Last week I had two sets of headphones go bad on me in the space of three days. The first pair was my set of Sony Pysc over-the-ear headphones.

Pretty nice, I’ve had them for years and I really love them. Planning on giving it a shot to bring them back to life with the soldering iron.

The second pair was some cheap Wal-Mart replacements for the Pysc’s.

After those died I decided to suck it up and grab a new pair of good headphones. I headed over to The Mart over lunch and picked out a pair of Skullcandy Lowrider headphones for sub-$30 before tax.

They aren’t bad, especially for a quick buy. Snazzy looks, 40mm driver, comfy padding, good isolation and they fold up nice. They are a bit floppy in the joints until you get them on your head, which feels (and probably looks) pretty silly. Cord is a bit shorter than I would expect too.

The unfortunate surprise came when I hooked them up. They sounded great in the store, but back at the office they were flat. Too much bass and mids. My guess is that they are optimized for hip-hop or something else. Either way, it wasn’t what I liked.

No problem though, after some experimentation I found an EQ curve to make up for the difference. This is what I worked out in Amarok. It feels right to me, I ran it through some Say Anything, Pedro The Lion, and Showbread. Reasonably diverse and fits my music taste.

End result? I like them, probably won’t take them to the coffee shop for fear of looking goofy, but they are pretty good for home or work listening.

Bonus Review – Skullcandy Warranty Registration

The Skullcandy website says it takes “only 10 minutes” to register your headphones for warranty. Plus you have to register on their site. Really Skullcandy? That’s the best you can do? No thanks, I’ll take my chances without a warranty.

My Inspiration

I wrote this song quite a while ago. We recorded it for Nikolai but we broke up before it made it to a disc.

I really like this song, and I thought I’d share it again.

Here’s the music.

And here’s the lyrics.

At the edge of the bell curve, I'd hoped there was one for me.
At the edge of the bell curve, I knew I'd love you, statistically.
 
I've got your number, you've got mine, so call me baby.
We're just two big old primes, together live unfactorably.
 
You'll never find another like me.
I solve your equation so elegantly.
 
At the edge of the bell curve, I'd hoped there was one for me.
At the edge of the bell curve, I knew I'd love you, statistically.
 
Unlike the number pi, you are so rational.
And with you, baby, I always know my set is full.
 
You'll never find an angle on me.
'Cause baby, oh baby, we're complimentary.
 
At the edge of the bell curve, I'd hoped there was one for me.
At the edge of the bell curve, I knew I'd love you, statistically.
 
You'll never find a number like me.
And, baby this love's not imaginary.
 
At the edge of the bell curve, I'd hoped there was one for me.
At the edge of the bell curve, I knew I'd love you, statistically.
 
3.141592
 
At the edge of the bell curve, I found you waiting for me.
At the edge of the bell curve, I'll always love you, infinitely.
 
At the edge of the bell curve, I'd hoped there was one for me.
At the edge of the bell curve, I knew I'd love you, statistically.
 
At the edge of the bell curve, I'd hoped there was one for me.
At the edge of the bell curve, I knew I'd love you, statistically.

This made me laugh, that is a talented rooster.

Found @ Boing Boing

Nikolai is dead. Long live Nikolai.

Before the band split up we recorded three last songs that we wrote near the end of our run, which had limited plays but lots of our love in them. I don’t think they are ever going to be polished beyond these versions, so I give you those three songs now.

1) r = 1 – sin(θ) – Download
This is song I wrote for Darcy, it’s the most finished of the three.

2) Sokold – Download
Kind of an Arctic Monkeys feel to it. Or that’s the idea at least.

3) Southern Rocks of Ages – Download
Energetic praise song, much more fun to play live.

Here’s a modification of a bash script I made a while back to convert anything that mplayer can play into an mp3 file. Change bitrates and the like to taste.

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#!/bin/bash
#
# any2mp3
#
for i in *.$1; do
mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast "$i" -ao pcm:file="${i%.$1}.wav"
done
for i in *.wav; do
lame -h -V2 --vbr-new "$i" "${i%.wav}.mp3"
done
rm *.wav

Say you are in a directory of m4a files, just run any2mp3.sh m4a and wait.