The 90s were quiet on public transport compared to the 80s, and I feel that this decade is another loud one.

MP3 phones were seen as a fantastic invention, but doesn’t it annoy you when someone has the audacity to play their MP3 phone at high volumes, forcing you to listen to low quality music of poor taste which has obviously just been downloaded off LimeWire? It annoys me.

This is a brief post, but I suspect you’ll agree with me.

Update: My friend tells me this is a grumpy old man post; but I’d argue it’s the social implications of tech!

Until recently, I have used in-ear earphones to listen to music, but these have grown increasinly annoying as wires always tangle and at times are impractical, especially when exercising. Therefore, I decided to buy a pair of wireless headphones. I thought to myself that it may be wise to get some Bluetooth headphones as these could be used on my MacBook Pro without plugging in an adapter.

Logitech Freepulse headphones fitted the bill. It utilises Bluetooth, but comes with a 3.5mm jack (standard headphone) transmitter, which allows me to turn nearly any audio into Bluetooth-transmitted audio. I have plugged this transmitter into everything ranging from my TV to my DS, most importantly, to my iPod.

Charger

The headphones and transmitter are powered by a non-removable, rechargeable battery. You get a mains power adapter to do this, which isn’t a universal one. I find this a little annoying, because it makes the headphones impractical for long journeys where they may run out of charge.

A mini-USB power socket on the headphones and transmitter would be useful, as it would allow everything to be charged by laptops or ‘emergency’ chargers.

Sound quality

THe sound quality seems to be quite good, although it is better when the transmitter is used than a direct AD2P connection. Using a AD2P connection from my laptop to the headphones, the sound quality, quite frankly, is terrible. On the other hand, if I use the transmitter, there is little difference to any other half-decent pair ear or headphones.

Sound quality is completely satisfactory, although it gets pretty poor at higher volumes.

Connection quality

The advertised 10 meters is hugely unrealistic. I often struggle at 5 meters and if I’m walking fastly, it can be a bit unreliable.

Generally, connection quality doesn’t pose too great a problem as any unreliability at very short ranges is rare and so are the circumstances where you would use them over a distance larger than a few meters.

The instruction manual provides no instructions on how to pair the headphones with devices besides the transmitter, but it can be done by holding the power button on the headphones for 15 seconds, until the LED turns into a flashing blue and red which indicates that it’s discoverable.

Design

The headphones, in my opinion, are quite attractive and buttons are well-hidden. It also has invovative volume control, which involves a very subtle up and down button underneath one of the phones.

The band which holds it together, unusually for headphones, goes behind the neck. This definitely looks odd, but it’s much more comfortable.

Other points

The ‘templates’ designed to secure the transmitter to a variety of devices aren’t shaped to fit current generation iPods. Whilst the transmitter still works fine, mine fell out once and the jack actually bent in my pocket. Logitech were fantastic about this and replaced the transmitter, but that was obviously an inconvenience and a small expense as I had to airmail it to their European support representatives in Germany.

Even if these aren’t the world’s best headphones, the convenience of the Bluetooth is fantastic.

Price

The headphones and transmitter cost about £50.

If you, like me, enjoy music but find the prices on iTunes (especially the British iTunes) extortionate, being expected to pay £0.79 per track, Amie Street may be the site for you. Whilst it primarily appears to be used by unsigned I was surprised to spot half a dozen bands whom I already have in my music collection (such as Wheatus and Vampire Weekend).

Amie Street is a site which recommends music to its users, then it allows you to buy those songs (or indeed, if the artist allows it, download them free of charge) and you can then recommend the song to others. If you recommend the song and the pr

ice increases as a result, you will get a share of that difference back. Prices change for the more people who download the song with a maximum of 98cents per song (still cheaper than iTunes!).

Some top names in Amie Street are Gary Numan, Badly Drawn Boy, Tay

Zonday (Chocolate Rain Guy), Wheatus and Vampire Weekend.

Amie Street is truly a social music shop and I love the way how pricing changes depending on the popularity of songs and how the users themselves can influence this by recommending songs, which involves the writing of a short review and having to compare the song to other artists (not each when you hear how unique some of these songs are!).

I also think the way it suggests music is pretty clever because it requires other users to tag songs as being similar to certain artists as you can use this to discover other tagged songs.

Best of all, the songs you download aren’t full of DRM and are nice, clean MP3s (the bitrate seems to be different for different songs).

You can put as little as $3 in your account in one top-up which will also get you 2 credits to recommend songs. You cannot recommend all songs or else you would, in order to maximise earnings. You can make $2.50 for referring a friend.

I would love to see how Amie Street, a fairly independent site, does compared to the likes of 7digital.

Needless to say, not all songs are available outside the US but I have not found one yet which has a US-only restriction on it.

If you join, please add me as your friend. My username is computerjoe.

Tags: music, amie street, itunes, mp3