Looking for good portable headphones?

[The Fishing Geek]

The KSC35's from Koss have been out of production for awhile, but recently have been re-released at the Koss website. While out of production, these $30 headphones sold for upwards of $100 on eBay due to their exceptional sound.

I ordered a pair of these babies last Friday for my MP3 CD player, to replace the earbuds it came with. I just got them today, and they are WOW! For a small set of earphones they have really great sound. While I don't think that I would have spent $100 on them, they are a fantastic value, and I highly recommend them.

[1pump]

Now that you mention it, I need to look into a portable CD/MP3 player that I can use in the trucks at work, which have AM/FM cassette decks. Are the "car kits" still available for these? My (ex) wife had one for her Walkman and it actually sounded pretty decent.
What's the advantage of burning MP3's vs. CD's? Is it just the amount of storage on the disk? [img]graemlins/dork.gif[/img]

[Miss B Haven]

Do they work on a VHF running at 2200 rpms on a rough ocean? :whazzup:
If so- I'm in!

Ps - one thing I miss on my Kenwood VHF's (as good as they are) is the speaker in mike that my Std. Horizen had. Having the speaker close to your ear has a lot to be said for it!

[The Fishing Geek]

There should be car kits for those, otherwise buying a car adapter and a cassette adapter separately isn't that expensive.

I have encoded my entire CD collection into mp3 format on my desktop PC at twice the bitrate of the average mp3 (average being 128kbits/sec) for improved sound quality. MP3 encoding reduces the size of the original file greatly through taking out the frequencies that the human ear does not readily hear.

Can you hear the difference between a standard audio CD and an mp3 encoded at an average bitrate? Yeah, but for applications like portable players or computer speakers it really isn't an issue. While I am limited to roughly 74 minutes of audio on a normal CD, I can get roughly 5 hours of music on an MP3 CD, and twice that if I encode at 128kbits/sec. At 128k, figure file sizes roughly a megabyte for every minute of music, so that would be more than 10 hours of music on a 650 megabyte CD. Makes for quite a large collection of music to listen to, all on that one CD.

Not all CD players can play mp3 discs. They have to specifically have a hardware mp3 decoder built in to play mp3's back. Computers use software mp3 decoders. Popular Windows decoders include WinAmp, Sonique, and Windows Media Player (all free). There are many mp3 encoders for Windows; however, most of them are not free. I'm a Linux guy, so I've got a lot of free choices. :smile:

It is possible to burn regular audio CDs from mp3s; however, the audio quality will be no better than the source mp3, as you have already taken out the highest highs and lowest lows.

[sinker]

I've got a set of Sony wireless headphones.
Sound pretty sweet.
Run on an FM frequency so they go through walls and everything. I can work out in the yard and listen to mp3's off my computer in the house.
The base unit also has composite inputs so I can hook them up to the dvd player for watching movies in the middle of the night without waking the whole house out.

[sinker]

DOH!!!

just realized what you mean by portable. [img]graemlins/1zhelp.gif[/img]

Guess I need some sleep. [img]graemlins/stupid.gif[/img]

[1pump]

Thanx, Geek. I know a lot of newer players have MP3 capability, but I didn't know why somebody would burn an MP3 disk when it's just as easy to burn a regular CD, which is what I do, since my pickup's deck is strictly CD.
I am now enlightened.

[crabbait]

As for headphones for the noisy boat, I just read an article on noise cancelling headphones (Sony?). They looked sweet but are not cheap. Cancelled 80db as opposed to 15db on other noise cancelling headphones. They also make a wireless model.