[mutabor]

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I just found out that Philips was a Dutch company... interesting... 

 
Lol. How did you manage to miss that fact?

 

[ardgedee]

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Mine are all pretty generic. Nothing fancy. My favorite uses celadon glaze, sorta like this one:

 
When it comes to pottery, I much prefer simple, balanced lines like that. Very nice.
 
Somewhere in southwest Korea is a celadon museum, shaped like a giant green bowl. It was about 20 meters tall and, dropped in the middle of a dry valley surrounded by scrub, it somehow lacked that particular kind of balance and grace.
 
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I am actually writing an academic paper on this topic. In short, it describes how biometrics will become the future (things like facial verification, etc). It will solve all those problems of forgetting PINs and passwords.

 
There's been stories already of people getting kidnapped or mauled to use their fingerprints. So I don't think biometrics will solve every problem without creating problems of its own.

 

[AcousticDreams]

I just found out that Philips was a Dutch company... interesting.

Philips is actually a Dutch company!

 

[MuppetFace]

In terms of aesthetics and feel, the CKW1000ANV are among my favorite earphones ever made. The housings look like really nice ceramic vessels used in a tea ceremony, and the wood accents give them an aged character. "Heirloom" comes to mind looking at them. Hints of roasted nuts and dried stone fruit. They sound the way they look too: somewhat vintage, with a thick and bassy tone married to its beautiful midrange.
 
There are earphones that cost less and sound better, but the CKW1000ANV as a complete experience is exceptional.

 

[MuppetFace]

Quote:

 
When it comes to pottery, I much prefer simple, balanced lines like that. Very nice.
 
Somewhere in southwest Korea is a celadon museum, shaped like a giant green bowl. It was about 20 meters tall and, dropped in the middle of a dry valley surrounded by scrub, it somehow lacked that particular kind of balance and grace.
 

 
I'd love to visit that museum.
 
My favorite colors are celadon / sea foam / pale greens. I'm especially fond of them when paired with delicate pinks (part of why I like my current avatar so much).

 

[kiteki]

 
There are earphones that cost less and sound better,

 
There are?  The CKW is the best dynamic I've heard.  I'd probably own one if they didn't ask for $650 for it at Jaben-Jakarta.
 
I'm very curious about the CKM which no one talks about, though?

 

[tomscy2000]

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  Philips is actually a Dutch company!

 
LOL, I'm normally the grammar Nazi --- thanks. At the same time, Philips is now a multi-national corporation...
 
Quote:

In terms of aesthetics and feel, the CKW1000ANV are among my favorite earphones ever made. The housings look like really nice ceramic vessels used in a tea ceremony, and the wood accents give them an aged character. "Heirloom" comes to mind looking at them. Hints of roasted nuts and dried stone fruit. They sound the way they look too: somewhat vintage, with a thick and bassy tone married to its beautiful midrange.
 
There are earphones that cost less and sound better, but the CKW1000ANV as a complete experience is exceptional.

 
Agree, agree! The CKW ANV is a true beauty. I was disappointed to see the ESW11LTD didn't have the same exceptional build and polish...

 

[tomscy2000]

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There are?  The CKW is the best dynamic I've heard.  I'd probably own one if they didn't ask for $650 for it at Jaben-Jakarta.
 
I'm very curious about the CKM which no one talks about, though?

I thought we had a PM convo about this?

 

[MuppetFace]

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There are?  The CKW is the best dynamic I've heard.  I'd probably own one if they didn't ask for $650 for it at Jaben-Jakarta.

 
 
For my tastes, yeah. I prefer the EX800ST and especially the Flat-4 SUI sonically. However the CKW1000ANV is still my personal favorite "bassy" IEM, though the Radius TWF21 is a close second. But like I said, as a whole package the CKW1000ANV is really special, and I think it's worth it. It has some of the best build quality of any IEM evaaar.
 

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Agree, agree! The CKW ANV is a true beauty. I was disappointed to see the ESW11LTD didn't have the same exceptional build and polish...

 

Yeah, the ESW11LTD as a whole was rather underwhelming unfortunately.

 

[ardgedee]

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I'd love to visit that museum.

 
I want to go back and see a bunch of things we drove past on our tour, including that museum.
 
That part of the country oddly reminded me of parts of the upper US Adirondacks and southwestern US rockies, both; alternately lush and dry environments, peppered with odd little out-of-the-way historical sites and museums of local significance. Due to South Korea's size, they're a few hours from the nearest major city, rather than a few days, so it's easier to hit a few of them in a day if you feel driven to try. We passed a few bicycle tourists; not a lot but enough to notice. Most of them were Japanese. It doesn't look like an easy way to see the country but potentially more rewarding than by car or bus.

 

[dukeskd]

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Biometrics are fine and dandy on paper, especially when thinking of how futuristic they feel. However, they will introduce other problems. Personally, I'd rather have to order a new card because of me forgetting my PIN, than having some server god-knows-where available to god-knows-who with the security configured by god-knows-who at god-knows-what-company, and so on. I'm not really trusting in these kinds of things, and when biometrics becomes the norm, I hope it will be able to recognize my face despite me wearing a tinfoil hat. I suppose that my background in university that was geared towards infosec (and systems development) does give me a couple of very different opinions on biometrics - at times very conflicting opinions.

Recent developments have made it actually very usable and in fact, FBI are considering using facial verification as a standard identification procedure instead of passwords.

 

[ardgedee]

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[...] Even my new treasure, the Float QUAD Atelier, is pretty much a copy of the originals with a few tweaks here and there. The original QUAD ESL speakers from around the same era still trounce most stuff today. [....]

 
Sorry for dredging up an old post but this line had stuck in my head for a couple days and the reason why coalesced this morning... I wonder if the problems the Quad Float have are due to those tweaks; Their attempting to wring the nth degree of performance out of them means avoiding some of the design compromises that ensured reliability.
 
Similarly, the original Quad ESLs are some of the best speakers ever made, but only within fairly proscribed parameters: That they will only be used at moderate volumes, that there is appropriate space for them that is neither too large nor too small and can accommodate their best positioning, that the room is neither too dry nor too humid, that your preferred music isn't too bassy... Speaker designs that attempt to work around the ESL's shortcomings tend to end up being other things entirely. It's arguable that there might not be a singular optimal speaker design, but instead a range of optimal speaker designs, and Quad happened to discover one of them very early on.

 

[kiteki]

I thought we had a PM convo about this?

 
Yup, you said the CKM1000 is bright, similar sounding to the CKM99, and the CK100Pro is better.  Let alone, the CKW is limited edition, so I feel like the CKM1000 is in a 'void' there of performance and value.
 
However... I'm still curious how it is as an IEM alone, like if it was the only IEM to exist on earth - or how it competes as a brighter dynamic driver, i.e. like versus Romy's trifecta of EX700 - Ocha - Final-Bass. ...

 

[kiteki]

 
For my tastes, yeah. I prefer the EX800ST and especially the Flat-4 SUI sonically. /

 
'kay, that makes sense.  My 5-10 minutes with the CKW were much more exhilirating than with the EX800ST, but that's only because I've been 'Sony Exxed' for what feels like years already.

 

[kiteki]

I just found out that Philips was a Dutch company... interesting.

Philips is actually a Dutch company!

 
Speaking of which, so is this company --- http://www.nosminidac.nl/background_information.html