We bought my wife a nice set of Bose speakers for her computer for her birthday last year. Since then she bought a high end sound system that blows the system we got out of the water. She gave me the Bose set a few months ago but I took my sweet time hooking it up.
Until today. It’s a massive upgrade over what I had before. Now I just want to sit at my desk with the volume cranked, feeling the sub woofer shake the floor.
Awesome!
Now that the whole music project is finished, we found ourselves at the mall today. My wife wanted to get a set of bluetooth headphones for work. She ended up getting a pair of Beats by Dr Dre. They are really nice. I thought they were a little heavy on the low end, but they were sweet. I accidentally ended up buying a pair of Bose AE2W Bluetooth Headphones. The Sennheiser HD 280 Pro headphones I used to mix my project are excellent, but these Bose babies… Wow. When it comes to sound systems, I kneel at the alter of Bose.
I think I might have stumbled upon one of the reasons that my home recordings sound like utter shit. One of the many, many reasons. Turns out my headphones suck like no headphones have ever sucked before.
I think it was 2003 or 2004 when I bought myself an 8-track recorder and a 16 channel board. I bought a pair of headphones from radio shack at the same time. I didn’t buy their cheapest cans, but I didn’t buy their best either. All I wanted was something better than the cheap crap that came with my portable CD player. Over the years I went through a few pairs of headphones, but I never invested in anything terribly good.
Today I was recording guitars on my iPhone and iPad so I used my radio shack cans. I didn’t think anything of it. At least not until a few minutes ago when I brought up the music app and tried to play the indie rock genius mix playlist.
Uh oh, thinks I. This sounds freakin’ terrible! 100 times worse than the Apple ear buds. What the hell?
For Christmas I got my beautiful wife a pair of Bose QC 15s. I plugged those into my iPad and low and behold! It was like listening to 90’s indie rock in heaven. I swear, Urge Overkill and The Breeders wouldn’t have sounded that good if they were in the room with me.
Yeah, definitely time for an upgrade in the headphones department. I’m not talking about getting QC 15s or anything like that, but the time for decent headphones has arrived at last.
Inside the Red Head's Head 