[Duartisimo]

*edit

 

[cjl]

What are you trying to achieve with this? Low power consumption? If so, you'd be really hard pressed to beat a set of IEMs driven directly by an iPod or similar. That having been said, the power consumption of any reasonable headphone rig will be pretty minimal (don't get a huge Class A amp and you should be good).

 

[Duartisimo]

*edit

 

[blades]

I view all of audio as "responsible."

 

[cjl]

  Would agree with you, but portable media players require (in most cases) a computer to sync with in the first place. That would be another product that has to be build and transported.

Presumably, as a member of modern society who is posting on this forum, you already have a computer (and you might have a smartphone too, which could take the place of the portable media player). That having been said, you could also make a case for just listening to IEMs via your computer directly. I still don't really see the point in focusing so much on small things like this though. There are many areas of your life that you can have a larger environmental impact than worrying about the waste from headphones.

 

[esldude]

Yeah, if you own a smartphone, hard to beat that.  Get either IEM or OTE headphones.  Any modern smartphone gives up little if anything for such use in sound quality.  A dedicated music player may or may not be better in terms of saving resources.  If you have the phone already, then the music player won't compete. 
 
Second best option would be a tablet plus headphones.  Easier on resources than a laptop with excellent sound quality from most. With careful phone selection an external amp will be unnecessary. 

 

[Strangelove424]

  Hello all,
 
While looking for arguments in favor of a Kindle I stumbled upon the magic number of 22.5; that is, it takes about 22.5 books to offset the Kindle's manufacturing and transportation CO2 emissions. After that i save some trees and also lots of space.

 
Gotta wonder how much energy you'd waste in the course of a life time reading your library (possibly multiple times) on a kindle. My books just sit there, using no more energy than when I first purchased them, and will continue to not use any energy for the rest of their life no matter how much I read them.
 
Furthermore, it is an honor for trees to sacrifice themselves to become part of a book. The trees should look upon it with dignity and honor. Besides, at the rate people buy books these days, it's hardly a drop in the forestry bucket anyway. 

 

[ProtegeManiac]

   
Gotta wonder how much energy you'd waste in the course of a life time reading your library (possibly multiple times) on a kindle. My books just sit there, using no more energy than when I first purchased them, and will continue to not use any energy for the rest of their life no matter how much I read them.

 
I said all of that back when the concept was first being pushed around. Then I came home from college, dumping truckloads of readings into a dumpster on my way out of the dorm, then finding termites all over my library at home (my parents migrated and left it for me). I wonder how much of an honor it was to be insect food (which is we'd all end up as anyway, except some idiots like pumping toxic chemicals into corpses and being buried in lacquered boxes).
 
Now all my grad school readings are on a Cloud storage along with my books and magazines, and I use a solar charger to store energy in a powerbank.
 
 
Quote:

 
While looking for arguments in favor of a Kindle I stumbled upon the magic number of 22.5; that is, it takes about 22.5 books to offset the Kindle's manufacturing and transportation CO2 emissions. After that i save some trees and also lots of space.

 

Just to add how we should think of eBooks:

1) The Kindle can hold waaay more than that, including storing them in a Cloud when you're not reading them for the time being. And it's not just books, magazines should be counted as well - I just cut paper waste on all that since MAD, Motorcycle USA, Road & Track, etc all offer them on PDF. Best of all MAD has interactive issues if you get them for the iPad instead of the PDF download, so you can actually "fold" the fold-in gradually, among other things. So while books tend to have value if kept, especially signed or first editions, magazines don't and the spines are very fragile.

2) Barring a widespread apocalypse or EMP burst, electronic copies are more durable than hardcopies, no matter how much those nostalgic types argue against them (especially with solar chargers). Just ask the screw**g termites who ate my damn library at home while I was away in college (and my parents moved out of the old house). Imagine my surprise when I pulled out Red Badge of Courage feeling like I had the biggest (though suburban - but hey I can grill out here) bachelor pad and found all those wriggling critters have turned it into a "The Gaping Cavity of Nope."

 

3) Our university has also gone paperless as much as possible. Submissions are electronic (not to mention there's a program that can check for plagiarism), msot readings are on PDF (even those from print copies have been requested for PDF copies from publishers, and if they were printed by think tanks and NGOs, they're usually happy to oblige). It's not surprising anymore for a class to just have everybody with a tablet (for the references) and a laptop or another tablet (for notes). Best of all with the monsoon rains here a heavy load of paper isn't as easy to lug around as a tablet in some kind of waterproof bag/case/sleeve (I use a good bag plus a large ziplock), and even if you get mugged (knock on wood), the copies are still somewhere online.

 

4) The only real problem overall is the amount of power required to keep these things running, but considering you can read in the dark, it's partially offset by reading with only the tablet's light on (and in reverse lighting - black background and white letters), plus charging powerbanks using solar chargers as much as possible.
 
 
Quote:

 
Looking for a similar way of approaching music purchasing and playback. Any ideas for a "responsible" headphone rig?

 

Even speaker rigs are "responsible" enough unless we're talking about a huge home theater system. Looking at a headphone, even a Class A amplifier with 1w per channel RMS output will not actually be running at 1w on most headphones.

 

What will likely suck a lot more power is the source. Whereas before you might use a CDP with less than 25w/h consumption, now people use their computers. If they use a gaming rig for audio listening, when they're not playing, they'll end up using a 600watt power supply that at minimum will run a GPU and a quad core CPU on idle, plus the fans on the GPU cooler, CPU cooler and chassis, and the PSU's. Even a laptop might use a 60w to 90w PSU. That's why I use a smartphone: it's more focused (no distractions), looks neat, and is convenient. I come home, dock it, run the amp, feed my cats, shower, then listen.
 

 
 
 
 
 
Quote:

 
My initial assumption would be Laptop > iTunes downloads > USB powered DAC/amp (Dragonfly, Microstreamer) > low impedance Headphones
 
Am i wrong in this? counter-arguments welcomed!

 

Like I said above, it's not like it will greatly impact your power consumption unless you use them all day (at which point you'd be putting more charge cycles on that laptop, you wear the battery out sooner, and contribute to battery waste). So yeah, if you can use a rig that is completely AC powered, like a CDP or a music server that doesn't use a lot of power (which is basically any dedicated music server that isn't using full-blown PC components), it would actually be a lot better. The power consumption isn't that much higher and you don't contribute to lithium ion (or similar) toxic waste. Also you might be better off with a DAP and IEMs - even an ultrabook needs way more power than a DAP (but then again you're using iTunes, so the firmware on these can be a downer for you).

 

Of course, if there actually is any IEM or headphone that you like driven just by the Dragonfly, then go right ahead. But if you have an existing rig and you won't need this new system as a portable rig, why spend? The power savings isn't exactly going to impact how much you spend; I don't even notice it having an impact as other things are at play.*



*I listen at most 2hrs in a day, and sometimes I go several days without listening; my bill is all over the place. It can be higher on months that I didn't listen at all for days for example, usually because I had to run the A/C overnight and it'll be noisy as heck. Normally I run the A/C for an hour blowing into the back of an industrial fan that cools the entire room within minutes, then stays cold until I leave for work the next day. If it's dry season though (March to June) the minute I kill the A/C I'll already feel the heat, and wake up at 3am sweating. That's why use my portable system (IEM) a lot more during those months.

   
Gotta wonder how much energy you'd waste in the course of a life time reading your library (possibly multiple times) on a kindle. My books just sit there, using no more energy than when I first purchased them, and will continue to not use any energy for the rest of their life no matter how much I read them.
 
Furthermore, it is an honor for trees to sacrifice themselves to become part of a book. The trees should look upon it with dignity and honor. Besides, at the rate people buy books these days, it's hardly a drop in the forestry bucket anyway. 

 

[sonitus mirus]

Seems like a no-win situation either way.   If we no longer use those trees for paper, the forest gets overcrowded, nature takes over and a lightning strike starts a huge fire releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and causing other problems that wreak havoc to the environment.  We could also stop deforestation in places with little other sources for income, like Papua New Guinea, and these same people will then over-fish the region or something else that will likely cause just as much of an impact on our environment.

 

[ProtegeManiac]

  Seems like a no-win situation either way.   If we no longer use those trees for paper, the forest gets overcrowded, nature takes over and a lightning strike starts a huge fire releasing large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and causing other problems that wreak havoc to the environment.  We could also stop deforestation in places with little other sources for income, like Papua New Guinea, and these same people will then over-fish the region or something else that will likely cause just as much of an impact on our environment.

 
Yes there is, the problem is that people are attacking the problem from the wrong angle. To be more precise, I can't discuss any further because politics and society are verboten, but I can write a whole damn paper on it off the bat and cite where groups usually on the different sides of all debates all agree on one thing and that's where everything went wrong.

 

[Strangelove424]

   
I said all of that back when the concept was first being pushed around. Then I came home from college, dumping truckloads of readings into a dumpster on my way out of the dorm, then finding termites all over my library at home (my parents migrated and left it for me). I wonder how much of an honor it was to be insect food (which is we'd all end up as anyway, except some idiots like pumping toxic chemicals into corpses and being buried in lacquered boxes).
 
Now all my grad school readings are on a Cloud storage along with my books and magazines, and I use a solar charger to store energy in a powerbank.

 
In college I would put notes in the margins, and tag pages useful for support of an argument or interpretation with sticky notes. Going back and forth between citations while writing a paper would drive me crazy if I was on an e-book. And if the paper had a bunch of different book sources and I needed to keep cross-referencing between them all, that would drive me crazy too. E-book users are at the whim of multi-tasking GUIs and screen sizes. Not to mention the battery. Finals week must require a lot of plugging things in.

 

[cjl]

 

Even speaker rigs are "responsible" enough unless we're talking about a huge home theater system. Looking at a headphone, even a Class A amplifier with 1w per channel RMS output will not actually be running at 1w on most headphones.

 

What will likely suck a lot more power is the source. Whereas before you might use a CDP with less than 25w/h consumption, now people use their computers. If they use a gaming rig for audio listening, when they're not playing, they'll end up using a 600watt power supply that at minimum will run a GPU and a quad core CPU on idle, plus the fans on the GPU cooler, CPU cooler and chassis, and the PSU's. Even a laptop might use a 60w to 90w PSU. That's why I use a smartphone: it's more focused (no distractions), looks neat, and is convenient. I come home, dock it, run the amp, feed my cats, shower, then listen.

Unless you're running an 8-10 year old super high end computer, you really won't be pulling that much power with it either. Most modern desktops pull somewhere between 30 and 80 watts when sitting idle (and playing music or surfing the web is pretty darn close to idle). The monitor might be the single highest power consuming item on a modern desktop. Laptops do even better - many of them pull under 10 watts, and even the large, powerful ones are still going to be under about 25 or so when not under a heavy load. Admittedly, a smartphone is going to be <1W, so it's still the better choice, but computers aren't nearly as power-hungry as you say here.

 

[Redcarmoose]

Changing your house to LED will more than save any silly energy you use for audio.

The bulbs use a fraction of the power and last 20 years.

 

[ProtegeManiac]

   
In college I would put notes in the margins, and tag pages useful for support of an argument or interpretation with sticky notes. Going back and forth between citations while writing a paper would drive me crazy if I was on an e-book. And if the paper had a bunch of different book sources and I needed to keep cross-referencing between them all, that would drive me crazy too. E-book users are at the whim of multi-tasking GUIs and screen sizes. Not to mention the battery. Finals week must require a lot of plugging things in.

 
I hated doing all those back then because I tended to lose post-its and can't find stuff flipping pages. On PDF readers there's a list of the notations that were made and you can click on them to zoom back to where it is on the paper so the context/related material an easily be viewed. I went through my comprehensive exams in grad school better than any finals in college (despite covering everything from college majors to 24units of grad school) with an iPad and a laptop, although we weren't completely paperless at that point but after initial analog notes I put them all up on the laptop.
 

  Unless you're running an 8-10 year old super high end computer, you really won't be pulling that much power with it either. Most modern desktops pull somewhere between 30 and 80 watts when sitting idle (and playing music or surfing the web is pretty darn close to idle). The monitor might be the single highest power consuming item on a modern desktop. Laptops do even better - many of them pull under 10 watts, and even the large, powerful ones are still going to be under about 25 or so when not under a heavy load. Admittedly, a smartphone is going to be <1W, so it's still the better choice, but computers aren't nearly as power-hungry as you say here.

 
I stand corrected; still, too many components running for my tastes. Not to mention noise, especially if you have a gaming rig and you live in a hot climate. My computer starts out quiet with the door closed on the intake, but even if I don't play, after about an hour of mucking around the internet while Steam is downloading updates the exhaust air can be a bit hot to the touch (around 60deg C), so I'll open up the front door to let the fans suck more air in, at which point the intake fans are more audible and the exhaust moves more air out that makes noise through the grill. Sometime while playing the GPU fans and CPU cooler fans ramp up and at every loading screen I can hear it all. Doesn't bother me with gaming but if I'm listening to music this will all drive me nuts, especially with open headphones.