UNDERDOG of PERFECTION - Page 95 - a blog on technology, music and geek culture from room34

SEO doesn’t matter

Note (April 22, 2011): I rarely second-guess myself after posting a blog entry, but this was one of those rare cases. I reconsidered the post due to the fact that shortly after writing it, I observed a case with a client where SEO did matter. But upon further, um, reconsideration, I decided the post did still have merit, because the type of SEO we were dealing with was not the type of SEO I’m talking about here. In fact, “the type of SEO we were dealing with” is something I’m reluctant to call SEO at all, even though that’s denotatively what it is: search engine optimization. But there’s a huge difference between semantic HTML, well formed title and meta tags, and carefully constructed sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, versus “gaming the system,” which is the negative connotation SEO typically carries, and what I’m focusing on in my criticism here. So… on we go. With a few edits for clarification.

There, I said it. Well, actually I’ve been saying it in various ways for years, so what I actually mean is: there, I made it the title of a blog post. And if SEO does matter at all, then people who don’t think SEO matters (and somehow feel inclined to express that sentiment in Google’s search box) will soon be viewing this post. (Huh?)

Today I was perusing my RSS feeds (a good way to find information that is relevant to your interests, often much more effective than just searching for random terms on Google), and I came across a blog post entitled Whitehat SEO Is a Joke. Intrigued, I read it, and it made some sense. The argument in a nutshell is that whitehat SEO is, really, just ineffective SEO. This spawned a satirical response, Blackhat SEO Is a Joke. It made some sense too. And that’s when the thought really coalesced in my mind: all SEO is a joke. Not because on one end of the spectrum it’s ineffectual and on the other it’s unethical. Because manipulating search engine rankings shouldn’t really matter to a sustainable business model.

To the Twittermobile!

After some thought (and a few minutes of research), I followed up with this:

So, what do I really mean here? In this specific example of my own work, what I mean is I don’t depend on random people googling “Minneapolis web development” to get work. I get most of my work through the network of contacts I’ve developed over a decade and a half of professional experience, and through referrals from past clients. And even if I do want people to be able to find me on Google, which of course I do, I expect they would type Room 34, not Minneapolis web development. Go ahead and google “Room 34.” I’ll wait.

Welcome back. And guess what? I didn’t spend a cent on SEO consulting, and I didn’t spend much time of my own thinking about SEO either. I thought about well-formed semantic HTML and relevant content and that just happened. But it still doesn’t matter because I don’t depend on search engine rankings for business.

If you’re building a website as a means to promote your business, or if the website is your business, you’ll certainly want to appear in relevant search results, but ultimately your goal is quite simply to get people to your website, regardless of how they got there. Search engines are therefore a marketing tool — hopefully only one of many you’ll be employing — and if search engines don’t lead visitors to your site based on its own merits, then the problem is not the search engines and their confounded algorithms, it’s your site.

Don’t ask me what the other marketing tools are or should be. I’m a web developer, not a marketer. For myself, word-of-mouth and business cards have been the only marketing tools I’ve needed. Other businesses need other strategies, and the first thing any business needs to do when developing a marketing strategy is to figure out where its business is likely to come from and how best to reach that audience.

Regardless of whether you’re deeply immersed in the world of SEO or you hold it at arm’s length like I do, there are some interesting and relevant points in the two blog posts I linked to above, but I think the most salient is this, from the blackhat post:

If however you have a web property that has some value to it, then true blackhat strategies are not the way forward.

Black, white or gray, all SEO (apart from basic web design best practices, careful [and responsible] use of legitimate tools like sitemap.xml and robots.txt files, Google Webmaster Tools, and meaningful, relevant content) is essentially about gaming the system. Some techniques may achieve more immediate impact, and others may have more lasting value, but ultimately I see only two reasons to engage in any of them:

Your content and/or its presentation doesn’t have enough value on its own.
Your business model itself is based on gaming the system.

If the latter is true, there’s nothing I can say or do to help you or to persuade you to act otherwise. We’re simply in this world for different reasons and will never see eye to eye. If the former is true, however, there’s an alternative. It’s a lot more work, but in some ways that’s the point: make your content better. And that will often lead to an even broader, harder, and more important task: figure out what you’re really trying to do in the first place. Because if you need to be on the first page of a generic Google results page to stay in business, maybe you don’t really have much of a business at all.

Addendum, a few hours later: Like I said…
Google search for "SEO doesn't matter"

A childhood fantasy (almost) realized: 100 Atari games in my pocket

Owners of 1980s technology intellectual property are in an unenviable position. Their IP has very little value beyond historical significance or nostalgia. No one (well, I hope no one) is going to use an Apple IIe computer for serious productivity work these days, but that doesn’t diminish its importance in computing history, nor the strong positive memories its once loyal users may still hold onto.

There are few properties from the ’80s whose value is more purely historical and nostalgic than those bearing the brand of Atari. Sure, there’s still a company today named Atari, and it still makes modern video games for modern consoles, but this Atari shares only its name with the hallowed institution founded in Sunnyvale, California in 1972. The name and all of the properties that go with it have been sold and re-sold and re-re-sold so many times over the intervening years that any minute connection to the past, beyond the games themselves, has been lost.

So, what is a modern company that owns all of this (relatively speaking) useless IP to do? Trying to cash in on it is obvious, but doing it right is a huge challenge. The biggest hurdle is the very historical significance and nostalgia that give these games any lingering value in the first place. The only people who are really going to want to play Combat or Yars’ Revenge or — ah-hem — Math Gran Prix on an iPhone are people who either owned (and played the hell out of) these games as kids 30 years ago, or their kids, who harbor a morbid curiosity about this old crap their parents like for some reason. In order to satisfy these customers, the company that now calls itself Atari needs to achieve perfection in recreating the experience people remember. Not just the graphics and the sounds and the program mechanics of the games, but the feel… the essence of what it meant to play video games in the days when Ronald Reagan was president, pastels were popular in men’s fashion, and MTV still showed music videos.

Yesterday Atari released Atari’s Greatest Hits as a universal app for iOS devices. (To the non-nerd[s] in my audience: that means the same app works on iPhone/iPod touch and iPad.) The game comes free with arcade Pong, and 99 other classic (and not-so-classic, but… well… old) Atari games, both from the arcades and for the Atari 2600 VCS, available as in-app purchases. The games are sold in packs of four for 99 cents, or the entire set can be downloaded for $14.99. Let’s be serious: anyone who cares about this at all should just get it over with and download the works, immediately.

So did Atari live up to my unrealistic expectations? Read on after the screenshot gallery to find out.

First impressions

It’s clear from the moment you load Atari’s Greatest Hits on your iPhone or iPad that a great deal of attention and care went into putting this package together. And yet, it just doesn’t quite hit the mark. The graphic design of the menu interface bears plenty of superficial nods to the vintage Atari experience: plenty of use of Bauhaus font (the font Atari used with the original 7 cartridges released with the Atari VCS in 1977), lots of browns and oranges, and of course the carousel navigation that uses the original cabinet and/or game box art to help you select a game to play. But despite fonts and colors, this doesn’t look ’80s, and it certainly doesn’t sound ’80s. The entire time you’re on the menu, loud 21st century techno music booms from your speaker. To be fair, I like this kind of music, and the music they chose is decent. But it’s a distracting anachronism.

I compare this to the Williams Pinball Collection that came out a few years ago on the modern consoles. Its interface looks like an arcade, with the pinball tables lined up along the wall, and over the din of a dozen pinball machines blasts licensed ’80s popular music. (The song that stands out for me is the quite-possibly-perfect Loverboy hit “Workin’ for the Weekend.”) This is what I would have liked (if not downright expected) in a properly executed Atari collection.

Lamentations about “what could have been” aside, it is truly great to see the original game box art and arcade cabinets on the menu, and the menu itself is intuitive and fun to navigate. And it’s great that each game also includes a full high-resolution scan of the original instruction manual, which also explains why a collection of 100 games, most of which were only about 4 KB each on the original cartridges, could add up to a 68 MB download on iOS.

The sound and the fury

There was almost no question for me which game I would try first: Yars’ Revenge. I logged hundreds of hours (sometimes in a single game, it seemed) playing this game in the ’80s, long past the date when I should have moved on to the NES or PC games. Any true Atari retro experience needs to deliver a perfect rendition of Yars’ Revenge for me to consider it a success.

I started the game, picked my favorite game variation (Game 6), and then… WHAAAAA!!! Playing the game on my iPad, I was assaulted by hideous distorted grinding noises. I tried a few other games and confirmed that all of the 2600 games had horribly distorted sound. (It also didn’t help that Yars’ Revenge gets most of its intensity from a constant droning buzz, making this quite possibly the worst game I could begin this experience with.)

Fortunately, later in the evening I loaded the game onto my iPhone 3GS, and found absolutely no sound issues with the 2600 games, even Yars’ Revenge. So I’m not sure if this is a general issue with the game on the iPad, or if it was an isolated problem that could have been resolved with a reboot. I’ll follow up on that when I know more.

Playing the game

With my worries about sound allayed, I was able to focus my attention on the quality of the game experience. All of the games are presented in a relatively small area of the screen, with ample space above and below devoted to on-screen controls. There have been some complaints in App Store reviews about the games not using the full display, but I think those complaints are misguided. These Atari games in their original form were so low-res that even when shrunk down to a little less than half the size of an iPhone screen, they’re still easily viewable. Plus, displaying the games in full-screen mode would mean you’d need to obscure part of the display with your fingers in order to control the game. Unacceptable.

The developers and designers who worked on this collection put considerable thought into translating the original game controls to on-screen counterparts that do not necessarily mimic the original feel, but that usually (but not always) contribute to a satisfying game experience.

A good pair of games to consider in reviewing the merits of these control systems are the arcade versions of Asteroids and Tempest. Both games translate quite well to the iOS experience. They look fantastic (all of the vector games, in particular, come through well here), and are just as fun to play as ever. With Tempest, the original control mechanism was a flywheel-like spinner. That is replaced with a thumbwheel that reminds me of the volume controls on old transistor radios. It’s way different from the original control, but it feels surprisingly natural and it’s very easy to adapt to this type of play.

Asteroids, on the other hand, does not benefit from this new alternate control mechanism, at least for the way I like to play the game. (I should probably note that I own an actual Asteroids cocktail table, so I’m very accustomed to the arcade controls.) The default control mechanism is a combination rotate/thrust “disc,” not unlike the disc controller on an old Intellivision. (Intellivision controls on an Atari game? Blasphemy!) Some people may prefer this, but I found it absolutely unusable, mainly because of my preferred Asteroids playing style: I don’t thrust all over the screen. I stay in one spot and just rotate, and I move around only when absolutely necessary. The disc control makes it nearly impossible, for me at least, to rotate without thrusting. Luckily, Asteroids (and apparently most of the arcade games, though I haven’t tried them all yet) offers multiple control schemes, including the original arcade-style five-button configuration. This worked well for me on the iPad, but I didn’t try it yet on the iPhone, and I imagine size could be an issue there, not to mention just holding the iPhone while fiddling with five on-screen buttons at the bottom of the display.

A few other miscellaneous game notes:

No licensed games. This was a no-brainer for me, but apparently (based on reviews on the App Store) it’s confusing to some users. This collection only consists of games Atari owns the rights to. That means games that were licensed for the original Atari 2600 won’t show up here, not even if Atari developed those games. You won’t find arcade classics like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Defender or Berzerk, and you won’t find licensed movie properties like Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark or E.T. And you definitely won’t find games that were originally released by other game companies like Activision, Imagic or Parker Brothers. Although… one wonders. Atari licensed Pitfall! and River Raid from Activision for inclusion on the plug-and-play Atari Flashback 2 console a few years back. Maybe a similar license could be in the works. It wouldn’t be difficult for Atari to offer additional in-app purchases of more games in the future.

I think the funniest instance of licensing issues popping up here though is the matter of Pong Sports. Back in the ’80s Atari manufactured the 2600 and a number of its games under special branding for sale at Sears stores, and there were three Sears exclusive titles (Steeplechase, Submarine Commander and Stellar Track), all of which are included here. And then there’s Pong Sports. Atari released this game as Video Olympics, and sold it as Pong Sports in Sears stores. But here it’s called Pong Sports, presumably because they couldn’t get the rights to use the word “Olympics” this time around.

Unreleased and homebrew games. If you’re not a hardcore Atari fanatic, you probably don’t realize that in recent years a number of unreleased prototype games have come to light as downloadable ROMs to play in computer-based Atari 2600 emulation software. And a rabid homebrew community has developed as well, creating brand new games for the system. This collection includes a few of these prototype and homebrew games, such as the Atari 2600 version of Tempest and an unreleased game called Save Mary. I find it funny that Atari had to, of course, come up with box art for these games for the menu interface, and they went with some really low-quality homemade art for most of them. But Save Mary is the weirdest… it uses the cover art that originally went with the Atari 2600 BASIC Programming cartridge.

It’s also funny… and probably an intentional joke… that for these games, the manual scans that are displayed are not for the games (since they don’t have instruction manuals) but for the Atari 2600 console itself. Somewhat of an Easter egg, I think.

God (or is it the devil?) is in the details

Atari got a lot of things right with this collection, but there is definitely room for improvement. Here are a few things that come to mind, some of which I’ve already mentioned.

License some great ’80s music for the menu. The aforementioned Loverboy hit would certainly be great, but really just about any music that was in heavy rotation on MTV circa 1983 would work. Personally I’d love to hear plenty of Duran Duran and Men at Work.

Alternate control schemes for the 2600 titles. Here’s the one thing that I think would make the biggest difference in creating an authentic Atari 2600 experience: position the on-screen controls to better mimic the feeling of holding an old CX-40 joystick. The space is already there; they’d just need to rearrange the controls. Move the fire button to the upper left where the pause button is; move the d-pad to the lower right where the fire button is; and move the pause button to the lower right where the d-pad is. Holding a square-ish device in the left hand and pressing a button with one’s left thumb while using one’s right hand to control movement is the natural way of the Atari 2600 experience. Ideally the d-pad would be tweaked a bit as well… it’s a little too restrictive feeling. A lot of iOS games with a virtual d-pad allow you to place your thumb anywhere in a general region of the screen and that instantly becomes the “zero” position of the d-pad. I suspect (or at least hope) that, given the nature of iOS apps, Atari will continue to refine the controls in future updates.

Better “cabinet art.” I have to be honest… I can live with the graphic design of the main menus, but the graphics framing the game itself while in play are downright ugly. Better to have it look like an actual vintage TV set like VH1’s (yes, VH1’s) Intellivision collection for iOS. And I’d prefer that the on-screen buttons look exactly like the real buttons on the arcade cabinets and console controllers, without the unnecessary added visual junk. It also seems like they phoned in the design of the on-screen slider for the paddle-based games. (Why doesn’t it at least look like the control they developed for Tempest?)

Final thoughts

I could nitpick details only an OCD Atari junkie will notice, much less care about, but in the end there’s only one thing I can say about this collection. Back in the early days of the App Store, Atari released a few of its classic arcade games as standalone apps, each consisting of both the original and a new version with modernized graphics and sound: Centipede, Super Breakout, Missile Command. Then they disappeared, and were gone for ages. A month or two ago, they reappeared, but with only the modernized portions. For ages I’ve been speculating that Atari had a massive collection app in the works, and finally yesterday it arrived. I was absolutely giddy. And while it will probably never fully live up to my expectations, it’s damn close. I’ve dreamed ever since I first got my Atari 2600 console in 1982, when I was 8 years old, that one day I’d be able to carry the experience around in my pocket. And now I can… almost. It’s not perfect, and it couldn’t be. But I’ll take it anyway.

Musings of a 4-year-old daughter: a tweet compendium

I’ve spent the last year-plus tweeting the musings of my 4-year-old daughter. Tomorrow she becomes my 5-year-old daughter, so this seemed like a good time for a compendium of her “greatest hits.”

I need to acknowledge the great iPhone app Momento, which made gathering a year’s worth of tweets possible (if still not quite as easy as I would have liked… I still needed to manually pull them out of a text file using TextWrangler, and I didn’t bother to reorganize them from its default reverse chronological order). Momento is a great app for automatically turning your tweets, Facebook status updates and blog RSS feed into an automatic personal journal. You can also write private entries directly within the app. It’s fantastic, and well worth the $2.99 price tag.

Here we go…

4yo daughter: What’s the car alarm for?
Me: To scare off someone trying to break in.
4yo: It should just make a ghost come out.
Monday 21 March 2011, 12:22 PM

4yo daughter just sheepishly approached me and said “I accidentally did this.”
“This” being writing her name on her leg with a marker.
Sunday 20 March 2011, 9:08 AM

I was explaining how long Bob Dylan’s been around. 4yo daughter: “Um, dad, the word you’re looking for is ’80 hundred years’.”
Sunday 13 February 2011, 8:34 PM

4yo daughter wants to do yoga. Or, in her words, get “yoga’ed up.”
Saturday 5 February 2011, 7:07 PM

4yo daughter: Who do you think I’m going to marry?
Me: I don’t know. Probably someone you don’t even know yet.
4yo: I have to MEET someone?
Saturday 29 January 2011, 4:06 PM

4yo daughter is excited for Twins Fest on Sunday, but only for possibility of seeing TC Bear or Joe Mauer (in that order). @MinnesotaTwins
Friday 28 January 2011, 9:32 PM

4yo daughter to coffee roaster: “What are you doing?”
Coffee roaster: “Cooking little girls.”
Daughter: “What?”
Roaster: “Roasting coffee.”
Saturday 8 January 2011, 3:45 PM

4yo daughter’s new song: “Doo Doo Death Star,” sung to the tune of “Frère Jacques.”
Thursday 6 January 2011, 7:31 AM

4yo daughter: “Worms are mean to artists because worms eat trees and paper comes from trees.”
Friday 31 December 2010, 12:52 PM

Always surprising what songs 4yo daughter spontaneously sings… this time it’s “Baby’s in Black” by the Beatles.
Friday 31 December 2010, 4:39 PM

4yo daughter in a freshly cleaned bathroom: “It smells like I pooped on a flower.”
Thursday 30 December 2010, 1:02 PM

To 4yo daughter: “Are they vegetarians?”
4yo daughter replies: “Yeah, they only eat vegetarian meat.”
Tuesday 21 December 2010, 5:58 PM

4yo daughter: “I love shopping. Just like London Tipton.” #ParentingFail
Thursday 16 December 2010, 5:22 PM

4yo daughter, totally out of the blue: “Pigs are breakfast, daddy.”
Sunday 5 December 2010, 8:34 PM

Apparently 4yo daughter spent entire drive back from North Shore listening to the White Album. Walking around house singing “Bungalow Bill.”
Sunday 28 November 2010, 1:51 PM

4yo daughter gets home from preschool. What does she want for a snack? Salt.
Thursday 11 November 2010, 5:20 PM

4yo daughter is listening to Queen: “Why are they champions?”
Tuesday 26 October 2010, 8:36 PM

4yo daughter correctly identified Kyle Massey on Dancing with the Stars as the voice of Milo on Disney Channel’s Fish Hooks. Seriously?!
Monday 18 October 2010, 8:23 PM

Listening to Rush — “La Villa Strangiato” — today, because last night my 4yo daughter misheard me say something and asked “Strangiato?” I think.
Wednesday 13 October 2010, 9:00 AM

Speaking of 4yo daughter, my natural inclination to correct everyone all the time shuts off when she calls an iPad a “big iPod.”
Wednesday 13 October 2010, 9:18 AM

4yo daughter identified the scientist Algernon (Roy Kinnear) in The Beatles’ Help! as “Veruca’s dad.”
Monday 30 August 2010, 3:30 PM

4yo daughter just said, “I wish your body didn’t need sleep. Sleeping is boring!”
Wednesday 26 May 2010, 9:19 PM

4yo explaining why she’s hungry: “My tummy’s empty. All the food went into my legs.”
Wednesday 12 May 2010, 7:56 AM

4yo daughter just insulted me (I think) by yelling “You shredded wheat!”
Saturday 10 April 2010, 3:22 PM

Troy Bolton is my 4yo daughter’s boyfriend. Also, bacon.
Tuesday 6 April 2010, 8:25 PM

4yo daughter just informed us that 7yo son is “pushing my buttons!” Wonder where she learned that.
Saturday 3 April 2010, 6:24 PM

And, stepping back just a bit further, my all-time favorite quote, from when she was 3…

The Smiths on @TheCurrent. 3yo daughter, hearing Morrissey’s crooning, asks: “Is he crying?” Yeah. Pretty much.
Friday 19 February 2010, 4:54 PM

Tomorrow is also my son’s 8th birthday (yep, same day). He’s not quite as quotable as his little sister, but he did have one absolute gem (for me, at least) this year…

7yo son: Is XBOX Nintendo or Sega?
Me: Neither… it’s Microsoft.
Him: Microsoft?! What’s that?
Thursday 27 January 2011, 7:50 PM

Happy birthday guys!

The quest for audiophile headphones

Although I’m a musician with (I think) a fairly good ear, I’ve spent most of my life listening to music on cheap equipment, mostly because I couldn’t bring myself to do something so foolish as throw $200 at a pair of headphones. But the more I produce my own music and strive for sonic perfection, the more incongruous it becomes that I’m mastering my recordings on a pair of $20 Sony earbuds. (Although I have to say, they’re pretty decent for $20 earbuds… good enough that I own three pairs of them!)

Anyway, the stars aligned this month for me to finally take the plunge and foolishly throw that $200 at a pair of headphones. Initially I succumbed to both my impulsive nature and a fair bit of effective marketing and bought a pair of Beats by Dr. Dre Solo HD headphones for $200 at the Apple Store. Although I was impressed with some of the details of the product, it wasn’t long before I realized that more care had been put into the packaging and trivial aspects like a detachable red cord than into what really matters: a balanced sound and comfortable design. Put simply, the things sounded muddy and gave me a splitting headache after 20 minutes of use. Seeing a parade of music industry tools on American Idol gratuitously sporting Beats headphones (among other branded accessories like baseball caps) was the nail in the coffin.

Fortunately, the Apple Store has a good return policy, and a week after buying them I had brought them back for a full refund. (No restocking fee!) And now I had $200 burning a hole in my pocket again. But this time I decided to do my research. I decided to go with Sennheiser, and I studied their various offerings both on their own website and on Amazon.

Now is a good time to buy Sennheiser headphones on Amazon. They’ve recently updated their product line, and Amazon seems to have ample inventory of the previous generation, which they’re selling at massive discounts. I settled on the HD555 audiophile headphones, as a nice balance between quality and price. Only $85!

But, after I placed my order, I began to discover how little I know about audiophile headphones. The HD555s have open cans, meaning there’s an outer grille rather than a solid enclosure, which allows air in to help the speakers vibrate, but therefore it also lets sound in… and out. These are not good headphones for private listening in a public place, or for drowning out external noises. So I began exploring other options. I found that Amazon also offered the closed-can Sennheiser HD448s for $100. Since I was already $115 ahead on the deal, I decided to go ahead and order both. I figured I’d try them both out, see which ones I liked best, and return the others.

They arrived today, and it didn’t take long to make my decision. I expected… no, hoped… that I would prefer the closed HD448s, because I prefer the idea of closed cans. But in comparing them I discovered just how many other factors are in play.

From the moment of opening the package, it’s clear that the HD555s are higher-end than the HD448s. The HD555s come in a cleverly designed box that opens easily by pulling a tab at the top. The HD448s are packaged in the dreaded plastic “blister pack”… the kind of packaging that can only be opened by utterly destroying it, often slicing your fingers on the razor-sharp edges that such destruction inevitably produces.

The difference in build quality between the HD555s and the HD448s is almost as immediately apparent. While both are made of plastic, the HD555s feel solid, whereas the HD448s feel like they’ll shatter into a thousand brittle pieces if you look at them too intently. The HD555s have a thick, solid cord, and the HD448s have a thin, flimsy one. Most critically, the earpiece and headband cushions on the HD555s are velour. (I had read that in a review but didn’t believe it until I saw it.) Contrast that with the shockingly thin plastic film wrapping on the foam cushions of the HD448s. I owned headphones with cushions made of this material as a kid, and all I remember about them is how quickly this film dried out, cracked and flaked off all over everything, exposing the foam rubber underneath, which itself quickly began to break off.

Another big difference in the design of these two sets is how the earpieces cover your ears. A major problem I had with the Beats was that they didn’t cover the entire ear… they pressed against the ear, which provided a nice seal to block outside noise, but it caused even more pressure on my ears (and specifically, pressed my ears against the frames of my glasses) in a way that exacerbated the headache situation. The HD448s have a similar on-ear design, whereas the earpieces of the HD555s are big enough to go completely around even my big ears, providing greater comfort. (Honestly, though, even the HD555s are proving to create some discomfort after an hour-plus of wear, but I suspect that will improve after they’re broken in a bit.)

Oh, wait… I haven’t even compared the sound between the two sets yet. I’ll give the HD448s credit… they don’t sound terrible. In fact, they sound pretty decent. But again, there’s no comparison. Side by side with the HD555s, the HD448s have a thin, flat sound, with a muddy midrange and poor stereo separation. The HD555s by comparison are sparkling with detail and present an astounding stereo soundscape.

In all, it took me more time to write this blog post than it did to compare the two headphones and make an unambiguous decision as to which set I would keep. As I write this, the HD555s are on my head, and the HD448s are already packaged up for return shipment to Amazon.

Before I go, I should note that there’s a lot of talk online comparing the HD555s (the bottom end of Sennheiser’s audiophile line) with the considerably more expensive HD595s. Some people claim that by partially disassembling the HD555s and removing an adhesive foam strip inside each can, you can dramatically improve their bass response, effectively turning them into HD595s. (There’s even a video guide to the modification.) Others respond that the foam strip is not in there to simply “cripple” the sound of the cheaper headphones (which use the same drivers as their more expensive cousins), but that it in fact protects the cones from rattling against the grille on the outside of the cans. Personally, I think the HD555s sound great as they are, though I admit I haven’t heard the HD595s for a comparison. But I refuse to believe Sennheiser would only put the foam in to make these sound worse so they can sell them at a cheaper price. There’s an engineering reason for the foam. Leave it in.

Private Eyes are watching you!

I don’t normally post links to music videos on this blog… that’s typically reserved for one of my other blogs. But… well… any way you slice it, Hall and Oates are not prog rock, so it just didn’t fit.

But I got this video in my head (yes, I can get a video in my head) and I felt compelled to share it. It’s a cool song, and a humorously low-budget video, but the main reason I remember this video so well and love it so much is that it’s intricately woven into the fabric of my early childhood memories. This song was huge right when we first got MTV in 1982, and it was on heavy rotation. I was at a critical age—8 years old—where a lot of things seem to start to gel in your mind. You understand the world in new ways… your horizons expand… and those things you enjoy most at that time seem to leave a permanent impression on who you are.

For me, in 1982, it was MTV and Atari. So hearing this song—and, even more, seeing its video—triggers a flood of memories. Maybe it does for you too. Maybe not. Anyway, enjoy…

There are so many things I remember vividly about this video. Daryl Hall’s green jacket. The trench coats. John Oates and his bug eyes. The white flashes when the hand claps come in. The list of minute details permanently stored in my brain goes on.

But there is no way I can let this pass without commenting on the one thing that drives me mad: that the video of the drummer’s hands at the beginning is “off.” He’s shown hitting the snare drum when you hear the bass drum. I’m not sure if that was a deliberate joke or if the director of the video was just too clueless and/or lazy and/or in a big damn hurry to get the video finished before they burned through the $200 budget.

Anyway, this was something I was acutely aware of and bothered by as an 8 year old, watching this video. At the time I had a tendency to point out any minuscule error anyone around me made, as if the universe assigned me the job of trying to fix all of the small faults within it. So, yes… oh yes.. I noticed this.