- Details
- Music Everywhere
August 2012
When I began writing this column over a year ago, it soon became evident that a great percentage of the personal audio products I would cover would be headphones. I discovered Bluetooth, and one of my first reviews was of the Sony DR-BT21G Bluetooth headphones. At the end of that article, I compared them to the jWIN JB-TH710 Bluetooth ’phones. I recommended the purchase of the jWIN set, along with Sony’s TMR-BT8IP Bluetooth transmitter, which can be used with most Apple iPhones, iPods, and iPod Nanos.
But things move quickly in the electronics world. Just as the review was published, the supply of jWIN headphones dried up -- jWIN had dropped the Bluetooth model. I felt terrible about this, having recommended a bargain that was already gone forever.
When I bought my Apple iPod Touch several years ago, I was excited by its versatility, and particularly looked forward to being able to carry it around with me to retrieve e-mail, listen to music via the Internet, and get the latest news. I’d ruled out an iPhone as being too expensive -- the phone itself, and the mandatory service plan. I eagerly read articles that promised more powerful Wi-Fi, more hot spots, and greater range. They never appeared, and still haven’t as I write this. Citywide networks exist, and some of them are free -- but not in my town. I depended on stores and other businesses to provide local Wi-Fi networks. I sought out all the local places (mostly coffee shops) that provided free networks because they know that offering Wi-Fi is a good way to bring in business. When I got my iPod Touch, I haunted Wi-Fi-enabled places just so I could use my cool new device. I drank a lot of coffee.
The continuing miniaturization of devices that can record and/or reproduce music blows me away. For the past six months I’ve been using Google to find original album-cover art for recordings I’ve ripped as Apple Lossless (and beyond) files. Don’t ask me to explain it, but if I can throw one of these up on the screen of my Logitech Squeezebox Touch and occasionally glance at it while listening, I get a warm, fuzzy feeling of remembrance that seems to improve the sound. When these recordings were transferred to CD, they usually included extras from other albums by (perhaps) the same artist. The covers for those editions I do not consider original. The upshot is that I’m coming to remember the relatively short playing time of the average LP, and learning things like this: the original edition of one of Ernest Ansermet’s recordings of Stravinsky’s Pétrouchka, about 35 minutes long, occupied two sides of an LP. If we go back to 78 records, the ballet would require even more sides.
The domination of the personal-electronics industry by Apple’s iPhone, iPad, and iPod families of products has inspired the startups of dozens of cottage industries now making accessories for the hugely popular devices. I recently 
Because I have so many recordings and often little time, I hadn’t tried any of the music streaming services. But I swore to myself that I would try MOG, as soon as they’d enabled streaming to my Logitech Squeezebox Touch Wi-Fi music player. As more high-resolution downloads have become available, the Touch has become the heart of the audio portion of my audio/video system. But the minimum resolution of everything I listen to through the Touch is CD quality: 16-bit/44.1kHz. MOG was better than most streaming services, at 320kbps, but not quite there. Would I be happy with the sound quality? 
Have you ever seen an accessory so cool that it makes you want to buy the product it’s designed to be used with? There are many fascinating apps that can lure you into the world of Apple. Maybe you never considered owning an iPod Touch, but then you see the free Red Eye app, which turns a Touch into a full-featured remote control. So you buy a Touch. This month’s product is sort of like that.
A little over a year ago, I discovered the IDAPT i3 universal charging station. The IDAPT i3 made it possible for me to charge my phone, my Apple iPod Touch, and iPod Nano at the same time, quickly and easily. I got in the habit of docking all of them before I went to bed each night. 
When I first saw photos of the Olasonic TW-S7s ($129.99 USD per pair), I immediately thought they’d probably be great little speakers for a laptop computer -- entirely portable. I was wrong about the portable part.
As technical advances are made in audio, it seems that everything just gets smaller. You can get 16 gigabytes of storage with the sixth-generation iPod Nano, which is about the size of a Nabisco cracker -- and almost as thin. Blu-ray Disc players have gotten smaller, certainly in the height department. The one thing that’s been difficult to miniaturize is speakers. The speakers in laptop computers and iPods might be good enough for announcements and news, but they’re totally inadequate for music. 
My quest for the perfect Bluetooth sports headphones continues, with this installment focusing on the Rocketfish RF-MAB2. The headphones provided many hours of solid use, but they still came up lacking in a few details. 