Monster Turbines vs. Ultimate Ears Metro.Fi 170

You know, I have had the Metro Fi 170’s and the Monster Turbines for a few months now. You know what I have concluded so far?

The Metro Fi’s, at a third of the price, actually sound better than the Turbines. I really thought I would love the Turbines more but it is a very confusing earphone. The sound is very rich but the sound stage is smaller than the 170’s, and the clarity is not quite as good. The driver is also not as fast, and the treble is and bass detail is kind of drowned out in comparison. What it has instead is, I dunno… “body.” The sound is very colored, though not in a particularly bad way. It sounds great actually and the sound doesn’t hurt the ear after long listens, and lends well in certain genres like R&B, House, Chillout, Latin, and many types of Jazz. In other genres that I prefer to sound clean like Hard Rock or Acoustic it gives a certain “echo” to the sound which is not unwelcome.

But despite that I find that the clean but not thin sound of the Metro Fi’s on the whole sound better. The Turbines give a nice listening experience for House and similar types of genres but the 170s are great in every genre I’ve listened to them with and hold their own against the Turbines even in genres you’d think a bass heavy monster like the Turbines would own.

And actually speaking of bass, the 170’s have as much bass as the Turbines, only cleaner. Crazy. I don’t know, I’m very confused over the Turbines, I don’t know what to say. Common sense tells me it’s 3x the price and 3x better but in actuality I find the Metro Fi’s — and I’m talking the low end UE model here — are actually better overall.

The Anti Logitech

Logitech is a horrible company. They somehow succeeded by building a brand that is perceived as the Porsche of keyboards and mice, but the shoddy worksmanship of their peripherals betrays their true form.

I have an MX3200 desktop set and the keys feel so spongy, it’s like there was a mound of dirt beneath them that you squish every time you type, and it sticks so they pop back a little slowly. The effort needed to press the buttons is above what other keyboards require.

Their mice, all of which have been following the MX700/MX300 form factor for ages now, may be good for people with big hands who like to palm their mice, but for gaming using your fingers for precision is often the better method, but all these palm mice they churn out just don’t make the cut compared to an el-cheapo A4-Tech mouse that handles flawlessly at a third or sometimes even a fourth of the price. Let’s not even get into how often their batteries crap out for all their cordless mice, and I’ve owned quite a few of them.

Logitech is highly disappointing, I’ve been burned too many times buying their shoddy products. You could say I’m the fool for going back to them time and again, fooled by the brand name, but sometimes I just gotta learn.

Bruce Lee Bullshido

I made this post on the Sherdog forums on a discussion about Bruce Lee:

[b]So what? Are you saying that because Bruce Lee “inspired” more people to do martial arts, he can rightfully be called the Grandfather of MMA?

The sad things is, the evidence points to Bruce Lee inspiring people with his MOVIES and not his actual martial arts or rantings about martial arts.

Did anyone actually listen to his JKD musings? Apparently not, because when UFC 1 came along seems everyone was doing single style fighting and nobody was cross training.

In effect, he netted the same influence with his JKD philosophy as Dempsey did with his Tough Crosstraining Manual: NADA.

Everyone still thought that martial arts was about standup fighting with fancy kicks and going “Wataa!” Thanks no doubt to Bruce Lee’s movies that glorified this kind of fighting. And this is pretty much what everybody who got into martial arts because of Bruce Lee was thinking. I read the article on the frontpage a few days ago about Vera’s wife. She described herself as a “Bruce Lee-crazed tomboy begging her parents to enroll her into taekwondo” (or something to that effect.

How many people got inspired by Bruce Lee and enrolled into Brazilian Jiujitsu or Greco Roman Wrestling or Sambo? Probably none. They all went to the arts we like to sneer at with disdain as McDojo arts (Karate, Taekwondo, and various forms of Kungfu).

One dimensional as they were, the Gracies are the ones who opened up the gates to what MMA is like today, by proving in the actual spectacle of combat that standup would get demolished by grappling. That is what ultimately led to people crosstraining en masse to succeed in MMA.

It was putting together the different styles in ACTUAL COMBAT that people were able to see what worked, what didn’t, and what needed to be thrown away and to find out what to keep. Not all the theorizing and bullshido Bruce Lee did that never proved anything — again everyone still went back to TMAs and standup in the wake of Bruce Lee’s heyday. It wasn’t Bruce Lee’s JKD who got Mo Smith learning the ground game in order to take out Coleman and eventually become UFC HW Champ, it was actually fighting in real combat, with real stakes, that got him to realize the importance of being a true Mixed Martial Artist.

Bruce Lee is old news. He gets credit for increasing the public awareness and interest in martial arts in a way nobody else ever managed, but his actual success — or lack thereof — in actual practical martial arts will never go away no matter how much the diehard Bruce Nuthuggers wish for it. Theoretics only goes so far, you can’t swim unless you get into the water and get wet. You can’t really do martial arts unless you actually fight.[/b]

This is something I had always believed in. Bruce Lee is the Grandfater of the Martial Arts Movie, and perhaps the Grandfather of Bullshido, but it would be a stretch to really call him the Grandfather of MMA.

He had the right idea going — getting out of the style and learning what works — but his lack of actual practical combat experience and more importantly his emphasis on his Kung Fu Movies and his McDojo approach were what ultimately led to people doing nothing but using their interest in him to get into the McDojo TMAs that are scorned by real mixed martial artists and even regular martial artists.

We all know the wonderful site Bullshido.com and it is clear to me that Bruce Lee is the man most responsible for the rise of McDojo Martial Arts as we know it today, which we all love to call Bullshido.

Maybe if Bruce Lee put his money where his mouth was, he’d have a real airtight legacy. But as it is, while there will always be people who will consider him the best martial artist the world has ever known, there will also be a lot of us who see him as nothing more than a glorified movie actor.

Oomph Oomph on the Highway

I just installed a new car audio system onto my car today. After two and a half years, my Vios finally gets a sonic upgrade!

The new toys are:
Ryan Audio i60.4 amp
Pioneer TS-WX301 sub
Kicker K6.2 seperates

It took about 4 hours to install. What a headache! But the results are… staggering to say the least.

Although both the sub and amp are only rated at 150W RMS, they deliver an amazing oomph. I wouldn’t call it punchy… The Pioneer dies sound a bit on the muddy side… but I suppose that’s to be expected from a budget sub. It also hasn’t been broken in.

But the Kickers deliver a real punch! They are strong, clear, and really create a sound stage I hadn’t heard in my car before. I guess having separate tweeters isn’t just for show.

It just feels so refreshing to have an actual sound stage in the car now. I love it!

I think I need to tweak the sub a bit, though. It’s just that powerful. I’m the kid that goes for clarity over SPL so this is one of my projects to tweak this system.

Well, I’m gonna go cruising a bit with this setup for a while. Oh yeah!!

The DiNovo Mini

Since I’ve had a PC setup as a home theatre for quite some time now, I’ve been looking to find an elegant and practical input method for watching videos and otherwise working with the PC from the comfort of my bed.

The DiNovo Mini came out as a standout option over my wireless keyboard and mouse which was simply too big and too heavy to use for this purpose, and a wireless gamepad was simply not elegant or powerful enough. Other options I was thinking about was using my PocketPC via WiFi to do the controlling but it was a very clunky option at best — connectivity was not always good and the control features were not well-refined. The DiNovo Mini on the other hand looked like it would fit the bill.

Now that I have a DiNovo Mini things have changed. It does what it is supposed to do really well, and I am pretty happy with it. There are lots of reviews out there talking about the merits of the Mini and I will agree with pretty much everything that is said when it comes to its features and your ability to control your HTPC.

Thumb Typing is excellent, I am used to Blackberrys, Treos and PocketPCs with QWERTY so that was not a problem at all, although the device is wider than any QWERTY pad I’ve used so your thumbs will need to do some reaching. The Touchpad is not as good as a Synaptics touchpad on any laptop you’ll find out there but it is adequate. The rest of the button layouts are relatively well-thought of and it also has a light sensor like the HTC Universal to control the backlight of the keys. One thing about the keyboard is that it doesn’t have a “sticky shift” option — meaning that you have to hold the Shift key when you want to capitalize something, unlike in most handhelds where pressing the Shift key once will enable the next keystroke to be in shifted mode — this is a pretty useful option for thumb boards where you do not have multiple digits to hold a shift key and press another key down — but the DiNovo manages by providing two shift keys on each side, so one thumb can hold the Shift while the other presses the key to be shifted.

However there are a few things I would like to caution about the DiNovo Mini. For a keyboard that costs some $150US the build quality is very cheap. It has an extremely plasticky feel that does not exude quality, but rather feels like it will break at any time. The keys have a springy tactile feel that reminds you of a cheap plastic toy rather than a $150 quality thumb board. It’s worse that I have a point of comparison for it — they DiNovo Mini greatly resembles HTC’s awesome PocketPC the “Universal” which has the same QWERTY keyboard. Whereas the HTC Universal had a splendid QWERTY keyboard that oozed quality with its solid. but soft and rubbery keys and soft but solid tactile feedback, the Mini has springy, almost quivering keys with a cheap plastic feel.

This is extremely disappointing, but then considering all the overpriced, low-quality Logitech peripherals I have gone through is really just par for the course for Logitech.

For shame Logitech, you’d think with all that overpricing and virtual monopoly of the highend keyboard/mouse market you could put in some real quality in all of your products. Out of the 5 Logitech Purchases I had in the past two years only one had good quality — the Logitech PC Cordless Rumblepad 2 — the others had varying degrees of quality like the MX3200 Cordless Keyboard and Mouse which had stiff keys that couldn’t be pressed in unison (space bar + 2 WSAD keys doesn’t work, I know I use that in games all the time) and a mouse whose mouse wheel is practically impossible to press. Or the MX700 Mouse whose battery dies out after a few months?

Logitech has really been dropping the ball on quality and the DiNovo Mini is simply reinforcing my opinion that Logitech charges a premium for its products but cost-cuts to hell behind the scenes.

It’s not just the key quality that is cheap on the DiNovo — the engineering of the plastic cover for instance is not exact, there is a wobble when you close the lid and it doesn’t close precisely. More evidence of cheap, shoddy worksmanship, so much for the vaunted Swiss-engineering.

All in all though it fits a niche in my control scheme that I really needed. It feels like an HTC Universal being used to control my PC, and I loved my HTC Universal so that is not a bad thing.

iPhone 3G

I just sold my iPhone 2G and in one fell swoop picked up a new iPhone 3G Black 8GB. This phone is a lot lighter than the old one and fits the hand so much better. I love it! It was from Australia, but unfortunately it’s not openline.

I am going to QuickPwn it in a bit.

After that I’ll have to decide what to name him.

Farewell Sushi Mk. II, you were loved.