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Sennheiser PX 100 Headphones Review

There’s a ton of headphone/earphone/canalphone/earbud options out on the market and it can be hard to filter through the crap and find headphones that perform well while keeping aesthetics in mind. The white earbuds that come with Ipods have become a staple on college campuses where they help complete that all important hipster look, but they don’t do much for the music you’re listening to.

A few years ago I came across the Koss SportaPro headphones and was very impressed with their sound and comfort level. I handed those down to the wife to work out with and looked for another pair to use at work (programming requires good tunes). My requirements weren’t too strict:

  • Reasonably priced (under $50)
  • Good sound quality
  • On ear pads to allow in ambient noise (to avoid startling taps on the shoulder)
  • Comfortable and easy to put on and remove

These few parameters helped eliminate a lot of products. I eventually ended up looking at the Sennheiser PX 100’s, another pair of SportaPro’s, and Grado SR60’s (pricier and bulkier than I wanted). This review at Dan’s Data finally sold me on the Sennheisers and I couldn’t be happier.

In the 2-3 years I’ve had the PX 100’s I estimate I’ve put 1500-2000 hours of music through them. The best way to describe how they sound is that they don’t sound like headphones. They’re clear and fairly detailed without being fatiguing in the high end and quite possibly pump out the perfect amount of bass. I highly recommend the Sennheiser PX 100’s if you are looking for a good moderately priced pair of cans.

Sennheiser PX 100 at Amazon

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Geeky Weekly Stats

The Blarg announced his number of visits a while back and I thought I’d take a look at some of my stats. I’ve been using Google Analytics for a while and I’ve got data back to Sept 2006. I started my blog in Oct 2005, but traffic would have been negligible that first year, maybe add 5% onto these numbers. So where do I stand?

  • Unique Visitors: 47,295
  • Visits: 61,400
  • Pageviews: 102,244

Not bad. My WordPress plugins make up the majority of my traffic, about 55% of the page views. A lot of those are single visit bounces, probably because I don’t have my sidebar up on individual pages; might be a good thing to change. A couple other interesting factoids:

  • About 98% of visitors have a screen resolution larger than 800×600
  • 58.5% were using Firefox vs 31% for IE

I’ve been wanting to do a redesign and it might be safe to finally push out towards 900-1000 pixel wide layouts. Still have to take into account that people don’t run their browsers maximized all the time.

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HD-DVD dead, Blu-ray prices up

With the competition eliminated it seems Blu-ray player prices are creeping up. I’m puzzled about the current player pricing which makes the PS3 a better option than the cheapest standalone player. Hopefully prices will come down as manufacturers finalize on the 2.0 specification and start pumping out more units. In the meantime if you need a nice upconverting DVD player for your standard definition DVDs, grab a Toshiba HD-DVD player on the cheap, which cost about the same as any other upconverting DVD player with HDMI. I’m saving up credit card rewards to cash in for gift cards when prices are a little more palatable.

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Google GrandCentral Beta First Look

Google has their GrandCentral service in beta right now and I signed up to find out more about it. GrandCentral is a telephony service that let’s you route all your phone calls coming in and going out through a single phone number. Google provides you with a phone number and you link your phone numbers like cell, home and work to it. So what does GrandCentral actually do?

First off it let’s people call you at a single number. When your GrandCentral number gets called, all the numbers you link to it ring (or however you configure it). That makes giving out your number easier since someone will be able to get a hold of you from a single number. This is also nice if you have numbers that can’t be ported like home and work, just give out your Grand Central number. You can initiate calls from your browser: select the person you want to call and which of your phones you want to use. You get a call from your GrandCentral number, you pick up and then it calls whoever you chose.

At home and don’t want to use cell minutes? Answer your home phone. There is also the possibility of putting your Grand Central number in your “Fave 5” if your cell provider offers that service. Another cool feature is being able to switch between your phones without interrupting calls. Just hit *, your other phones will ring, answer the phone you want to transfer to and hang up the other one. Could be useful if you are having a conversation on your cell and arrive home or you have to leave and want to seamlessly switch to your cell.

There’s a few other cool features. You can screen calls like you could with old school answering machines: you hit 3 to pick up and listen as the caller leaves a message and then hit * to jump in. You can record conversations (both parties get notified) and forward or playback messages from your browser or by calling your Grand Central number.

The system is pretty customizable too. You can set how callers get screened based on if they are unknown or if they are in your address book. Have unknown callers go straight to voice mail and let them leave a message, but let your friends get right through. You can create groups and decide which phones ring for each one. You can record personalized greetings or rings for specific people and groups; friends could get a casual greeting, but business contacts get a more formal greeting.

Overall I think GrandCentral is a great idea if you actually need it. If you’ve just got a cell phone it might not be too useful. If you are juggling a cell, home and work it could be a pretty cool tool to have. Everything is free right now, but I think the plan is to charge for outgoing calls which might affect how appealing it is for personal use.

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