Category: Tech

My 3-year-old Google Pixel 4a phone has a headphone jack. That was one of the reasons why I bought it, so there’s no need to retire the excellent and durable Sony portable headphones that I bought at least a year before starting this blog.

Whenever I eventually get a new phone, it will undoubtedly not have a headphone jack. Adapters with a DAC that converts USB-C to 3.5mm analog audio can be had for $10 and less.

Another option is the Linsoul 7HZ Salnotes Zero IEM with USB-C connector and built-in DAC. It costs $24 and works well, with volume and play/pause controls for mobile use.

Used with the right ear tip (for me it’s not the one that’s pictured) the sound is excellent. For the ultra-nerdy, there’s a setting in the Wavelet app for Android that tweaks the sound closer to the Harman IEM curve.

In my more productive and lucrative past life, I worked with VMware, both the product and the company. VMware brought virtual servers into the corporate mainstream, where they became an essential tool for enterprise computing.

When I retired, VMware was mostly owned by storage system technology vendor EMC. At the time, Dell was in the process of acquiring EMC, and we were under non-disclosure regarding Michael Dell seeking financial backing from China to close the deal. I assume the loan was settled long ago. VMware is now owned by Broadcom, which is making some painful changes at its new acquisition.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/01/broadcom-killing-vmware-partner-program-could-disrupt-thousands-of-businesses/

For a time VMware, Cisco Systems, and EMC were in a partnership called VCE, offering pre-configured server/storage/networking packages.

These product offerings made sense at the time, given the complexity of the configurations. A typical IT department, deploying desktop PC’s, making employee badges and replacing laser printer toner cartridges, didn’t have the resources to install and configure VMware with an EMC Storage Area Network. One area I specialized in was Storage Area Networking, a technology that hyper-converged networking has effectively made obsolete. Hyper-converged networking, first used at Amazon, is the foundation of cloud computing, which runs on commodity server hardware. The worst of the complexity is remote to customers, leaving IT departments free to deploy desktop PC’s, make employee badges and replace laser printer toner cartridges.

VCE’s long-term viability quickly faded with the rise of cloud computing, and the partnership was dissolved. On-premises systems continue to be essential for many applications, and yet I have to wonder how much more relevance VMware and EMC have in the corporate IT market.

My job was often fun, and it was certainly always interesting, but I’m glad to be out of it. Life put too many personal challenges in my way to manage both it and what I used to do for work.

Just as I know my next car won’t have a CD player, my next phone won’t have an analog headphone jack. Having no interest in a wireless headset, for a mere $25 I’ll get prepared now by giving this thing a try.

Once again, Vint Cerf didn’t mention the ARPANET, the packet-switched (as distinct from circuit-switched) technical foundation upon which the Internet was based. In grad school Cerf had early exposure to the ARPANET, but he was not one of the visionaries behind it.

Vint’s significance in the development of TCP/IP can’t be overstated. He is a legendary development programmer, and as he says he approached the Internet as an engineering challenge. Cerf should give credit for the vision where it’s due, and that should certainly include the late Bob Taylor, one of the originators of the ARPANET project.

Cerf and Kahn started working at DARPA in 1973, after Taylor got the ARPANET going and had left for Xerox PARC. Taylor headed up the Alto project, which was the thing that blew Steve Job’s mind by having a GUI with a mouse, an early version of Ethernet, laser printers, and e-mail. After Xerox, Taylor moved on to Digital Equipment Corporation.

At DEC, Bob leveraged Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the Worldwide Web by coming up with AltaVista, the powerful search engine that was influential on a startup called Google. Since 99.999% of everybody thinks the Web is the Internet, rather than the biggest part of it, an occasional mention of Tim by Vint would also be appropriate.

I’m abusing the headphone jack on my laptop PC by playing two different pairs of In-Ear-Monitors, or IEMs, at the same time. I’m abusing my ears by going back and forth between them.

Positive reviews on AudioScienceReview for inexpensive “Chi-Fi” IEMs made me curious, resulting in this post from a month ago.

In One Ear, In the Other

A guy in Singapore who goes by the handle Crinacle is a leading reviewer of these products. His influence extends to him collaborating with manufacturers to evaluate and fine-tune the sound of their IEMs.

After listening to the BLUE set with his name on it, I was curious about the RED set. The models are identical in design and construction except for the sound, with the RED tuned to Crinacle’s preference. As expected from the reviews, it’s more balanced sounding than the BLUE.

That would typically be my preference, but I feel that something of the baby was thrown out with the bath water, and I actually prefer the brighter BLUE with its excellent deep bass. The extension piece on one of the cables is a bass boost for the RED that I think muddies the sound like the loudness buttons that used to be standard on amps and receivers.

Unlike some other hobbies and pastimes, where the next generation of fans failed to show up (stamps, coins, bowling, et. al.), many young guys are actively involved in appreciating audio and music. Being young, there are some snarky reviews of IEMs on YouTube, but the overall tone is positive and fun. As is seen here, where the youngsters are questioning an elder audio expert, while remaining respectful.

Follow-up: Both of these IEM’s are keepers. The extra $5 for the RED edition seems to be for the booster adapter. Curiously, on the Lenovo laptop it makes the sound a little muddy, but with my phone it seems to have no effect. Maybe it’s an impedance thing.