What do you expect in a set of $15 noise - cancelling headphones? If you answered “not a whole lot,” then you might like these Philips SHN2500 earbuds.

Construction

Good news: it uses only one, small AAA battery, and an AAA is included in the box.
Bad news: the earbuds dont work when the battery dies. No, I dont mean the obvious - that the noise-cancelling fails. Of course it fails without power. When the battery dies, the earbuds will not play audio. Hmm. You could compare this to a car’s thermostat failing closed,causing the engine to overheat rather than failing open and causing the engine to run roughly.

Other construction notes are these:
_Battery/on/off switch is large, maybe larger than it needs to be, daresay I, non-engineer.
_earbud ear canal adaptors come in a handy three sizes, but they tend to slip off in bags and pockets, and at the size and weight of Cheerios, are easily lost.
_the mini-jack is not iPhone friendly, unless you modify it by trimming/whittling off a bit of pliable, casing plastic, a tactic I’ve used with success on a half-dozen mini jacks.
_the on/off switch is large and I suspect easily toggled by shit in your luggage, purse or pocket.

Performance

So-so. In a bar/cafe, noise reduction sliced perhaps 10-20% off the general aggregate patron mumble. I’m writing this on my iPhone on a flight to Seattle, and the drone of engines is at least halved, making the value of these earbuds increase quite a bit in my estimation.

The seal the buds provide my ears is quite good, and contributes substantially to their performance.

Constant low frequencies seem to be eliminated best, and when noise-cancelling is active, the audio signal is boosted.

Battery life so far is unmeasured, save for the fact that I’m still on the OEM battery after around five hours. I’d expect 20 or more hours of use per battery.

Conclusion

If you have the money, I’m sure there are better-performing noise cancelling earbuds out there. Go get em. For frequent fliers, the poor, or those who are prone to losing things like this, I consider it a fair trade for something that fits inside a twenty dollar bill.

Bought it a week ago from Amazon (buy it from Amazon with this link). I’d like to turn this into a pro-looking review, but there’s really not much to say about it: it just works. My test 13×19 print from my Epson 2200 was very similar to the image on my two displays (MacBook and older VGA NEC 17″ LCD). And subjective spot checks seem dead on too.

It’s Cold Here Today

As for the COLD… well, my displays are “cold” now that I’ve calibrated them. At the end of the calibration, the Huey software of course activates the profile it just created, and bam you get the corrected profiile and a dialog box asking if you want to keep it. The sudden shift to blue-green shocked me at first, so I re-ran the process. But nothing veered from the first profile: same blue-green cast. Then I did my two other displays, and they too had this cast. Ok, I’m starting to think, maybe this is “neutral”, and my displays have simply been really warm all this time. My images on the web were never that off, really close to a nice skintone consistency accross displays, but a little cold. And that makes sense if my displays were always a little warm.

I used to calibrate (or should I say “calibrate”?) my displays entirely with software using the built-in System Preferences -> Displays -> Color -> Calibrate. But now I can see that was generating a very warm cast. When I go back to those profiles I’m shocked by how much magenta is in them.

Process

So what’s the process like? Pretty simple:

• Install the Pantone software
• Plug in the calibrator
• Run the software
• Follow directions
• Four minutes later your’re done

The calibrator has tiny suction cups that keep it attached to your display while the software runs its color test loop. Just pop the Huey Pro in the center of the screen and watch the pretty colors cycle.

Noteables

• The Huey has an ambient light monitor that can be used a) only when calibration is run, or b) always, as long as the USB calibrator is attached to the Mac/PC. This option gives you a constantly-correct calibration, despite changing light in the room.
• The Huey Pro comes, oddly, in REALLY nice packaging. I say oddly because really nice packaging is usually the domain of high-end equipment. By nice packaging, I don’t mean leather-bound felt-lined boxes or anything, but the presentation was kinda reassuring, saying “Yes, Matt, you made the right choice here.” Very Apple-like.

[by Berger] [from Some Actual Apple Macintosh Questions]

On Firewire cases:

I’ve been through a number of external cases - both cheap and not so cheap - and have settled into a couple that work very well for the way I do business.

I go through a bunch of drives per year because I save all of my PSD build files for clients so I can re-purpose for other jobs. I like a tray system and this one from Stardom has worked well for me for the past couple of years. You can buy separate trays for SATA and IDE. I use both 400FW and 800FW/USB2 versions. About $100 for the 400 and $125 for the 800/USB. Trays have been $10 each through newegg, but they don’t carry them any more and I’ve seen them going fro about $22 on average. I bought about 15 trays within the last 2 years - they all work perfectly. I keep the loaded trays in my fire safe when I’m not accessing files.

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