A world on its head

Yesterday I ventured onto the underground - something I rarely do these days. A young girl got on, say around 20-25, and sat down. She had one of those "big" bags that girls carry over their shoulders and carry everything including the kitchen sink.

In this instance she pulled out a pair of studio (large!) headphones and started unwrapping around five feet of cable attached to them. Having placed them over her head she then reached in for her music player. What she pulled out was one of those small matchbook sized players that she connected and daintily attached to a bag strap. The relative size of the two components seemed out of balance.

The reason I now comment on this is two fold. The first is that many things have been turned on their head these days. While I am not old enough to have used valve radios or wind-up gramophones, I do recall when no music system was portable other than wireless radio (but we still relied on pirate radio for any decent music!) and few supported any sort of headphone. As music systems have got progressively smaller (I now carry around 17 days playing time of music!), earphones have become the norm. While for a long while the headphones became smaller and smaller too, it now seems that discerning listeners are returning to larger ear enclosing headphones. The relative scale of these components would seem to be counter-intuitive, yet it links with the second reason I thought to blog today.

This second point is that there are still some fundamental truths in the world. In this case the size and operation of a human ear has not significantly changed in the last few thousand years and I see no reason to expect these to change in the foreseeable future. This constancy sets some boundary constraints on what "good" looks like for technology using the ear to deliver information to the brain.

In order to isolate the ear from outside sound the ear pieces need to be big enough. So colour, material covering and some style does differ the basic size is common. Similarly the generation and delivery of quality sound is dependent upon the cavity within which the sound is created, in this instance the inner volume of the ear. This again sets minimum parameters if one is looking to delivery quality.

Of course one does not have to follow the herd as we can all set our own compromises. Personally I don't carry a big bag so I don't want to be carrying around large headphones; my ear buds are good enough and highly portable. In contrast I carry a larger music device, in my case an iPad. I use and carry that iPad for many other reasons so why would I want to carry another device?

Having said all this the summary is that while compromises are perfectly acceptable, they need not set the new "good" as good has a more enduring foundation.

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