Wednesday, May 9, 2012

May Life Rant

So, with the new semester in my final year of education, life has gotten very busy lately. Not to mention the numerous number of family birthdays I seem to celebrate over the last few weeks. While I seem to be coping fine with the demands of Aeronautical Engineering, there are indeed a couple of really, really crappy subjects I can barely cope with. One is Aerospace Materials, which on top of being as boring as History class, seems to be heck hard to understand and with very little(or crappy) learning material, it is gonna be very bad news for me. Another would be the Flight Dynamics subject, which is essentially about vibrations and other physics which translates to me as you guess, pure Greek.

Now on to musics, for this season I seem to have very few albums that I really want, save for Kotoko's new single and Kalafina's "To the beginning" (getting it much later though). For me those are probably the most catchy tunes for the season.

"to the beginning" CD cover, Kalafina looking as cool as usual.
Kotoko's "Unfinished" Accel World's ending song

As for anime I enjoyed most lately, I find myself looking forward to each episode of Jormungand lately, is it because such anime are so uncommon? The last one of the type I remembered enjoying was probably Black Lagoon. Jormungand itself really appeals to me with its guns, animation and cast without using any moe factor. If you hadn't watch it yet for whatever reason, I totally recommend this. 

Also, not too long ago, I managed to get more impressions on different headphones from different places,

Stereo ION-Orchard:
First time been there and I found the look of the store a much more welcoming one then the one over at Plaza Singapura. Good customer service makes this experience really wonderful. My friend and I initially wanted to try out the new Sennheiser Amperiors but for some reason the samples have been sent back to Sennheiser, theories anyone?

Denons D2000- wonderful, neutral, they get close to the tonality of my Eq to flat R2000T monitors at home. Bonus is that they are ridiculously easy to drive. Soundstage was incredible as expected to the semi-closed design of these wonderful headphones. They don't have that edgy treble like the Beyer DT880 250ohm but thats just my initial thoughts.

HD600- Wow, a truly neutral headphone indeed, very detailed. Not worth the MSRP when you see the MSRP of the likes of Beyerdynamic's DT880 and AKG's Q/K70X. Its nice to note that my Objective 2 with its low cost had perfectly no problems driving these though.

Sony store:
Went there to take a look at some of Sony's nice goods like cams and other stuff, I do wish they sell more of their AV products in store though. Here the staff left me alone(or everyone else for the matter), which gives me plenty of space for window shopping.

Sony XBA-4
Damn was I in for a disappointment, midrange performance was downright weird, it felt um, cartoony/grainy? It was fairly disappointing for a 4 driver BA, want a 4 driver BA done right? Westone has great examples.

Sony XBA-3 
Ah, here is where the party is at, still a little of that mids problem but it was done a lot better here, I suspect phasing? The IEM overall was detailed but I'm really unsure whether it can best my TF10s(still waiting for my upgrade cable from FiiO). Has nice treble and good sound imaging but again the mids suffer a bit.

Sony XBA-1
Skipped the XBA-2 impressions because I did not have much time with the XBA-2 but i thought the XBA-1s were pretty worth the asking price, fairly detailed with good sound image. As expected of a single Balanced Armature driver, bass performance is pretty much non-existent on these.

Looks like a pretty great headphone concept, from a initial impressions by someone online, they at least managed to make it sound better then Beats. Stylish and totally classy cool, I want.

I will round this off with pictures of last month's loot.

I'm a whole season late but Zettou Amano Habakiri is really a extremely addictive song. As a huge fan of Love Live! I really enjoyed this single like the rest, Mermaid Fiesta vol.2 was a joy to listen. The art book by Fujima-sensei was worth every bit of money I spent on, been trying to resist for quite a while before I bought it but the HNNNG factor was too great. Finally, I found a partner for Haruka on my pencil case....