I had a problem. I ride the bus to work, and sometimes you just get tired of all the noise, sometimes from the other bus riders, sometimes from the engine, or maybe I just want to focus on something else for the commute, like a good song or two.

My search for a decent pair of these type of headphones started there. A set of headphones that don’t cost an insane amount of cash lead me to these, but before I pulled the trigger on the purchase, a friend of mine beat me to the noise-cancelling trend and got the Sennheiser PXC 250 noise-cancelling phones first, which I tried on a few times. They were good and the noise-cancelling feature worked well, my main gripe with those was that the battery is in a separate, bulky case down the headphone cord, they required two AAA batteries, and they don’t block as much noise as I wanted (i’ll explain this later).

I found the Audio-Technica QuietPoint ATH-ANC7 noise-cancelling headphones on amazon.com. I read lots of reviews that customers wrote about them and decided that the value was well worth it, and if I didn’t like them I could always return them. My main points about what makes a good headphone in this category are noise-cancelling ability, comfort, sound quality, and price. I’ll discuss each.

Noise-cancelling

This is the feature that’s been a buzz-word for a few years now in the headphone world. It was (purportedly) originally designed for use in airplanes. Essentially, the way it works is there are microphones on the outside of the headphone that listen for outside noise, then send the inverse of that sound wave to your ears, which cancels it out. This ends up sounding like a very light “hiss” to your ears as you turn the noise-cancelling feature on.

According to the website for the product, this feature works best at removing ambient sound that falls into the 500hz or below range, things like engine noise, fans, and vent noise. They do not filter things like human voices or loud, high pitched spikes of noise (such as a police siren or a PA announcement on a plane). The cups do block a mild amount of this type of audio on their own, though, simply because they cover your ears.

The noise-cancelling feature of the headphones requires a single AAA battery, which is hidden inside the left headphone cup, and also seems to give an extra “punch” to your music’s sound quality and volume (if you are listening to music, you can use these with or without music on and the headphone cord is detachable).

Comfort

Any set of headphones, noise-cancelling or otherwise, need to be comfortable. This point is really up to interpretation on the headphone wearer. Some people hate over-the-ear style headphones, some hate earbuds. I prefer either the earbud-style headphones (see my review of the V-Moda Vibe earbuds, for instance, not the iPod earbuds, which are terrible.), or over-the-ear style (like the headphones being reviewed or my set of Grado SR-60 open-air headphones). The ATH-ANC7 are very snug around my ears, I wear glasses so it can be a bit too snug at some points and can make my glasses shift a bit, but it’s a small sacrifice for having a decent amount of ambient noise blocked from the get-go, which only improves after the noise-cancelling function is turned on. They seem about as comfortable as this style of headphones gets, I can’t say I’ve worn better because I haven’t.

Sound Quality

I consider myself to be someone who isn’t exactly an “audiophile” per se, since a real audiophile prefers reference (read: flat) audio reproduction, with no sweetened highs or lows. I like my music punchy, so good (or “enhanced”) highs and lows are important to me, so a lot of audiophile headphones are disappointing. These headphones do a great job with music and movies. I wouldn’t say it’s the most bass-heavy set of headphones I’ve ever used, but they satisfy my desire for good quality audio. Background noise being filtered out helps you hear a lot more details of your music (like very soft passages), where with other types of headphones you would need to crank the volume even louder, destroying your hearing.

Price

These headphones carry a retail price of $219.95, but Amazon’s price is significantly less, and at the time of this writing they cost approximately $124, which is less than a third of the cost of the Bose version of these headphones. This is an amazing bargain for headphones of this quality. This is the ATH-ANC7’s best selling point over other noise-cancelling headphones in this style.

Summary/Conclusions

Overall, if you’re in the market for headphones with noise-cancelling, I won’t hesitate whatsoever in highly recommending the Audio-Technica QuietPoint ATH-ANC7 Noise-cancelling headphones. They are worth every penny of their price. As someone who primarily uses them on the noisy bus ride to and from work, I can’t stress how much sanity this can gain you some days. I’m writing this review on a plane with the headphones on, with music from my iPod cranked through them, and I can barely hear anything but a very slight rumble of the plane engines. This does wonders for concentration. Those stupid Bose commercials aren’t lying, it really is sublime, and paying one-third the price of the Bose version is even more sublime.

Review update, 2/2/2008: my recommendation of these headphones was featured on Leo Laporte’s podcast “The Daily Giz Wiz”. Leo’s a good friend of mine and I really appreciate the shout out! You can find the podcast these were mentioned on TWiT.tv.

I’m writing from my second home today, San Francisco. I visited MacWorld Expo 2008’s opening day for exhibits… I also was outside of Moscone West during the keynote with my MacBook, watching MacRumors Live IRC chat robot spit out the feed of what was happening during the keynote. It was really fun out there, a large group of people had formed around me and my laptop, wanting to know keynote updates and see photos.

Regarding Apple’s announcements, let’s start with the big one. The MacBook Air. My first impressions of it after picking it up and typing on it at the show are that it’s incredibly cool and thin. The moment you put your hands on it, you feel the RDF kick in. It is a very slick device, in very typical apple fashion. With all the coolness of the device, there were a few things that struck me as omissions or things it (perceivably) lacked.

The first item on the list is the lack of an Ethernet port. I don’t know about how most people work, I usually leave this laptop (a MacBook) on my desk most of the time connected to my gigabit ethernet at home, which is insane amounts faster for transferring media back and forth between devices. Not having this item would mean you would be restricted by the speed of your wireless network (in most people’s houses, it’s 802.11g, which travels at a paltry 22mbit/sec at it’s best in my testing at home). It does support 802.11n, but N still doesn’t even touch the speed of gigabit Ethernet for simple file copying, and is wildly inconsistent on transfer speed since no one seems to want to agree on a final specification.

Secondly, the battery on the device is not removable. It’s the iPod all over again. I’ve heard installation is a free service apple will provide if you buy a new battery, but that means you have to buy the battery from them (at apple inflated prices) or do it yourself. Really stupid. I realize design choices are sometimes chosen over functionality in regards to Apple stuff, but every previous Apple laptop I can remember has a removable battery.

The third item on the list is the omission of any type of firewire port and only 1 USB 2.0 port. I don’t think this going to be as much of an issue as some people might think, but I routinely use 2 USB ports on the road (for instance, with a Verizon EVDO USB modem and a USB thumbdrive or card reader). Guess everyone will have to lug around an un-powered USB hub with them to compensate.

And finally, my last item of negativity on the product, what’s with the price point? $1799 to start? It’s thin and all, but it’s slower than my 1.5 year old MacBook, it has less features, and it has no CD/DVD drive. Add the 64GB SSD drive and you’re gonna pay $3000 for this thing. Hope you have a few spare credit cards.

All this being said, I may consider this device in a few weeks when it’s available. We’ll see. If I do, I’ll review it for the readers.

The only other item in the keynote I felt was noteworthy was the new software update for the crippled AppleTV appliance. The update includes the ability to rent movies directly from Apple, on the device, without the use of a computer. Pretty interesting. I had an AppleTV at one point and sold it, mostly because I didn’t find it immensely useful, and the limitations of the device and it’s ability to play content other than Apple’s hand-picked video and audio codecs got to me. This may renew my interest in it again to possibly buy another one, but only because they added the functionality to rent 720p HD versions of popular releases.

Currently there’s not another provider of a service like this, so we’ll have to see what kind of movies get there. An alarming item I read from the keynote transcript said movies come out “30 days after DVD release”… ouch. Honestly, if they really want to curb people from pirating media, why do they do stupid things like that?

Apple also dropped the price of the baseline AppleTV from $299 to $229, which was a smart move.

I had a great time visiting San Francisco for the event again and hanging out with some of my friends here. I’ll probably be back next year. The show itself was boring as usual, but Apple’s announcements and the parties and gatherings are the reason it’s fun. See you next year, MacWorld.

I have posted my photos from MacWorld 2008 on Flickr.

So. I’m not the first tech reviewer on the block to do this, but I finally procured myself one of the oft-talked about Aliph Jawbone Bluetooth headsets. The Jawbone is a MSRP $129 Bluetooth headset which has been much-heralded for it’s ability to “shield” your calls from noise.

My first impression of this device was near the release of the iPhone, back in July 2007. A friend of mine who I was traveling around San Francisco with had one of them, and in the car I was driving we had a bit of a challenge. He wanted to test how good the Jawbone’s noise-shielding technology really was. We were driving about 60-70 MPH on the 101 freeway over the hills North of the Golden Gate Bridge. I rolled all the windows down in my rental car, we turned the radio up, and he placed a phone call. He then asked the person on the other end whether he could understand him properly and if it was noisy. The person on the other end said they could only hear his voice, and the distant sound of the radio. I was impressed to say the least, but didn’t get the chance to actually use one myself until now.

In The Box

The Jawbone is a well-built, almost art-like device, the packaging borrows a lot from the book of Apple. Clean box art, clear acrylic plastic, and something that almost looks like it belongs in a museum (the headset) is contained in the box. It also includes 4 different ear loops and 4 different ear bud attachments to try to secure a better fit. It includes two charging cables, one that connects to a computer via USB and another that plugs into an AC outlet, which requires the same USB cord. The device in the box was gloss black, one of three colors.

I found the box almost impossible to get back together properly after opening it, similar to when you buy an iPod. It was an interesting puzzle to try to figure out the proper way to remove the headset from the box without feeling like you were about to break something.

Connection

Being someone who hates reading directions, I tried to figure out how to get the Jawbone into “paring mode” (for non-techies, this is the mode where the headset is open to accept Bluetooth wireless connections from your phone or computer). Since the device itself doesn’t have traditional buttons (they are actually part of the design itself), it works by certain points in the Jawbone’s frame being buttons. I eventually found which of the two buttons I needed to press to get it into pairing mode (and for how long) after that it was quite easy for my BlackBerry Curve to find it.

Using The Headset

Most current generation phones use Bluetooth headsets the same way, and this was no exception, I could initiate a call to the last number dialed by pressing the button on the outside of the Jawbone. I could also pick up or hang up on someone using this same button. The noise shield technology is active on the device automatically but you can disable it if you wish by pressing in a button on the top of the unit.

The Jawbone seemed to have a better signal and less connection issues than two other Bluetooth headsets I’ve tried, a low-end Motorola HS820, and a Jabra BT250. The Jabra especially had signal drop even when the phone was in my pocket or a few feet away. The Jawbone didn’t have this issue.

Comfort/Fit

Even though the Jawbone includes 4 different ear loops and 4 different earbuds, I couldn’t find any combination of these that made the device comfortable for me to wear for more than a few minutes. I wear glasses, and the Jawbone’s earloop kept catching on my glasses and just generally didn’t fit snugly. The Jabra BT250 was definitely more comfortable in that regard.

Sound Quality

Naturally when using a Bluetooth headset it’s easy to make a comparison to the cell phone’s speaker when referencing quality. I was using mine with the T-Mobile BlackBerry Curve 8320, as mentioned earlier. I found the sound quality through the Jawbone to be very cheap sounding versus the built-in speaker on the phone. This isn’t really anything surprising to me, as I’ve found most Bluetooth headsets, especially ones that don’t fit your ear snugly, to have poor sound (not that a cell phone has great sound quality in general, but there has to be some kind of baseline here).

“Noise Shield” Technology

This is the feature that sets the Jawbone apart from the other Bluetooth headsets I’ve used. In my extremely unscientific testing, I tried calling people while watching noisy TV and listening to noisy music and when asked how it sounded they said they couldn’t hear anything but me, which is great. I think this feature makes up for a lot of other things I mentioned in the review regarding sound quality. I would like to see more scientific data on it, but as far as I’m concerned it works very well.

Battery Life

I didn’t use the Jawbone enough to kill the batteries, but it lasts several days without charging on standby. It’s very convenient to be able to charge it off a computer’s USB port as well.

Summary and Conclusions

How do I feel about this device after using it? Is it worth $129? It depends. If you get an opportunity to try one of these before buying it, you should. My gripe isn’t necessarily with the Jawbone itself, but I’ve found out after using these that I don’t think I’m the target market for them. I find it annoying to have to remember to bring it with me, and to charge it every few days. I have enough trouble remembering to bring my keys and cell phone with me places. I’d rather just use my cell phone’s built-in speaker. Not to mention you (and I) look like a fool walking around in public with one of these.

There are certain scenarios which I like it, and if it’s around I use it. I do laundry on Sundays and use it while ironing my shirts for my 9 to 5 job. It’s nice for that because you can work without having something up to your ear. If you have it in your car, it would also be useful so you could concentrate on driving, but I always forget to bring it with me.

If I was asked to make a recommendation for people who use Bluetooth headsets a lot, I’d have no hesitation to recommend this device, I think it’s the best Bluetooth headset I’ve used overall. It’s a bit expensive, and the fit is a bit iffy on my ear, but it does seem like the creators of the unit spent a lot of time developing it. It oozes quality and attention to detail in design, which is more than I can say about all the crappy Motorola Bluetooth headsets I’ve seen over the years.

Pros:
+ Noise shield technology is unique and works well!
+ Very classy looking design.
+ Easy to charge with two charging options included.

Cons:
- Pretty expensive for a Bluetooth headset.
- May not fit people’s ears with glasses without a lot of effort.

Aliph’s Jawbone website: www.jawbone.com

I thought I’d write a bit of an plug for a program I participate in, using a lot of the computers I use to write my articles with.

I use my idle computer time to contribute to a project called Folding@Home. Folding@Home uses the spare processing power on your computer to run simulations of protein folding. Before proteins carry out their function, they have to assemble - or fold - themselves. Unfortunately, the folding process can and often does go wrong, leading to serious diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow, Parkinson’s, and others. By simulating the folding process, scientists can use the results to find out more about these diseases, and eventually find a cure.

There’s a good chance that you or someone you love will encounter a disease related to protein folding at some point in life. Instead of feeling helpless in the fight against that disease, you can join devoted scientists that are helping to cure it!

Check out the folding@home website to get your hands on the Folding@Home client. Once you’ve downloaded it, begin the installation. It will guide you through a number of steps to get started. Remember to enter team 35054 when it asks you for a team number! That’s ours.

Folding@Home FAQ: http://folding.stanford.edu/faq.html
Our Folding@Home Team Page: http://leovillefolding.com

Team 35054’s Folding Statistics

Thanks for your help, if you can contribute!

Apple released new iMacs at a media event on August 7th, 2007. With them came a new keyboard. Since I didn’t have a grand laying around to buy a new iMac, and my PC suits me well, I decided to purchase this new, “revolutionary” keyboard that Apple included with the iMac for myself so I could use it on my PC.

The keyboard retails at $49 from any Apple store by itself. There is also a bluetooth wireless version available, which for some reason does not include a number pad. If I find a use for the wireless model I will be purchasing one of them as well to review. This review will focus on the wired model.

As I said a bit earlier, I purchased this keyboard not to use with my MacBook (or any other mac), but instead for use with my 3 year old Windows XP PC. Previously I had been using an Apple Pro keyboard, which is the keyboard that came with old G4 PowerMacs, and was quite happy with that keyboard. Apple does not officially state that this keyboard works with Windows XP/Vista, but I knew from previously using a Mac keyboard with my XP machine that they do work, with a bit of tweaking. This is done with a program called SharpKeys, which allows you to re-map any key on your Windows keyboard to do something else. An example: since the Mac keyboards don’t have a PrintScreen key, I used SharpKeys to map F15 to use as PrintScreen.

The keyboard itself is a very svelte, all aluminum design with chiclet-style keys similar to the MacBook laptops. It takes up a very minimal amount of space on a desk, almost the smallest you could possibly get a full-size keyboard while still retaining the number pad keys. The angle the keyboard uses is a bit less than most keyboards that have legs to prop themselves up on, and it isn’t a height that you can configure. This is a minor nuisance for me, but it may be a big deal for people with carpal tunnel issues.

The feel of the keys is very nice. I’ve been using the MacBook’s keyboard for a while and I enjoy typing on it. The keys bottom out with much less work than a regular keyboard, which I find makes it a lot easier to type faster. The extended keyboard layout has special function keys for Mac features like screen brightness, volume, eject, play/pause, and Exposé. It requires an update on Mac OS X to get them to work, as some of them have changed locations from the earlier Mac keyboards. None of them work properly on Windows, until you throw SharpKeys into the mix. I was able to program other keys for Volume Up/Down/Mute and Stop. You can get a lot crazier with this if you wish.

There are two USB 2.0 ports, one on each side of the keyboard, which are an upgrade from the USB 1.1 ports in the old Apple Pro Keyboard. However, they are still unpowered and won’t work with your iPod, which is something apple claims works (?). You can plug your mouse or other less-demanding (or self-powered) USB1/2 devices into these ports.

Overall, I really like this keyboard, and at $49 retail, it’s well worth the price if you’re looking for something new to type on. As I’ve stated in my review, the Apple Keyboard (2007) works with Windows XP and Vista with some tweaking with SharpKeys.

I definitely recommend buying one, but try it in the store first.

Key Positives:
+ Sturdy aluminum casing
+ Thin, small profile
+ Volume/Media controls
+ Has two USB 2.0 ports

Key Negatives:

- May put off people who like keys that are more tactile.
- USB 2.0 ports are un-powered and located under the keyboard, so you have to lift up to plug anything in.
- Keyboard height is non-configurable