Feast your eyes, dear readers, on the dreadful scene reproduced above, and let the full horror sink in. Oh so wrong, oh so wrong on so many levels.

Many of the principle ills of this vacuous age are shamefully on display here.

Words escape me.

And the worst of it is, I am related to the two objects on the back row, right side.

Almost certainly a female was behind the organising of this atrocity.

Nuff said.

Being an audio engineer, I’m fussy about ear-gear. Take the headphones I use for monitoring on my 24-track digital recorder. I’ve been using them for years, and I treat them with kid gloves because you can’t get ‘em anymore. Imagine my horror when a few years back I was doing this gig recording a bunch of old biddies singing some a cappella crap, and some idjit tripped over the cable and yanked them off my noddle, breaking them in the process. O Lordy, did I let forth a mighty string of ancient Hebrew imprecations that day. Well, I knew from bitter experience that just going out and buying some more headphones was not going to do it, so I forced the culprit to scour the Japanese equivalent of eBay and procure some replacements. Boy, was I happy to get those puppies!

See, it’s like this. Audio is a very personal thing. Some folks like it bassy, some like it shrill, but I strongly suspect that the majority of slack-jawed apes who don’t know jack about music wouldn’t notice the difference no matter what was clapped onto their greasy heads.

Not me, though. And therein lies the problem. Buying new earwear is very difficult, since there is no real way to assess beforehand if a pair of headphones are going to match up to my exacting criteria.

Yeah, yeah, you can try out cans in some stores, but this never really works since the store is usually very noisy and the muzak piped through is usually not something you’re used to.

But, you cry, what about the technical specifications? Aha! Good try, kind madam, but alas, this is, to all intents and purposes, useless. You can compare frequency responses and impedance till you’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t translate to what the damn things actually sound like. Two pairs of headphones with identical specs will sound different due to a whole host of factors such as materials, construction, fit, etc.

Well then, how about going online and grabbing yourself a fistful of reviews? No sir! Wrong again! For one, human beans have this annoying habit of talking up their recent purchases as a kind of justification. I mean, if you’ve just forked over $300 for a set of earphones and they turn out to be decidedly average or even indistinguishable from a cheaper model, you’re not going to trump your dumbarsed failure to the world, are you? No, you’re going to go online and spout forth about how great they are.

Secondly, how does one review sound? It’s notoriously difficult to describe in words how a pair of speakers sound. Even if you get around the audio-geek terminology, there’s still the fact that the description is going to be meaningless unless you are au fait with the other models used as comparison.

Price! You can judge how good they are by the price, right? Wrong! Exhaustive research in this area (me wasting money on multiple sets of unusable headphones) reveals that just because a pair cost more than another pair doesn’t mean that you are going to like the sound more.

So, it ll boils down to potluck, really.

Take the case of the iPod. Well, not the case, but the earphones. I’d been a staunch advocate of the stock buds over the last three years or so. They sounded alright to me, so why change them? True, when you’re on a noisy train it’s kind of difficult to make anything out without cranking the things up to ear-damaging levels of volume, and true, they are somewhat lacking in the bass department, but hey, if you’ve never heard any others, they’re fine.

Let’s take a trip back to last December. I saunter into Osaka’s Apple store and, feeling a little down, make a rash impulse buy of some new earphones. I check reviews on the ‘net on my cellphone, and stare at the technical specs on the back, knowing full well that they mean nowt, but I still go ahead and get ‘em. Hell, it’s only $50 - why not? And bugger me if these little gems don’t turn out to be just wonderful right out of the box!

Here they are now, the cheeky little German Sennheiser CX300’s…

Great sounds - good bass, but still nice ‘n’ sharp up top, and what’s more these beasts are powerful - I can hear every detail of the music on a crowded train with the volume only at around 20%. They shut out a fair bit of the background noise, too.

The only drawback being the ‘slimy‘ feel of the cables, which seem to amplify and conduct any wind or even rustling against clothes. Not show-stopping faults, though.

Well, I’d finally lucked out on the audio front. And of course I should’ve stopped there, happy as I was with the sound of the new earphones. But oh no, like a couple halfhead I was seduced by the talk of the nerds on the web, who mutter things like, ‘If you’re going to be spending $400 on an iPod, why would you then only spend a trifle on the part that matters, the part that actually translates those tunes into sounds for your listening pleasure?‘

So of I went and bought a pair of Audio Technica ATH-CK7’s for $100, universally hailed on the Interweb as high-class earphones with superlative performance….

And how are they? Shite! The moment I plugged them in I knew I had made an egregious error and that the folks on the net were deaf fools to boot. The thing that struck me immediately was the lack of power - a very weedy output requiring the volume to be cranked right up. Next, the bass. Where was it? Practically non-existent! Even worse, the flat tinny treble added a nasty sibilance to everything - yuck!

Well, knowing that it is sometimes just a matter of getting used to things, I gave them a good go for a couple of days, but they were nowhere near as good as the CX300’s, which cost half the price. Doh!

Which just goes to show that the folks on the net don’t know shite, unless perhaps they like their music thin, shrill and weedy.

And the moral of the tale? Caviar Empty, as the Romans used to say, but I prefer Confucius‘ more specific ‘The wise man pays no mind to tin-eared knobs who try to get you to buy the same crappy overpriced headphones as they’ve got.’