Sony MDRZX310... Discovering Headphones

I have listened to portable audio for decades. From cassette to portable CD to iPod to my phone which is my now choice for music. In those many years I have always used earphones. I looked at headphones as large bulky items.

Being a nerd and father of four who are also tech fans, I have boxes of cables, spares and all things geeky and in said box has been a pair of Sony headphones for a while. They must have been cast offs from one of my children.

I don’t know why, but a few days ago I dug them out and decided to give them a try. They are a pair of Sony headphones, which cleverly fold in to themselves for easier travelling I suppose. I think they are model MDRZX310. Looking around they aren’t the most expensive pair, nor particularly large compared to other 'over the head' headphones.

So I plugged them in to my Motorola Moto Z Play and fired up my music player, which is full of acid house, early rave, jungle and tech house. I am a huge fan of late 80s to mid 90s underground house.

What a difference to small in-ear devices. These Sonys fit comfortably over my ears, with soft cushioned pads and have an adjustable band. But the biggest difference is sound quality which is not surprising considering the speakers inside each ear are 30mm drivers, but the bass that booms out of them is insane. It provides a whole new audio experience. Tracks I have listened to for years, now take on a completely different sound.

The 10-24,000 hertz range offers an excellent all round sound, deep bass balanced and rich tones balance perfectly.

The cord is of a decent length and is very thick. The 3.5mm jack plug is very good quality and L shaped which I prefer for extra strength and less strain on the end as well as the socket it plugs in to.

Old Skool legends such as Acen, LFO, Armando, Altern 8, 2 Bad Mice, Origin Unknown and SL2 have never sounded so good. Deep basslines rumbled even more, and that 303 sound squelched amazingly.

Modern tech house from Clarke & East, John Summit, Chris Lake and Block & Crown just purred along.

And jumping in to The Prodigy discography made my ears bounce with joy covering older styles such as ‘The Experience’ album all the way through to modern albums ‘Invaders Must Die and ‘No Tourists’ which took on a whole new life.

I listen to a lot of music, sometimes up to 10 hours a day and these new (to me) style of headphones are going to make a huge difference.

I have always gone with in-ear buds because of true portability. You can just tuck them in to any pocket. Something like these Sony need more space or to worn around the neck when not in use, but at least you are less likely to mislay them.

The downside of the Sony headphones is they do not have a mic, so cannot be used as a handsfree kit on my phone, so I may look at a newer pair that do.

It seems I have been missing out of superior sound quality for the sake of portability and after nearly 30 years of portable music I may have just stepped up my quality.

It may seem an odd thing for someone to finally discover, especially someone so music orientated for so many years, but large headphones have just been something I avoided and it became a habit.

Written by Simon Royal. Follow me at twitter.com/simonroyal

Revitalizing a Sony VAIO with Xubuntu 14.04.

Yesterday I rescued a Sony VAIO VGN-N31S/W from a life of Windows Vista and from being recycled as e-waste. It has a dodgy PSU cable (held together with green/yellow electrical tape) and one missing key-top on the letter O. The previous owner has put a bit of tape over it, so it still kind of works, though a little awkward to press. I'm hoping I might be able to pick up a cheap replacement key or replacement keyboard.

The battery is totally dead, and I had to set up the time/date and other settings in the BIOS. It's got a 1.66ghz Core 2 Duo CPU, Intel 950 onboard graphics (up to 256MB shared memory), a 320GB Seagate hard drive and a DVD writer. This machine still has it's original 1GB of RAM - 2x 512MB DDR2 sticks. It came to me in it's original box and has all it's manuals too. I even found the original receipt tucked inside the box, this laptop cost £599.99 in 2007, when it was new!

On boot up I discovered it had a messed up Windows Vista Premium install, so that had to go! I decided to install Xubuntu 14.04 on it, since it would run better on it's current 1GB RAM than Mint Cinnamon, which is my main distro of choice. At first I couldn't work out why it would not boot from my USB stick, despite already setting it to boot to USB in Boot Settings. Then I discovered there's another setting called "External Device Boot" that needs to be enabled, and that's in another section of the BIOS. Once the live disk had booted, the improved installer had Xubuntu installed in around 10-15 minutes. Everything went very smoothly and as far as I can tell right now, all the hardware works out-the-box. Wi-fi works and it suspends and resumes perfectly, which is not too surprising I suppose since this Intel chipset is well supported in Linux.

I have installed Cairo Dock, and my usual selection of favourite apps (gtkvncviewer, Audex, easyMp3gain-gtk, Filezilla etc) and a nice wallpaper that I have forgotten where I found. I did a Google Image search for "sunset wallpaper" and Large images in Search Tools.

Xubuntu runs really smoothly as usual, even on just 1GB RAM, though I still intend to replace the two 512MB sticks with 2x 1GB to max out the RAM. This is the first Sony VAIO I have ever owned and it feels fairly light compared to my Dell D520 and HP nc6320 laptops and has a bigger hard drive too, though the Dell and HP can both take 4GB RAM. It's also the first laptop I have owned that has an Express Card slot. I'm quite pleased it, once the RAM has been upgraded, keyboard repaired/swapped and the power lead fixed this should be a fairly decent and usable laptop.

Update 10/06/2014: Despite every site I have been to saying that 2GB is the maximum RAM this laptop would take, I have bought a 2GB DDR2 stick of RAM, for £10 which isn't bad at all, along with one of the original 512MB sticks, the VAIO is running just fine, more smoothly than with just 1GB RAM. I have also bought a replacement PSU too, as it's too tricky to try repair the original.