Music Thread: Page 145 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One More in the Tolly

Music Thread

Claudius

MistaT wrote:
Kingsland, you catch this one? Love it...beat reminds me of Gangstarr.

One of my favorite rap albums in the past year. Catch Palmolive and Fake Names on the same album.
Was also playing the Paak record Malibu yesterday. Had forgotten how good that was.

mdgoonah41

the new tame impala is pretty solid, but not nearly as good as currents, imo

Asterix

Did anyone catch the Firefight concert from Sydney yesterday? My daughter and her boyfriend went and we watched a lot of it on telly. It featured a really eclectic line up of local acts and whoever was around - Queen, Alice Cooper, John Farnham and Olivia Newton John, Icehouse, Peking Duk, Amy Shark, Hilltop Hoods, k.d. lang, Baker Boy, Grinspoon.

Queen played their set from Live Aid and were amazing - they had played their own gig the night before and I'm kicking myself for not going. Adam Lambert can really sing.

Hilltop Hoods and Grinspoon were excellent too, and Alice Cooper had the crowd eating out of his hand. Not bad for 72 years old. My 21 year old daughter said it was one of the coolest and weirdest experiences of her concert going life being in the middle of the mosh for "some bloke called Alice Cooper".

The audience was like that though - young uns and old uns there to see their favourites, and hearing bands they'd never otherwise listen to.

Segway

mdgoonah41 wrote:
the new tame impala is pretty solid, but not nearly as good as currents, imo

It's more than pretty solid imo. It's great. Give it another listen. It needs high volume.

Segway

Claudius wrote:
MistaT wrote:
Kingsland, you catch this one? Love it...beat reminds me of Gangstarr.

One of my favorite rap albums in the past year. Catch Palmolive and Fake Names on the same album.
Was also playing the Paak record Malibu yesterday. Had forgotten how good that was.

One of my favourite albums of the last few years. It's just so incredibly nice and easy to listen to.

Klaus

Rest in peace the Real McCoy.

Claudius

Busta Rhymes arrives in radio studio and told to perform his old tracks. Great medley

flobaba

O G MC

Asterix

Introduced my daughter to Skyrim last night - my goodness the music in that game is tremendous. If you're looking for good relaxation / meditation music it's pretty damn good.

MistaT

Perhaps a call for chill music is needed?

Most people know Brian Eno's Music for Airport, but if you don't it's worth a listen. Don't expect too much (in terms of sound) and just let it all hang. One of the forefront ambient albums...

Big Willie

Claudius wrote:
Busta Rhymes arrives in radio studio and told to perform his old tracks. Great medley

That was some medley. Busta's voice is so unique and sounds exactly as it does on his tracks.

Shame they never included break ya neck though.

Claudius

I’ve been listening to Jay Electronica’s album for a few days now. This is the antidote. Well worth the wait.
He lays perfect beats throughout this masterpiece and I think this and his thoughtfulness ignites Jay Z who basically collaborates on the majority of the album. Both men are in fine form. You feel like you’ve lost J from 10 to 20 years ago and then he’s dropping couplets like
“In the world of no justice and black ladies in the back of buses / I’m the immaculate conception of rappers-slash-hustlers” or
“ My ancestors took old food, made soul food /Jim Crow's a troll too, he stole the soul music / That's the blood that goes through me, so you assuming / I could never sell my soul, they sold their soul to me / Peaceful teaching of Rumi, but don't confuse me.”

And JE responds on the never ending story: “ If you want to be a master in life, you must submit to a master / I was born to lock horns with the Devil at the brink of the hereafter”

Album is a joy.

jones

Better to continue in this thread

Quincy Abeyie wrote:
Noise cancelling headphones are a must for me when working at home with other people present. WH-1000XM3 is supposed to be the best one I think, but pretty pricey. I just have an old wired QC25, I still think they work decently well.

Mate I'm sorry but your headphone recommendation (tbf you didn't really recommend them) are horrible. The WH-1000 (I heard just the XM4, doubt XM3 sounds better) has the resolution of headphones that should cost around 100 and the QC25 are -I wrote something mean here before I realised you own them 😆- err not good. Bose in general is a lifestyle company barely above stuff like Monster Beats By Dre etc.

The only time I'd ever recommend active noise cancellation headphones is for people who are on a plane several times a week, and even then it's not a given. It's basically voodoo for everyone else because you need a consistent noise source for them to work as advertised otherwise they tend to distort. Most good cans have decent enough passive NC (almost every in ear monitors does unless you have freak ears) and paying a premium so I can have a builtin equaliser to frame my audio input so I don't realise the pitiful level of detail doesn't make any sense to me. Almost all ANC phones I ever tried also have far too much and muddy bass and poor or no mids too.

If you do indeed fly a lot and must have ANC I'd try the beyerdynamic Lagoon, although beyerdynamic themselves have much better cans in the same price region if you pass on the ANC.

KingslandBarge

Life outlook changed forever after using Bose Quite Comfort noise-cancelling headphones on flights. I can no longer find myself relaxed enough to sleep on planes anyway, but at least I get substantial tranquility and a bit of dosing. Agree with Jones though, that they aren't trendsetters but more of a middling best seller.

Sennheiser probably has some noise cancelling headphones that best Jabra at the moment as well. Jabras are great value for money though. I find the price points massively stretched in the market, and Jabra seems to go the furthest with the least.

jones

Quincy Abeyie wrote:
You're right in assuming that I don't know much about audio quality, but I always make very informed choices when I buy things I consider expensive, reading a lot about the different products. I got a good Black Friday deal for the QC25, and they were already an old model when I bought them. ANC is certainly not only for people who fly a lot, it works equally well when you're on a bus or on a train. Also having lived in a small apartment where there's constantly people watching TV or playing video games while I sit on my computer in the same room, the volume I have to put my music on to not be annoyed is simply too high without ANC. I'm aware that Bose doesn't have very good audio, but their ANC is good , although less so now that others have started making better ones. Beyerdynamic Lagoon is one of the products I checked out, and from what I could gather they have good audio quality, but are less comfortable and have worse ANC than both Sony and Bose. And like Qwiss and you both said:

Qwiss! wrote:
The funny thing is 90% of people with expensive headphones are still listening to shitty compressed audio anyway.

Spotify is what I use to listen to music, streaming at 320 kbps. When I download TV shows and movies I don't bother downloading the biggest files, so the audio is compressed there as well. Other than that I use it for PS4, video chat and YouTube. None of those things require better sound quality for me, so comfort and noice cancelling is more important.

Also, the XM4 aren't even released yet.

I mean XM2. Sentence doesn't make sense the other way

Again sorry if I come off hostile but I get a nervous twitch under my eye reading about people buying Bose stuff. There's nothing wrong with not knowing or caring too much about audio quality but you're not making any sense - if you think ANC "works" well that means (unless you put on headphones and don't put on any audio) you're doing it for the audio experience. Sound is a pretty technical and complicated topic and I won't get into what roles noise reduction and distortion play when listening to music. Audio quality depends on good isolation from outside noise sources, and almost every manufacturer puts their money into the development of PNC headphones.
You simply have never tried good headphones/IEMs to be able to say you have to put the volume too high without ANC, either that or you have some Gareth Bale sized ears or suffer from hearing loss. I don't spend my life in a library and even in a noisy environment I'm perfectly able to listen to music on 60% or 70% volume. It's also possible your output impedance is too low, which means the headphones need more voltage than your device (ipod or smartphone) can give. It would be easy to tell you if thats the case but Bose is a dickhead brand and the only hifi producer in the world that does not publish its specs.

Regarding your music source 320kbps is in general plenty enough but I'm pretty sure Spotify upsamples its tracks. You could still get much much better sound using even cheapish headphones like ATH-M50 or Shure SE215 compared to the QC25 but if you really don't care if your music sounds like two farts echoing in a trashcan more power to you.

QuincyAbeyie

Again, I don't know what I'm talking about, but when learning about something I don't know anything about I like to get information from various sources. That's why I appreciate what you're telling me, but I'm also thinking that you make this sound pretty black and white, and that gets me wondering why different critics who also care about audio much more than me give different opinions than you on Bose's and Sony's ANC (and Lagoon's for that matter). Is there a correct and a wrong answer and most of them are wrong, or is it a matter of opinion?

Qwiss

The lesson here is unless you're actually an audiophile who understands all the details you shouldn't be buying €300 headphones

Jens

Qwiss! wrote:
The lesson here is unless you're actually an audiophile who understands all the details you shouldn't be buying €300 headphones

Pretty much. Whenever my amateur photographer friend tells me about his new lenses he just bought I think to myself well that's a massive waste of money. Maybe it is, maybe not I don't have the knowledge or the interest to give an opinion. Just like he looks at me like I have two heads when I talk about why tube amps are preferable to solid state when he can't hear a difference.

KingslandBarge

As a novice, WC tends to help me. For reference: https://thewirecutter.com/electronics/headphones/

jones

@Quincy
Audio is literally and figuratively a matter of perception. There are people that like the ridiculous amount of bass they get from Beats headphones even if it falsifies the actual audio because to them it feels good. There are also people who like pasta with ketchup. Neither is correct or wrong technically.

If you spend a lot of time listening to music however at some point you start to appreciate being able to listen to the music as close as it's to the work the artist created, realising fine detail that you can't hear on cheap or poor headphones. Similar to how if you have the choice you'd pick a TV with higher (if possible native) resolution, rather than some old 480p resolution TV that employs some 'vibrant' alteration or ambilight that some manufacturers would add to distract from the shitty picture. That's basically what happens when you use ANC, by design they have to employ an equaliser putting lipstick on a pig. Again a matter of opinion if you ask a Tory.

What's not a matter of opinion is that all serious manufacturers (Ultimate Ears, Westone, Stagediver, Grado, Denon, beyerdynamic, Shure etc) build their high end IEMs and over-ear headphones without ANC. That's for the 98% of the market with dynamic drivers (for high end IEMs balanced armature driven, those are impossible to build with ANC anyway), for the really, really high end magnetostatic or electrostatic headphones I'm pretty sure no one's ever tried to ruin one with an ANC.

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