Bass, beats, bus?

I bought new headphones the other day off Ebay. They're a pair those fancy Sennheiser CX500 in-ear headphones. You know the sort that drill all the way down into your earhole, essentially doubling as earplugs. It was interesting catching the train that first morning after a year of using the old ear-buds that came with my Creative Zen.

First there was the weird sensation of having tiny pieces of silicon squelching into your ears and forming a seal - well, in at least one ear. It seems my right ear hole is a teensy bit bigger than my left, probably from numerous operations that went on there a couple of years ago to stop it from going deaf. Of course that means that it's slightly uncomfortable sitting in my right ear, and no matter how far I jam it in (painfully, I might add) the bloody thing won't make that satisfying seal that it does in my left. Ah well, at least the majority of sound from the outside world is blocked out, and that's a good thing, isn't it?

It is a strange sensation, walking down the street without hearing a sound from the outside world. It's a feeling I can compare to being drunk, or extremely tired, there seems to be some sort of disconnection between I can see and what I can hear. Simple things that ground you in the real world, like cars roaring passed or the rumbling of a train, are absent, replaced with the blaring soundtrack of whatever is pumping through my headphones at the time. Obviously this disconnection can be good, since you can then lose yourself in the music (well, most people would, the spasmatic audiophile in me can't help to fiddle with equaliser settings everytime a new song comes on).

On the flip side, it does make my morning treck across several busy roads a little more treacherous, not only can I not hear cars coming, but I'm also off with the fairies and not realising that the fast moving metal thing can cause hurt. It's almost as if I'm associating the sound of an approaching car with danger rather than the actual image of that same car approaching at 50 clicks.

Ah well, at least my life now has a basstastic soundtrack.