The diary entries of a little girl who is now 30! ~ Part 2 - Page 99

Quote:

Originally Posted by mutabor 

 

And the specs are above average for the price ( of course they are not meant to be gaming machines).

 

The lowest priced 14" model ( heck, $600 128GB SSD)

 

The most expensive 14" model ( $1100, 256GB SSD)

 

I personally like their thin&light 15.6" models which have IPS + Full HD displays + SSDs. I don't play games and I don't need mobility hence the specs are what I need in my notebook ( great design, IPS display, SSD). And the price is reasonable $1000-$1150. I wish they improved their keyboard ( The Verge were complaining on this part).

I agree, specs wise they look very good and competitive. I wish they were available in Sweden so I could check them out at least. I remember the verge hyping them up a bit before release, so obviously they got my attention as well.

Oh, I realized I had been looking at the 15.6" version of the Vizio, and I just read the review for the 14" one. They really didn't like it. Could they have gotten a bad example or were they particularly negative?

Quote:

Originally Posted by compoopers 

The Verge review was particularly unfair against them. At least in my experience, aside from the battery life problem which I agree with, this laptop is top notch.

Speaking of verge reviews, I'd like to know how they decide their scores. When is something worthy of 7 as opposed to 6, and so on. This is also the problem I have with game reviewers, especially those who do it on a scale of 1-100 (i.e. percentages). While it's fun to use numbers and make it quantitative, I can't help being skeptic about them. Oh well, I'm not going to go on a one-man crusade against a whole industry, so I'll just leave it as it is.

But beware reviewers, I won't take your numbers and scores as gospel! Curse you for making this a first world problem for me.

Quote:

Originally Posted by MuppetFace   I'm genuinely curious.

It comes in green!

Quote:

Originally Posted by ardgedee 

Doesn't seem to have. Then again, he's had re-dos from a variety of cIEM companies (including Hidition), so the matter seems to be more of being proactive about changing the ones he's unhappy about, rather than write them off and pan them. The upshot is that he's inclined to be far more hands-on with the fit and tuning on his cIEMs than most people. This plus the sound signature he prefers means that there is a great deal of YMMV in the equipment he reviews that get mitigated in the final versions of the cIEMs he has. Taking that into account, plus that he's focusing his attention on flagship cIEMs, and I see his goal as somewhat similar to yours: less of an interest in finding a single best item, and more of curating a diverse collection of items optimized for different purposes or tastes.

Well, I would think that anything he doesn't rain praise on counts as a 'negative' review. For example, he doesn't seem to like the JH16 as much as other CIEMs. It's hard to blast a CIEM that he gets for free.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jgray91 

http://www.head-fi.org/t/629335/apple-earpods-appreciation-thread
/apple-earpods-appreciation-thread

ಠ_ಠ
This takes the cake of all pointless appreciation thread. I mean... wow.

They sound pretty good, actually. The soundstage is really remarkable.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tomscy2000 

Well, I would think that anything he doesn't rain praise on counts as a 'negative' review. For example, he doesn't seem to like the JH16 as much as other CIEMs. It's hard to blast a CIEM that he gets for free.

What I was trying to say earlier, in a way, is that he's writing about a lot of top-line IEMs, and presumably they should all be good -- assuming the designs are fundamentally sound and the manufacture meets expectations. There are evidently some that are better than others, but I find it perfectly plausible that none are bad or even mediocre. But to the extent there is no perfect transducer and each cIEM has individual characteristics, the strengths and weaknesses of a given model could fail to complement those attributes the listener is most interested in -- so it's bad for the listener's purposes, but not necessarily an objectively bad product.

The extent to which anything a_j deems not-good usually leads to reworking until it fits him and sounds to his taste -- offhandedly I can recall this occurring with his Spiral Ear and both Hidition IEMs, and as far as I can tell he's been reasonably open about this process when it occurs. But this is one advantage custom manufacture can have over universal IEMs and headphones, where the ideal is to be designed in some optimal way and then manufactured with the utmost consistency. The disadvantage of customs, of course, being that potential for misfires, and that the process requires the customer to invest extra effort in getting a good result.

To that end, a review of the cIEM is also a review of the company, but it's also natural for manufacturers to go out of their way to keep a client happy when they know that client is going to be publishing his experiences; the reader's perspective has to remain somewhere between trusting and skeptical, even with the most honest reviewer, regardless of how the reviewer gets the product.

Custom IEMs are not usually intended to be tuned in bespoke ways (aside from Ultimate Ears' Personal Reference Monitor), but their performance is not necessarily fixed in place early in their production runs either. This is where the early adopters have an advantage that later purchasers do not, but it is still predicated on the early adopter(s) being sufficiently demanding of the manufacturer, and of the manufacturer being appropriately receptive to requests. (It can go to extremes as well, such as where Unique Melody was building all kinds of things to request until they decided to formalize their product line -- during the early times, many people besides average_joe ended up with cIEMs that were more, wellllll, unique than usual.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by jgray91 

http://www.head-fi.org/t/629335/apple-earpods-appreciation-thread
ಠ_ಠ

I can back up Apple's claim that they sound better than headphones that cost hundreds of dollars. Of course, there are also $25 headphones that I prefer to them. Price is a tenuous grounds for defining performance. They're the first earbuds from anybody that I don't intend to toss. At the same time, I don't plan on listening to them often, or maybe ever; I will pretty much always depend on IEMs for mobile listening.

So I think they're pretty good. There have been fan bases and appreciation threads built around much more marginal things. If there's an appreciation thread, I'm inclined to trust that participants are being honest about it.

I'm just a bundle of trust and goodwill today, aren't I?

Redux --- FAD's awesomely weird marketing pictures: http://www.petapixel.com/2012/10/02/a-portrait-project-showing-subjects-with-two-perfectly-symmetrical-faces/

Just a reminder: someone will soon get the first post of the 100th page.