Brainwavz Beta VS Superlux HD 381 F

At first I was looking for replacement for my broken craptastic Superlux HD381F that had served me for a year plus. Hence, I visited a modest shop yet this shop sells decent varieties of audiophile gadgets than most other bigger shop in town. My original intention was to find a conventional type of earphone instead of IEM or the "hybrid" type, like Superlux HD391F. However, I was a bit disenchanted due to the fact that only few options available to try for the normal earphone type as I was expecting able to try the famous YUIN pk1 or the fancy Sennheiser MX980 but... No demo unit available for both series. So if you guys know where I can found a shop that generous enough to have them as demo unit, please do let me know ;) Then I tried the Blox... Forgotten which type but the look was similar to Sennheiser MX400. Unfortunately, found out that it's too warm for me. After that I decided to try the iem type. After almost trying 20iems and make the shop keeper irritated... :P I have shortlisted 2 iems that catch my ear and yet having good price performance ratio. They are: Sunrise and the Brainwavz Beta. Finally I decided to buy the Brainwavz Beta instead since the design is more comfortable for my ear although the Sunrise outperform in term of sound clarity. And yet the price was only a third of it hehehe The impression: As my IEM database and knowledge are very limited, I only can compare against Superlux HD381F. Bass: First thing that I missed from HD381F was the bass quality. It's not that Beta has bad bass... But compared to the HD381f, it is less deep. Hopefully it's because it hasn't fully burned in yet :P as I only listen to it for less than 10hrs when I wrote this article. Vocal/middle: this one I prefer the Beta as it is less forward or more laid back :P probably it is only my personal preference Treble: some of the forum mentioned that this Beta is harsh. But for me it's still reasonable although in some songs I still could find sibilance... However, I can hear the high frequency "detail" or "ambient" that I wasn't able to hear by using HD381f. Sound stage: It's impressive! In my opinion, HD381f only can beat Beta in term of sound stage if plugged into amp. Direct head to head, certainly Beta beats HD381f. Probably it is because due to less forward vocal characteristic. Clarity: Both almost similar in my ear Detail: As I mentioned earlier, I can hear more ambiance sound in Beta. Conclusion: Both Superlux HD381F and Brainwavz Beta are craptastic IEM! They both no doubt offer fascinating bang for the buck. And although they share the same "weird" hybrid design, their sound character are different. Hence, both serve different purpose. If you look for forward vocal characteristic, just grab the HD381F but if you prefer the laid back vocal, then the Beta will make you happy. In addition the Beta gives more "ambiance" sound, but lack of deep bass. Hence, there is no absolute winner here. They both have their own superiority and inferiority. My suggestion for those who confused to decide which one suitable your taste, buy both and trust your own ear as their combined prices still arguably cheaper than one other "branded" iems with similar performance :)

Valentine

Valentine day for me have a different meaning. It's not about chocolate... not about pinky stuff... not about love... or even romantic things... I was started my professional career on IT world on Valentine.
So today is my 6 years anniversary of my "relationship" with IT world.

And this time I would like to share about one of the reason why I choose IT as my major. It is because computer is honest, as what you type is what you get otherwise it is a bug/defect :P

However, for the past 6 years, I met more than enough people which are more suitable to have career in politics instead of IT.
But don't get me wrong, it's not only higher position that tends to be having authority to do such a thing... even the staff level also... weird isn't it?

Let's make IT world better place... by making it back to where it is supposed to be honest like computer program without bug/defect.

Happy Valentine!

Google Translate

As you may already notice, I added google translate tools in this humble blog.
One of the reason is that some friends told me to use bahasa instead. Maybe they don't understand what I wrote...
But please don't get me wrong... I'm not trying to blame them... what in my mind is that maybe they're trying to tell me that my English is too poor to be understanable for them... so they told me to use Bahasa instead. :P

So I added this awesome tools from google... so everyone who speak the supported langunge -which around 50 languages if I'm not mistaken- can read my blog... including the one who speak bahasa... :)

And for your information that the translation is not 100% as what I wanted, but at least it can deliver the main idea :)

Instinct...

Recently I listened to another audio book about economic... however the topic is being introduced in different way... very different way... :)

In that book there are some phrases that tickle my mind. One of them is
"the male instinct to impress the female is apparently strong even when..."*

Hmmm... in this kind of sentence you can put almost anything without abusing the sentence so it will have different point...

For example, you can put even the most absurd reason such as... the woman is not from planet earth... the point of the sentence is the same... hehehe...

Ok, now let's get down to the business... Of course the instinct is part of the human as we are a living creature...
However as a human we are given ability to think that define us with the other creature...

And it is our call to determine whether we let the sense of thinking win... or the instinct win because of the temptation...

Don't get me wrong... and I am not trying to say that the instinct is always wrong, and the sense of thinking is always right. After all the instinct sometimes tends to be more honest then our mind.

Some people will say it depends on the situation...
For instance, in situation when one of the person is already going to married and still the male is trying to impress her... simply to get her heart... most of the people will say it is something that really wrong to do...

And this kind of situation usually is being risen as the topic of a movie... And recently I watched an Indian comedy (3Idiots)... yes I watched an Indian movie! (let's discuss this another time hihihi...)
This topic was also existed on the plot of the movie...
Even in the movie, there was an idiom that says "Everything is fair in love and war"... and personally I don't know exactly where is it come from...

There's no one know, which one is the right thing to do... to follow our instinct or to follow the sense of thinking...

However this also reminds me to a controversial Chinese espionage thriller film which is titled "Lust, Caution" or 色戒 (Se, jie)

--- WARNING! Spoiler alert! ---

The movie is telling about a attractive woman who has a mission to lure and then assassinate a corrupt leader. But she failed although she's able to lure the corrupt leader and only just one step to complete the mission. And it is because she is overcome by emotion bound and then breaks down and urges him to flee. Hence the mission is failed; after all of her tremendous effort... you can see the movie by yourself if you want to say why I choose the word tremendous... :P

Maybe that's the differentiate between love and lust... love should give you power to help you getting what you aim for... or make you move forward... not giving obstacle or even worse... dragging you back into your darkest past...

But I don't know... Since as you all may already notice, I'm just a geek... for me these kind of things are more complicated than quantum physic... :)

However I do understand one thing... even if the male has tried to seduce but there is no reaction from the female... the result would be nothing... just like third Newton's law of action reaction... hehehe... or in less geeky way there's saying "It takes two for tango"...
So the "tango" won't be happening until there are two people doing it :)

The new version of "Flash contender" has been released...

Today the Silverlight 3 RTW* has been released. In my very limited knowledge… I dunno whether there was a RC version before or not. Since all that I know the last previous version was beta… but who cares… this new version of “flash contender” has been released anyway :P
The run time can be downloaded via this link.

And the overview...

The new features description can be found in this link.

There are some features that exciting for me, those features are GPU support, 3D support, 3. Out of browser capabilities and new bitmap manipulation API.

Regarding those the new features, these are some comment that pop up from my head, but please be aware that due to my limited knowledge and I haven’t try this feature my self so better not use it for reverence hehehe…

1. GPU support - for faster video and bitmap rendering…


2. Perspective 3D support - yes… finally the “real 3D” support! not just a 2D vector that looks like 3D. So for those who previously were expecting to implement 3D in this Silverlight world… it’s time to bring it on dude! Hehehe…


3. Out of browser capabilities - if you think that this feature will kill the WPF application… in my opinion it won’t… well at least for now. The features of this Silverlight version are still very… very… very… limited compared to the WPF desktop application. One of the simple example is that there is no printing/reporting support on this Silverlight application. Another silly analogy to explain this is, from the size of the framework. This Silverlight 3 run time is only around 4MB. Which is very small compared to the .NET 3.0 framework, although it is combined with the other Microsoft foundation (WCF and WF) so I personally don’t know the size of the WPF framework itself. So this second analogy is not very relevant :)


4. New bitmap manipulation API - I personally quite glad hearing this feature. Since it will certainly ease my pet project :P


5. For the other features… you can see it for yourself from the given link… :P

However… without any intention to devastate the excitement, there are some (basic) features that are not included in this release. Some of those features are right click and mouse scrolling button support and also the printing/reporting support. From my point of view, for the right click and scrolling is really essential for today application. For the printing/reporting support is also essential especially when we want to build business application or even enterprise level application.
Therefore I would like to ask you guys to support by asking this features to the wish list in the Silverlight official forum.

In case if you want to develop Silverlight 3 application you can download the SDK from this link.

*RTW stands for Released To Web in case you’re not geeky enough… :P

Pet Project

A geek is not that “geek” if she/he ain’t having pet project. So based on that judgement, this time I would like to share my plan for my pet project.
Ever since I graduated I always wanted to rewrite my final project application that I wrote for my graduation. The application was a very simple image processing application. It implemented the Exemplar-based image Inpainting. Although it was a simple application but I think the implemented algorithm is so damn interesting. The application lets the user choose an image and a part or object that user wanted to remove, and the application with some unique algorithm do the “magic”, regenerating those empty part that being left by the object that being removed. The result will be just like a background of the image. Burrrb… enough already with the geeky explanations… I’ll just show you the example:

Input:


Result:


I got this interesting topic from a friend of mine, than the introduced me to his friend who’re working on it for final project for his graduation. Thanks to him because of his help, I managed to finish it and graduated in time :P

Alright, let’s back to the pet project geeky stuff. The previous application was written in Delphi programming geek language. And for sure the application wasn’t written in a good way. It was only written to kill the job. No compile error and the program ran as expected… than the job is done… he3x… :P

As I mentioned, I want to rewrite the application to the .NET technology. To make it look more professional fancy, the design for the application is described on the following simple diagram:

As you all can see… the front end for this application is going to use Silverlight 2.0 technology, and it will consume a WCF Service. The service will process the image based on the user input and then send back to the client to display the result.

There are some obstacles for developing this application. Apart from the issue of learning curve to get familiar to those new technologies, here are the issues that currently I have in mind…

• • On the front end,
  I haven’t seen any component that helps the development of the image processing application, such as: “marching ants” selection tools. If I have to write this tools by myself, for sure it will take a lot of time… :P
  


• • On the back end,
  Finding a free web hosting that support Silverlight and WCF service isn’t that easy. I quick browse on the net and found these two options. Aspspider offers free hosting for 6 months trial only. And for the silverlight.live.com, I’m not so sure if it supports the WCF service
  

I wish that those obstacles do not make my spirit down, to start working on this pet project.

Any information, suggestion or even comment that can help me to finalize this pet project is positively welcome.