if connected

I have multiple headphones but none are right. Here’s what I want:

• Good sound quality.
• Quick and easy to put on and take off. So, they’re easy to use when out and about, and I want to take a quick music break to chat to someone in a shop or listen to a public announcement.
• Robust. No pieces to lose. Cables don’t tangle too easily and if they do are easy to unfurl. Survive a little light rain.
• Black, to match the bulk of my clothing.
• Sometimes I need sound isolation for example on the tube. At other times, I want to be able to hear what’s around me, for example when running.
• Don’t fall out of my ears.

So far, here’s how my various current headphones fair:

• Bose in-ear: Great sound. Ugly black and white cable. Don’t tangle. Feel robust but the rubber earpieces tend to fall off easily and keep threatening to go awol. Of the three sizes of rubber provided, none fit my ears well. The small ones are the best, but even with those the headphones tend to fall out of my ears if I move around.
• Apple iPod/iPhone: Poor base sound but a good ear fit. Mic on the iPhone cable is in a good place. Don’t fall out. White, so shouts loudly against my clothing. Tangle easily. I’ve managed to lose them! No sound isolation.
• Sennheiser sport: Even louder green. Don’t fall out but tangle easily. Claim water resistance and good so far. Average sound quality and the earpiece feels uncomfortable after more than 30m or so. Ok for running and doing house chores but not much else.
• Shure: Great sound quality. Cable is bulky both to store and while wearing. The sound isolating rubber earpieces that best fit my ears take 10 seconds to put in which gets annoying. If I don’t take the time, the fit isn’t right, and the bass sounds vanish. The numerous other earpieces — including non-sound isolating ones — that Shure bundles don’t fit my ears. Others report the plastic cables wear and break but it’s not happened to me yet.
• Freebies with my last laptop: Goodish sound isolation. Quick to put on/off, and stay in. Do tangle. Sound quality OK for voice so I tend to use these for listening to podcasts when out.

I used to have a pair of Sony over the ear headphones with retractable cables that had a great sound, didn’t tangle and didn’t fall off. But they broke, which is always the trouble with any gadgets that have moving parts.

Suggestions?

Back from two weeks on leave from the office. I had a pile of books I wanted to read, websites to build, blog posts to write. But family and friends filled the time almost completely. This is not a particular bad thing, but!

I’ve spent much of today musing about the trade-offs we make to save us time. I’m hosting this blog on wordpress.com rather than self-hosting. Why? I’m choosing to focus on writing rather than keeping the server patched and up to date. I’m ceding some control over look/feel for example, in return for time saving. Blog software and other content management tools do the same, why self-host WordPress rather than building the site from scratch in PHP, Rails or Drupal or whatever? It’s quicker.

Elsewhere, I’ve been using Mac OS more and more. Why? Because I spend less time patching it with software updates, fixing things that break, and it starts up, shuts down, and goes in and out of sleep fast. The downside is that there’s less software available for it and much less legal hardware I can run it on. Sure I could grab a MSI netbook and put OS X on it, but to my mind that defeats the point. If I want to spend time tinkering I may as well run Linux on my main machine.

This applies right across many areas. Why do people buy music on iTunes? It’s not cheap compared to retailed CDs now. The music is lower quality and most has DRM that restricts what devices can play it back. However, iTunes is quick and easy to use. It’s faster than visiting a shop or waiting for a CD to arrive from Amazon. People trade off sound quality and freedom for speed and save time.

Why do people write so much about other trade-offs — money/quality/size/weight/battery/features — but not time?