Skullcandy – Striker’s

Striker's Purchase

In my continuing pursuit of the ideal ear buds without spending a fortune I recently purchase a pair of Skullcandy Striker's for $49 from my local electronics retailer. The box marketing blurb states "Base Rich Noise Isolation For Active Aggressive Listening". What is Active Aggressive Listening, does this mean you are jumping up and down and banging your head against the wall? Got to love the marketing folks!

Packaging

The Striker's come nicely packaged with a semi-rigid carrying case and the obligatory three sizes of silicone ear gels. Before you even open the package you can see that the housing for the drivers has a unique design and appears to be machined out of aluminum, the packaging states "Solid Anodized Metal Housing". After opening the package you see that the cord connecting the ear buds to the 3.5mm plug appears to be an outer jacket woven of a metal with a clear silicone covering. Overall this visual impression is solid well designed and appealing. The semi-rigid carrying case is nice too I suppose for those of you that will use it, I myself will stick it in a drawer; once out of the package I am either using my ear buds or they are sitting on my desk until needed, I can't be bothered with putting them in and taking them out of a case.

Fit

After fitting the ear buds with the small silicon gels the Striker's fit my ears better than any previous ear buds. The fit was very comfortable, providing a tight seal without being uncomfortable to wear for long periods. The ear buds were easy to put in my ears and never felt like they were going to fall out and didn't need constant adjusting that I have found with other ear buds.

I can definitively state that these ear buds isolate you from the outside world better than almost every other ear buds I have used, I could see where wearing these ear buds could pose a potential hazard when you are outside as you will not hear anything besides your music.

Listening Experience

Like most of you I barely made it out of the store before opening the package to try out my new purchase. Frankly I almost turned around and returned them to the store, they sounded horrible. My iPhone is set to shuffle and I think I just happened catch a song that doesn't work well with the Striker's. The sound was kind of garbled and harsh so I searched for a song that was from a Hop Hop artist so I could experience the "Base Rich Noise Isolation For Active Aggressive Listening". I was rewarded with a nice tight base response and clear highs and mids, but at the same time I wasn't convinced I liked the sound compared to the Altec Lansings MUZX MHP136 I have been listing to.

The problem with speakers and ear buds in particular is that they tend to be prejudiced towards one type of music or another. Some speakers sound great with hip hop but terrible or just ok with classic rock, or they sound good with jazz but mediocre with alternative, etc. So you end up choosing the ear buds that fit the majority of the music you listen to. I happen to have eclectic taste in music and listen to everything from classical to country to alternative rock to hip hop and rap. This makes it a little difficult to choose the perfect set of ear buds.

The Striker's have a clean sound, the overall tonal quality is clear and precise, and while they do have a decent bass response it is definitely not aggressive. There are many types of bass response like the annoying car vibrating distorted bass that comes from the punk in the compact car with silly looking 22's, or the almost non-existent bass of your standard iPhone ear phone, or my preference the extremely tight body thumping bass you get from a high end audio system. The striker's are indeed tight and clean but they don't have the punch I would really desire.

Overall after switching back and forth between the Altec Lansing's and the Striker's I preferred the clarity of the Striker's even though the bass is not as strong as I would like. If only the iPhone had a built in equalizer, that would solve a lot of the sound problems! Funny with how much Apple likes to pat itself on the back that they could overlook or reject the need for an equalizer.

Conclusion

I would give the Striker's a seven on a scale of one to ten, clear, smooth highs and midrange with adequate bass. The styling is nice and the fit and comfort is better than any ear buds I have tried so far.

My Windows 7 Rants - Part 1

Let me start by saying that in general I am happy with the Microsoft products that I use. The problem I have with Microsoft applications are the dumb choices they make with the User Interface in their applications.


Windows Vista and now Windows 7 have the same Start Menu, and frankly I don’t get it. In general I don’t get the concept of any of the MS dialog windows. I have my monitor set to 1900 x 1600 so I can see a lot on the screen, yet MS doesn’t check the user’s display resolution and no matter the size of your screen you are stuck with a tiny dialog. To add insult to injury many dialog windows will open in the top left corner of the screen, why not center them on the screen. I don’t know about you but my focus is at the center of the display not the corners. Both the general size and position could be made an option setting that each user could set to their liking but instead MS will add something goofy like Bing.

So when I click Start Menu > All Programs I see this

Now I have to scroll through the list of applications even though the bottom of my screen is about three times the fixed length of the Start Menu window. Why not just display a window like the Control Panel with all the icons and folders so you can easily find the application you are looking for. Or at a minimum leave the All Programs display like it was in XP.

Here is another example of the tiny window syndrome, as you can see my screen would easily accommodate the entire contents of the dialog but instead I have to scroll because Windows defaults to a low resolution.

I know there are a lot of people that use the Desktop to store links, which frankly I think is idiotic, why would you want all that clutter and have to minimize any open apps just to get to the Desktop? Toolbars are a much better way to access the applications you use all the time. Which brings up my next complaint about Windows 7, Microsoft eliminated the Quick Launch tool bar, for what reason? Granted you can create your own toolbars but the Quick Launch tool bar has been around for ages and many application installers ask if you want to add an icon to this tool bar. Removing the Quick Launch toolbar just seems dumb, was it causing system crashes, was it causing code bloat, was it confusing, what? Tell me MS what was the reason to remove this item.

The next big gripe relates to window positions and sizes. Do a search on the net for “Windows 7 Remember Folder Settings” you will get about 70 million hits. Clearly there are a lot of Windows 7 users that are not happy with the MS decision to remove this setting. It was great in XP you could have your My Pictures folder show icons and your Word document folder show a list, and you could have one folder show the navigation pane while another window just showed the folder contents. Also, if you resized the window and positioned it in a different place on the screen then the default size and position and XP remembered the size and position then next time you opened the window. Microsoft chose to eliminate this feature. Again why? Was it causing system crashes, was it causing code bloat, was it confusing, what? Tell me MS what was the reason to remove this item.

So far I have to say Windows 7 seems to be better. Seems to be faster, but seems is the key here as my experience with XP was that it was very fast after I did a fresh install but after about a year it slowed down and I would have to do another fresh install.

Windows 7 has a number of new ways of accessing open windows that I am not sure I like but it could just be a matter of getting used to it. When you have an application like Word open and you have multiple documents open instead of seeing multiple buttons on the Task Bar for each Word doc you now see one icon on the task bar with another one hidden under it. When you click the icon you see a list of the documents and then you select from the list. Like I said I am not sure I like it, I never had a problem remembering which Task Bar icon was for each document I opened so I could go to what I needed quickly, now I have to click the icon then read the list of open docs then click the link. This is slower in my opinion, but maybe most users are dim witted and MS had to compensate for the majority.

Side Note: Just started a new document in Word and yep you know it, MS opened the new doc in a tiny window in the upper right corner of my screen. Not in the middle of the screen where I am working, not at a size that is appropriate for my screen resolution but a tiny window in the corner. Annoying.

I will write more about W7 as I use it, this has been my first week of use so I know there will be more to say. I believe most of it will be positive but what gripes me is the simple things that MS doesn’t get.

Windows 7 Folder View Fix

Like a lot of other Windows 7 / Vista users I want my folders to display information based on my choice not on a Microsoft Global Template.

I tried this registry hack and it seems to work, now I can set My Pictures folder to display thumbnails, and My Music to display as a list, and Downloads to display as detail, etc. This hack also seems to have fixed the positioning and sizing of windows; now when I open Windows Explorer it is in the same position and size it was in when I closed it.

 

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\LocalSettings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\Bags\AllFolders\shell]

Add a new string value named "FolderType" and change the value to "NotSpecified"