hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr1812.txt

Episode: 1812
Title: HPR1812: Headphones and a $2 Microphone
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1812/hpr1812.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:38:03

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This is HPR Episode 1812 entitled, Headphones and another 2 Microphone.
It is hosted by John Kulp and in about 20 minutes long.
The summary is, I talk about my various headphones and I walk to my office.
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All right, is it recording?
It appears to be recording.
I check the level, maybe bring the level down to 70, okay, I'm going to leave it at
that.
I'm going to tuck my recorder into the little case, you're still recording?
Yep.
Okay, so this is John Kulp and Lefayette Louisiana and I'm going to do a different sort
of recording this morning.
Dave Morris, among others, has said that he enjoyed hearing environmental sounds in
recordings and so I'm going to record an episode as I walk over to my office this morning.
I'm leaving my house now and walking down to the end of the street where there's a big
apartment complex.
A few days ago we had an incident here, I think it was on Wednesday of last week.
Some drunken loser blew through the stop sign and crashed his car right through the wall
of the apartment on the end.
This was about 230 in the morning and when I woke up at about 530, I never heard the thing
happen but when I woke up at 530 there were still cop cars out there with their blue lights
flashing and curious thing though, a few days later I got an email from one of the students
in my summer class saying that she had missed the deadline for one of the quizzes and she
said she missed the deadline because there had been a terrible accident at her home and
attached pictures and when I opened up the picture and look at it, it was the apartment
right by my house with the car sticking right out of the wall.
And so the resident of the apartment whose apartment got crushed was one of my students.
Sorry for the noise, they're doing maintenance on the apartments here and right now that
maintenance is in the form of powerwashing the entire exterior of the buildings and
walking across the bridge and now I am on campus.
When we moved here in 2001 the first year we had a rental house that was pretty close
to campus but not right on campus and when it became clear that I was going to get to
keep my job permanently we bought a house on a street that is right next to campus and
so I can walk over to my office in about 10 minutes and if I get on my bike it only
takes about four or five minutes.
Where was I going with that?
Oh, anyway.
So, oh, I remember what I was going to say.
So it was kind of a surprise to me that the resident of the apartment who that got
crashed into was one of my students and you might wonder, well, why didn't you know
this and well, the answer is because I teach this class online and unless there's
some big problem I never see any of the students face to face and so I don't know
them.
So anyway, of course I granted her an extension to get the quizzes done and all that.
So anyway, that's enough about that.
I thought the topic of my talk today was should be headphones.
I use several different kinds of headphones and I thought I would talk about the kinds
of headphones I have and what I use them for and that kind of thing.
I'm sorry, it's it's going to sound like I'm getting all out of breath now because I've
been walking.
I didn't think I was that out of shape.
It's not all that strenuous of walk that I'm doing.
It's a little bit hot here.
One other thing I want to say though before going to be further is that the microphone
I'm using right now is a $2 microphone.
Now one of the barriers to recording HPR episodes that people have mentioned is a lack
of a decent microphone.
Well, I think with this episode I can prove that you don't need to set the threshold very
high to have a good enough microphone.
This is this microphone.
It's a little lapel mic with a windscreen and I bought it not too long ago.
On Amazon I bought three of them for $6 with free shipping.
Now this little microphone, you can buy them in quantities of like 500 and so I think
it sounds pretty good actually.
To me it certainly sounds better than what I would think of a $2 microphone sounding
and I've got it plugged into my Zoom H1 recorder and so that's how I'm recording.
I can see in the distance that we've got a whole bunch of
freshman for the fall semester on their orientation tour walking around in red t-shirts and
whatnot.
Anyway, so let me I put the list of headphones on my phone so I wouldn't forget what they
are.
Okay, so in order of I don't know best to words, maybe in no particular order, my most
recent headphone acquisition pair of Bose Quiet Comfort 15 headphones and I
had been wanting a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort for a long time mostly to counteract
the trumpet that you may have heard in previous episodes of mine that happens
next door.
I hear industrial noise coming from somewhere and I'm going to try to walk away
from it.
That's probably just one of the giant air conditioners on campus.
So the guy whose office is next door to mine is the trumpet professor and of course
a trumpet is a very loud instrument and in our building we have absolutely no sound
isolation from one office to another and so for the longest time I thought my
gosh, I really need to get some kind of headphones or something to help keep this sound
away from me and so as a Christmas present last fall I chose a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort
15 headphones and if you keep up with this kind of thing you'll know that that's not
the most recent model.
The most recent one is the Bose Quiet Comfort 25 but I wanted to try to get them used
so I could save some money.
Retail there like 300 bucks and I just couldn't see spending 300 bucks on a pair of headphones.
So I found a pair of QC 15s on eBay for $160 including shipping and a bottom and they're
awesome.
They're the pretty comfortable.
They sound amazing.
I mean the Bose headphones are really, really good quality.
They sound amazing.
The noise canceling is pretty effective especially for white noise type things like if I were
wearing them right now walking over to my office I would not hear any of the industrial
noise that's probably coming through the microphone right now.
So they're really good at canceling out that kind of thing and it actually performs better
than I thought it would against the trumpet also as long as I'm listening to something.
Now sometimes people will wear the Quiet Comfort headphones without even listening to anything
they'll just turn on the noise cancellation to get rid of background noise.
And if I wear them like that I will still hear the trumpet but if I'm listening to something
like the wonderful open Goldberg variations or the open well tempered club here while
I'm sitting at my desk and trumpet guy next door with playing his trumpet I can barely
hear the trumpet so they actually work pretty well.
The only negative that I have about the Bose Quiet Comfort, well two negatives, one is
that they require a battery but the battery seems to last a very long time and so that's
not a huge problem.
The other negative is that they're not as comfortable as I would like for them to be for headphones
to cost that much money.
They're pretty comfortable but I wouldn't want to wear them for a really long time.
The next best set of headphones I have is actually maybe I'll wait and talk about those
because I can't remember the model number but if I talk about the other ones first then
by the time I get to my office I will be able to simply look at the headphones and tell
you the model number.
So another pretty cool pair of headphones I have is a pair of Aftershocks, let me see,
Aftershocks that's spelled word after followed by S-H-O-K-Z, Sports and that is S-P-O-R-T-Z
M2 Bone Conduction Headphones, these are pretty cool headphones, they use this bone
conduction technology so there's nothing actually sticking in your ear or going over your
ear.
Instead they rest on your temples and they conduct the sound through your bones.
I'm going to pause for a second.
I just passed a large group of incoming freshmen being conducted on their tour.
The bone conduction headphones have these little pads that rest on your temples and you
can hear the music because it's resonating in your skull or something.
I don't know exactly how the technology works but they work pretty well.
The sound quality is nothing like you would get on say the Bose headphones but it's perfectly
good sound quality for listening to speech like podcasts and it's not terrible for a music
as long as you're not trying to listen to them as an audio file.
But the advantage of the bone conduction thing is that you can keep your ears wide open
and they market these to people like joggers and bikers who for safety's say should not
have things stuck all the way in their ears where they can't hear cars coming, stuff
like that.
These Aftershocks bone conduction headphones also have a microphone and so you can plug them
into your phone and use them as a headset.
I use them almost any time I'm going to call my parents or some other place where I think
I might be on the phone for more than two or three minutes.
I'll put on this headset and use it that way so I can talk hands free and it works amazingly
well for that.
Okay I'm approaching the intersection of McKinley and St. Mary which is where my building
is located.
We can probably hear all the cars.
When I see another group, oh there's a group of parents and students over there getting
their tour.
The summertime is when they do a lot of the orientation stuff here.
So students either who are thinking of coming here or who have already committed to come
here and have to go through orientation, they're all over campus right now.
Crossing the street.
So the next pair of headphones that I'll talk about is my Sony.
I have some Sony earbud type headphones that hook over the ear and rest that way.
I've had a bad luck with ear buds because for some reason my ears just are not shaped
the right way and so ear buds just fall right out but I really like the kind of ear buds
that have these little clips that go over your ear and hold them in place.
So the headphones I use the most in terms of hours, like just day in and day out might
go to headphones for listening to most things is just these Sony.
They are the MDR J10H ear headphones with non-slip design and I think I paid about 20 bucks
for them but when I looked on Amazon they were priced at $34.99 so I don't really know
the deal with that.
Okay I've just walked into my building.
Good morning.
How are you?
I'm okay, how are you?
I'm doing well.
Good.
Okay, I'm now in my office so no more noise so now you know exactly how long it takes me
to walk to work every day.
So the Sony thing they don't sound great but they sound good enough and they're lightweight
and they don't fall out of my ears and they have those little hooks that go over ears
but that also means I can kind of hook them over my shirt collar and hold them there when
I'm not actually using them in my ears.
So that's my most often used pair of headphones.
Okay, so now I'm sitting at my desk and looking at the Sennheiser headphones.
This is the Sennheiser MD500A or wait, is that HD?
Hang on, HD, one of the letters was rubbed off.
The Sennheiser HD500A headphones.
These have large ear pads that go completely over the ear but they're also kind of open.
I mean they do not cancel out any sound at all and these headphones are the best ones
I have for listening to stuff in high definition when there is no environmental noise that
I need to contend with.
Like since trumpet guy is not here right now, it's summertime and he doesn't come around
that much in the summer.
If I wanted to listen to something I would put these headphones on, they sound absolutely
amazing and they're extremely comfortable.
The Bose ones are not quite as comfortable.
They're not terrible but these, I mean they feel like air, they're so lightweight, they're
so comfortable, I could wear them for hours and never notice that they're on my head.
Absolutely love these headphones but they do not block out noise at all.
So that's the only downside for those.
I think they cost about, they're 8 or 10 years old now, I think they were about 150 bucks
new back then and there's probably some newer model or comparable thing available now.
Okay, so let's see I've talked about the Bose Sennheiser, aftershocks, the Sony, okay
the very last ones I want to talk about are the Howard Light 1030-110 sync noise blocking
stereo earmuffs.
This is a little bit a different thing here, before I ever got noise cancelling headphones
I wanted to have something I could wear when I was working outside in the yard or doing
other things where I needed to block out noise and still be able to listen at a decent
level and I found these things on Amazon, they're very affordable, they're about 30 bucks,
35 bucks and they are earmuffs and so they're great for when you're doing things like
mowing the yard or hammering things, if you're doing something very loud or an environment
that's really loud, you can wear these and then plug in your audio source to it, you
can wear them just as earmuffs or you can plug in an audio cable and use them as headphones
at the same time and the reason these are so great for that is because they block out
the sound really well in terms of reducing the decibels of potentially dangerous sounds
in your environment, but also that means that you can listen to your music or your
podcasts at simply a normal volume, whereas if you were using earbuds or something like
that you'd have to turn them way up to dangerous levels to be able to hear them at all.
This allows you to listen at a safe level and have those annoying sounds blocked out.
So they're pretty cool, they're very uncomfortable though, so I don't wear them for long periods
of time, I mean almost any earmuff is going to be uncomfortable because they squeeze your
head so hard, but anyway, that is a rundown of my headphones and with that I think I'm
going to start walking back home. I'll close my office door and start walking out the
front here. How are you doing? Good, how are you? I'm going to be tour guides for the
many incoming freshmen, just came racing in the building looking for the restrooms.
Okay, now I'm back outside and heading back home. So I think that's probably enough, I'm
going to sign off now and next time I'll probably go back to my normal mode of simply sitting
at my desk in a quiet environment and recording a podcast. Thanks for listening, I will talk
to you later. Bye.
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