HD600 Ramblings

So, I'm sitting here at work listening through my HD600s to my Sony D-E406CK portable CDP playing a copy of Limp Bizkit's Significant Other that was burned from I believe 128kbit MP3s. It was the first CD I made with my burner on Sunday, I actually think I burned it at 12X. Anyway, anyone who has ever said that listening through headphones cannot be visceral is dead wrong. I don't know if it's burn-in or what silly pyschoacoustic phenomenon is causing it, but I am enjoying the sound of my Senns much more than when I first got them. The sound is amazing, keep in mind the source, but the bass is just very powerful, not overpowering, but just very present down to very low frequencies, it makes my body tingle at times, and it's not even being played very loud.

Listening to music with these headphones is just so much more enjoyable than I have ever experienced music portably before. Listening to other CDs such as Bruce Springsteen's Greastest Hits, Lords of Acid, Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade (on the telarc label) and others just sound so clear, invigorating and emotionally satisfying. Wow, I can't believe I just said all that, basically it makes my day at work much more enjoyable.

This is slightly off topic, but my CD burner is putting a bit of static which is quite noticable on some of the copies I have made of my parents' classical CDs, and it's @$@#$ annoying me, it really gets in the way of all the good qualities I just talked aobut in the headphones, I'm hoping my crappy CDP (it's been through a lot, I think it's getting waterlogged while walking acrosss the Harvard bridge in the rain did it in) is the culprit, because then I know that when I get my Denon 370 all will be well

Just thought I'd share with all of you, I hope you'er all happily listening to your precious cans wherever you may be.

My gf was busy so I stayed in and played with my burner last night.

The first important factor seems to be the CD-Rs used. I have been using 2 different types:
1. some old Memorex ones that were probably pretty cheap
2. I bought a spool of 100 very high quality TDK ones that I think came out to $.50 a piece at Circuit City.

Here are the results on the different players I tried last night:
1.Sony D-E406CK- Both discs sound pretty staticy, I attribute this to the player not the discs, although the TDKs sound a little better.
2.Technics 60 disc changer-The memorex are unplayable while the TDKs sound almost exactly like the original

On a related note, I was doing all my listening through my parents I thinkn it's about 5 year old Technics receiver, and it's headphone jack was great (keep in mind that I have never heard a dedicated headphone amp before), perfectly silent, and by adjusting the tone controls you can look make comparisons of different aspects of the CDs better because certain attributes would be exagerated if they were different.


I honestly think my new CD burner is broken, it worked at speeds up to 12X on Sunday when I bought it (although I only burned 1 CD that fast, all others were at 2X), but now I can barely get a 2X burn out of it without it saying that data isn't being transferred to it quickly enough. And I don't think it's the computer because on sunday I tried it with both of my macs and it worked fine, I was even surfing the internet while successfully burning on one of them. But now it doesn't work on either computer, I even reformatted my hard drive and reinstalled the OS on one.

So I think I'm just going to return the burner and make Circuit City give me a new one, put that damned $44 4-year warranty to some use, although I was hoping it wouldn't be within the first week.

I have a Mac, I don't know what DMA is. I just bought an external Sony Espressa 12x/8x/32x iLink Firewire burner, I don't know what the exact model number is, but it has a 1600 in it and it's the only model they have that fits those specs. When it worked the thing kicked ass.

More random thoughts: U2's new album is awesome, some more of that visceral low frequency presence that just makes you happy

Wow, that would be a cool feature, I have plenty of ram, it would certainly aleviate this problem probalby. When I was burning at 12x, it was set to the "generous" ram setting which gives it a cache equal to 2 times the burn speed in megabytes of ram, now I have it set on the max 64 meg of ram for the cache, i can't think of any reason this would be so slow, oh well, thanks for all your help dhwilkin.

I'm hoping it's the drive, and not something wrong with my computer or some software conflict because that will probalby consist of weeks of phone calls with apple and sony just blaming the other company for the problem.

If it's the burner, if I replace the burner, then all will be well, the only problem will be if they don't have any more in stock , this could become a nightmare anyway, oh well, thanks guys.

So, I went to Circuit City expecting to scream and yell if they wouldn't accept my return because it was still within the 14 day return policy, not to mention that I had purchased a $45 4-year extended warranty on it. And, after driving out their for a second time (the first time, I pulled in the parking lot and realized I had left the cables on my desk), I walked in said "this is broken" and the lady took my receipt and handed me a new one with the box still wrapped in plastice NO HASSLES, I would recommend Circuit City now.

Anyway, it will won't burn above 2x with Toast, but if I use iTunes, or the crappy Sony burning software it'll go up to 12x, so maybe I actually need to buy Toast (I downloaded it from Hotline) or something like that since it is much better software than the other two.

Well, honestly, there was no problem with the drive at all, only a problem with Toast, which I illegally downloaded anyway. Using Apple's free iTunes software burning CDs is so easy... my parents can do it . I love it. HP doesn't make (m)any Mac CD burners, and I needed it to be external which also limited my options. I have heard great things about Plextor though. I ended up with the sony because it was more or less a well-researched impulse buy. I had read about it before, and then it just happened to be there at the store when I went in looking for one. You really can't beat the ability to just walk in a store, take the product home with you, and enjoy it immediately. Mail order takes some of the fun out of it, although you can save a ton of money that way (i.e. Jan Meier, I wouldn't even have my HD600s without him).