Going along with me being an audiophile and all, I had always wanted a pair a quality headphones to listen to my music with. I guess it isn’t conventional to have large, around-ear headphones anymore, but that wasn’t a concern with me at all. I didn’t care how big or clumsy they were, as long as I got some quality sound from them.

To add to that, I have no patience so when I wanted them I got them. This probably wasn’t the best decision but I definitely don’t regret it. I ended up rushing to my local audio store and buying a pair of Bose around-ear headphones.

I tested them out at the store, and considering they were they only pair of quality headphones they had, I bought them (it isn’t saying much that my local audio store’s highest quality headphones run for $130). Since I never got to test out any other similarly priced headphones I am probably missing out on a better pair, but I am completely satisfied on this pair of Bose headphones.

Bose has a name that is synonymous with sound quality, and their products always live up to the hype. These headphones are no exception, especially when they are the first higher end pair that you use. The change from standard iPod headphones to the Bose around-ear headphones is like a totally new world. One world is black, white, and gray. The new world is full of color, pounding bass, high treble, and total comfort. Now understand that the Bose headphones aren’t going to look as cool walking around the city, and don’t even try running with them….I did. But when you’re sitting around the house, putting on these Bose phones immerses you into your own little world of perfect sound.

The only downside that I found with the headphones is that their construction is a little too fragile (and too much plastic) for the $140 price tag. I recently dropped them, and they were fine except the outer black part on the right side snapped off from the silver part (the cups). It was repairable with tape, but they don’t look quite as nice now. So just be gentle with them.

Overall these are a pretty sexy pair of headphones, and the sounds quality is great for the price. Definitely try them out sometime.

Buy them on amazon:
Amazon - Bose Headphones

As you may have noticed, I am an audiophile and I cannot stand hearing music at 256 kbps, or god forbid 128 kpbs. Well you know what I also hate? I hate having to buy CDs at $12 bucks a pop to be able to listen to good quality music. So the other day during my internet roaming I found this site.

Now having CD’s shipped to my door for $6.99 a piece, that’s a deal I can stand. I mean this is pretty much dirt cheap for new, never used CDs. Lets say you get a used CD for $4 on eBay and you pay $1.00 shipping or something around that. Well yes, you did save $2, but think about it this way, selling your used CD to someone or some store won’t get you much money at all. Selling a new CD like the ones you just bought should get you anywheres from $1 to $6 depending on if you kept it in good condition and how valuable the actual CD is (all about supply and demand).

So I signed up for this site, and all it requires is $6.99 monthly from Paypal, or your credit card. From this subscription you get one CD free per month through your order queue, much like Netflix. So the subscription is pretty much just to make sure that you stay with the service, since you get a free CD each month paid by the subscription.

The site is very easy to navigate through, complete with suggestions on music that is similar to the genre of the CD you are looking at.

The only downside of the service is that they have a limited number of artists since it is done by BMG direct. This leads me to believe that they only have CDs by labels associated with Sony/BMG, but I may be wrong. Even then, not all artists are on yourmusic.com.

Besides the downside of having a limited amount of CDs this service works very well, and when I buy CDs from there, listen and then sell them to my local music store, the cost of the original CD comes out to be around $4 or less with a $3 resale value.

Check it out here:
Yourmusic.com

FLAC is one of the best lossless codecs out there today. It has a high compression ratio, and the ability to be tagged as well. The one question everyone asks themselves when backing up their CD collection as audio files is what format should I use? You don’t want to pick one that will need to be updated in 5 years, but there are so many different formats to choose from. But really, who likes feeding 2,000 CDs into a computer one by one to convert them into a newer format? FLAC is the answer to this, and is extremely easy to use as well.

One of the biggest chores when converting music is tagging it. Well iTunes took care of that for us with its automatic CD tagging integration with Gracenote. To make things easier we’ll just stick with iTunes in this tutorial. Other programs will work for tagging, just make sure all the codecs used are lossless to maintain the quality.

How To Do It:

1. Once iTunes is open, make sure that your preferences are set so that CD imports are encoded in their Apple Lossless Encoder. This will make lossless files from the CD while tagging it with id3 info.
2. Insert the CD into iTunes and let it import it if you have it on automatic, or press the import button.
3. Now all the files are in the Apple Lossless Encoder format and can be converted over to FLAC. Now download a program from this site to convert the files. For this tutorial in OSX we used a program called Max to convert the audio files. This program works very well and has support for just about every other codec in existence. We highly recommend it.
4. Now using your conversion program load the files from your iTunes folder into the conversion program. Make sure to save tagging info if there is even an option, otherwise choose your options such as compression levels. The amount of compression will not make a difference in the audio since FLAC is lossless.
5. Start converting the files and then enjoy CD quality FLAC files that have all their tagging info with them.

Screenshots (Click for larger image. Please be patient since the images are large)