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Review: Sony MDR-V150 Headphones with Reversible Housing for DJ Monitoring

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I needed some decent budget headphones, preferably by a good brand and if possible under £15. So I went looking on Amazon, and found these –Sony MDR-V150 Headphones with Reversible Housing for DJ Monitoring.

I didn’t find the headphones from the company I’ve linked to, because when I ordered them (25th Dec 08) they were available direct from Amazon. However, they were around the same price if you include shipping costs.

For budget headphones, they are a fantastic buy. Since I only paid about £10 with Super Saver Shipping (available at the time), I wasn’t expecting much quality. But they are very good – the bass sounds good and can be adjusted through Windows.

They look and feel relatively sturdy, although the ear muffs look a little cheap. However, the headphones are very comfortable and I would be quite happy to wear them for extended periods of time. They are dispatched as 3.5mm jack headphones, but a 6.3mm jack adapter is also included.

I had a quick go at seeing if I could easily pull them apart and they didn’t come apart. The ear muffs aren’t detachable which I find very good as I hate headphones that have detachable ear muffs. The moving parts don’t come apart without a severe snap. You can drop them onto a hard surface and they survive easily.

They have a size adjuster of 9 sizes, which should fit most people.

Overall I think they are very good for the price. They are Sony which makes them very good sound and sturdiness. There are definitely better headphones around if you can afford to splash out, but I wasn’t requiring top-notch headphones. If you need budget headphones that will sound good and last, these are the ones to buy. Don’t go with cheap unknown brands as they will not be good and probably will be very cheaply made.

A definite buy if you want to save a bit of cash in the credit crunch and still get a good sound!

The working Freecom Network Drive review…

Well now I finally have a working Freecom Network Drive (http://www.geekonthepc.com/2008/12/12/the-final-freecom-network-drive-update/), I thought its only fair to post a real review for it.

So, I’m reviewing the Freecom Network Drive 500GB (available from http://www.freecom.com/ecproduct_detail.asp?ID=3402&CatID=8020&sCatID=1146266&ssCatID=1147446)

For a drive costing just under £80 plus a bit of delivery, it’s really quite good value. You get a 500GB drive, 10/100MB ethernet connectivity, USB connectivity, a local FTP server which can be made available all over the internet via port forwarding on your router, adjustable IP configuration, seperate directories, and a couple of other things you don’t really notice.

There are a few pros and cons…

Pros:

Very good value for money
Huge amounts of storage
Useful powersave option
FTP (local and internet-wide)
Generally does the job fine

Cons:

Occasionally crashes
Powersave option doesn’t totally turn it off
Gets quite hot due to it not having a fan
Only capable of about 2mbps when uploading to drive which isn’t rocket speed
FAT32 formatting means the dreaded 4GB file size limit; change it to NTFS and you won’t be able to access it over LAN (only USB)

So it does have it’s good and bad bits, but overall it does the job fine. It does get noticeably hot so beware of that but its not caused any problems so far. I believe it shouldn’t be a problem because the alliminium casing is designed to allow heat to flow through the device. On the upside, the lack of fan means electricity usage is very low.

I’d recommend it to most people as long as your not storing files more than 4GB per file.

General thoughts: Very good for most people, ideal as a home storage solution. Maybe not so useful for people who store DVDs on their hard disks, for example.

Update 3.2.09: Since I did this post back in December, Freecom have increased the price of this drive. However, the drive itself is still the same and they have not modified it.

Is Nokia’s new Comes With Music worth it?

If you want a straight answer, then no. I doubt Nokia will have this deal last very long, because frankly Nokia is making quite a gamble.

So this is how it works. You pay £129.95 and you will get a Nokia 5310 XpressMusic and a 1 year subscription to Comes With Music. Well first of all, the 5310 is a phone that’s over a year old now. You can have N95 8GB if you would rather have that, but still the N95 is beginning to show it’s age now and more modern technology is already beginning to replace it. Besides, if you’ve only got two phones to choose from a lot of people will just move onto something else.

The N95 Comes With Music edition will knock you back £400 and with that you’ll get an 8GB model, all the “bells and whistles” of the N95 and the year of “free” music.

Oh and by the way don’t forget this “free” music doesn’t cover data costs so you still have to pay for some plan to get a fair rate for downloading music or you are going to end up with a massive phone bill.

Nokia is in my opinion taking a huge gamble here. Lets say someone downloads 1500 songs over the course of the year and each song was to cost £0.79. Well that totals to £1185 so how Nokia is making a profit here I would love to know.

So overall I think Nokia is not only risking a huge loss, but the poor choice of phones and the risks of data costs make it pretty much useless to most people.

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