75 on importing some great headphones from the US was more than reasonable. To him it was an extravagance that was beyond comprehension.

Dunno what exactly I’m getting at here, but am I spending too much on this stuff? Or is it worth it to hear great music sounding better than I thought possible whilst listening on my poor old speakers?

Whatever, I’m going to stick on some great tunes and be happy that they sound good