…are already proving themselves. My flight’s delayed about an hour,
and the Crown Room is, as almost always, more of a zoo than the
gate, so I’m waiting at the gate. It’s noisy here; a
constant background of machines and chatter. So I put on my new
headphones and turned them on (without plugging them into any audio
source). Instantly, it’s like I’m in a library. I can still hear
announcements (actually more clearly than before), and occasional
take-off rumbles or dot matrix printers, but they’re in the background.
And the rest of the noise is gone.
I’d been looking at these for a long time, but they’re not only
expensive, they’re overpriced, due to Bose’s distribution system
that prevents any retailers from discounting. Still, I’d bought a
few less expensive noise-reducing headphones, with limited success,
and I’d been thinking about spending $150 on another pair that
might work better, when I decided to just go ahead and buy the
ones that everyone says are best.
Everyone is right. These are much better than others I’ve tried. And
the ergonomics are much better, too. For example, I don’t have a
cord hanging down right now. If I’m not going to connect to an
audio source, I can unplug the cord at the headset end.
While I was sitting here pleased with this new gadget, I had a few
bad moments. When I tried to boot my PC I got an “unreadable
memory location” area in the logon code. Three times. I was about
to open it up and reseat the chips, when I decided to try one more
time. I powered it down for a full 20 seconds, then started it, and
it worked fine. I’m pretty sure the problem was a transient glitch.
Charles Engelke's Blog 