Zen and the Art of the Ear-Bud
I bought a pair of ear-buds the other day. They sounded awful.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, because I paid only $
for them. At this point you’d be justifi ed in wondering why the
editor of a prestigious specialist audio magazine would be buying
a pair of $12 ear-buds. It’s not a long story.
I was heading to Melbourne and on the way to the airport
realised that I had left my noise-cancelling headphones at home.
This was bad enough, because I like using noise-cancelling to cut
out the noise during fl ight, even for a hop as short as Sydney–
Melbourne. But the other problem was that I was conducting an
interview, and needed headphones to monitor the sound, then
help with transcription on the fl ight back.
As I was walking past a Coles supermarket at the time, I
thought to myself: ‘No problem, I’ll just pick up a pair of cheap
ear-buds and throw them away at the end of the day.’ At the
airport, I unpacked the buds, which were branded ‘Liquid Ears’
and plugged them into my recorder to check everything was
working. In so doing I immediately discovered the plug was just
a little under-sized, presumably to compensate for poor quality
control during manufacture, so that the plugs would always fi t,
even if some were accidentally made bigger than usual.
This wasn’t a good start, as I suspected I might get some
crackles and dropouts while monitoring due to the loose fi t, but at
least I was getting sound, so I switched over to my portable audio
player to listen to some music while I waited for my boarding
call. I started with Simone Dinnerstein playing Bach. I was only
about two notes in before I realised something was drastically
wrong. The piano sound was completely unrecognisable, instead
sounding a little like someone was playing back on a glockenspiel
with cracked keys.
OK, so piano is a diffi cult instrument to reproduce, and these
were $12 ear-buds, so I switched to Paul Simon—vocal and guitar.
What could go wrong? Oh dear. Just about everything. It was even
diffi cult to tell that it was Paul Simon’s voice. So I put the buds
in my pocket and spend the fl ight reading the newspaper... and
observing, with some amazement, how many people on the fl ight
were using Bose’s wireless noise-cancelling headphones.
On arrival at my destination in Melbourne, when I tried to
use the ear-buds to check recording levels, I discovered they
now didn’t work at all. Completely dead. Apparently the tough
hour-and-a-half trip in my shirt pocket had been too much for
them. So I just winged it on recording levels and made sure I took
copious written notes.
At the end of the day, after landing back in Sydney, I had to
walk past the same Coles store, so I stopped by with my dead
buds and my sales receipt to request a refund. ‘No problems’,
said the manager, ‘we also sell Sony ones, so maybe you should
have bought one of those.’ As I walked out, I looked down at my
computerised refund docket and in the spot marked ‘Reason for
return’, he’d written ‘Quality’.
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