Thoughts, photos and other things.

The B&W C5 headphones are the newest addition to the headphone section of the company and what a great addition they are too.

Great sound with lovely response and great base define an innovative In Ear Monitor IEM.

Bowers and Wilkins are a company I have always highly respected. Even though I have never had the pleasure of owning any of their truly high end products, the ones I have owned have always been of great quality and design. 

Last year I purchased the [[ASIN:B003IHUHGE P5 Mobile Hi-Fi Concert for 1 Headphones - Black]] after deciding to replace my [[ASIN:B000UZ03ZW Shure SE420-K-EFS Sound Isolating Earphones - Black]] which had gone missing.

As great as the P5’s were, I took great issue with how warm my ears got when walking round London in the Summer. This led me to hastily offloading the - in my opinion - flawed product.

I went back to the Shure SE-420’s once again and that was that. 

Come late 2011 and once again I was without my 420’s. This time I had been an idiot and had dropped them outside my car door whilst getting out and returned to find the headphones smashed to smithereens - not a pretty sight I assure you!

Whilst at the airport just a week ago I noticed that I had become fed up with Apples signature, crap, headphones and needed something else.

Surprisingly my choices were varied, even at the airport. I narrowed down my choices to [[ASIN:B003S3RD74 Shure SE425-V-EFS Sound Isolating Earphones]] the [[ASIN:B00368CICQ Klipsch Image X10i Noise Isolating In-Ear Headset with 3-Button Mic for iPhone / iPod - Black]] and the Bowers and Wilkins C5’s after discounting the Bose QC15’s on the basis of not wanting noise cancelling technology destroying the music I listen to.

In the end I settled on the Bowers and Wilkins C5’s. My reasons were the innovative design, and reputation of the firm for creating great musical listening devices.

I was not disappointed.

DESIGN & BUILD QUALITY

The design is something I have never seen before, the headphone, after being pushed into the ear uses the cable which is slightly rigid - although still adjustable - to slip inside a ridge of your ear to hold itself in place.

It is a much cleaner solution to the one employed by Shure and is leaps and bounds ahead of Klipsch.

Also the study metal construction is reassuring and the cable does not feel like it will fall apart. I must say I was most disappointed to find the cable non replaceable. 

Other than this the design is a welcome refresh to the same old.

Also the inline controls - which only work with iDevices are very useful and work well.

The headphones feel well built, they should last at least a year or two. 

SOUND QUALITY

Now here is of course what you have been waiting for.

Summed up in one sentence; The Bowers and Wilkins C5’s deliver astonishingly good bass which can be too powerful whilst still providing the listener with a warm - although sometimes harshly bright mid and high range.

At high volumes on tracks with lots of bass the mid range can suffer although it handled Thom Yorke’s ‘Skip divided’ with relative ease up until 3/4 volume. Villa Nah’s ‘Running on’ did however suffer and i was forced to turn the bass down to FLAT on my iPod.

If not presented with heavy or overbearing bass such as in Interpol’s ‘Leif Erikson’ the headphones truly shine.

SOUND ISOLATION

Of course chances are you want to shut out the outside world whilst commuting and the good news is that these headphones do a great job of shutting out the outside world.

Problem is that due to the ‘micro porous’ outside - which helps provide the great bass’ most of your fellow commuters will probably be able to hear the music as well if you are listening above 2/3 volume.

It can be a little tricky to get a proper fit but you are rewarded with deep bass and lovely highs if you get it right!

SUPPLIED ACCESSORIES

The headphones come with a somewhat ‘suave’ suede case.

Personally I’d avoid it. My headphones didn’t fit in them very well so I am continuing to use my Shure case as that is large enough to accommodate both my headphones and iPod Nano.

The 4 differently sized tips should accommodate most ear sizes.

VERDICT

I would say that the B&W C5’s do represent good value for money.

Although not at the cheap end of the market they are definitely not at the top of the IEM market either. Innovative design and fantastic sound quality for the price make these a great buy.

The only downsides are the sound leakage and non replaceable cable.

To me these outperform the Shure SE-425’s on sound quality and build in most respects. Perhaps the se-420’s are cleaner when it comes to merging bass and mid range but at that stage it is purely a matter of personal preference.

Be careful what you wish for, you might actually get it!

I have been ill so sorry about the silence.

There is something about London that separates it from other cities, I’m not entirely sure what it is, but there is definitely something.
New York had a similar feeling but a different one. Also it was easier to put my finger on what it was. It was the restlessness rather than a curse it was a blessing. The fact that the streets were as busy at 4 am as they were at 9AM.

London definitely does not have this particular characteristic. No matter what anyone tells you, London sleeps. Yes there are havens of nightlife where things go on into the early hours and then on into the late morning but as a whole London quietens down.

London is a very rushed city. That is true, things to do, people to see, business deals to complete, bars to visit, tubes to get and walks home to sleep. I disagree with people who say London is not kind. The people are very nice, they be in a godamned rush but they will still stop to offer directions.

So what is it that makes London so special? Because it is special. Very much so.
Perhaps it is the old pubs, the real drinking establishments as it were, but I wouldn’t say that wou,d make a city special.
We don’t have a cafe culture like the Italians, nor the nightlife of even other European cities. You could even argue London does not have the class of other cities.

Yet perhaps that is it, as much as it pains me to say it, the old cliche of London being a mix of everything is perhaps what makes it what it is.

Light and night.

There are few things which I hate more than sleeping in a room with any form of ambient light.

I can honestly not tell you why, but for as long as I can remember I have found it nigh on impossible to sleep in a room which is not as dark as physically possible. This goes as much for the halogen street lamp, which can impregnate the white walls of any room with a neon orange glow that would not look out of place in a science fiction movie, as it does for that red alert LED that RIM found necessary to place at the top of all their phones.

Even the pulsating ‘invisible’ white light that emanates from the front of my MacBook Pro is enough to drive me insane at night - although I must confess it is truly impressive how bright that light is considering it is impossible to see the opening on the aluminium chassis of the laptop during daylight hours.

I also remember an ‘amusing’ moment when I re-arranged a hotel room so that the built in radio alarm would not cause unnecessary distress whilst I attempted to make the most out of the available hours I had left to sleep without being disturbed by the incessant green glow.

I have even gone as far as to unplug TV’s and other electrical equipment in friends houses purely because I would otherwise not been able to sleep. Of course to many of you this may seem extremely strange, as human beings we all have wonderful eyelids. These ‘covers’ serve to protect our eyes from stray objects and invariably light and yet for me they are not enough.

This brings me nicely onto something which has now been bugging me hugely for a very long time, my radio. I have owned my Revo Heritage for about a year now. It has diligently woken me every morning that I have had it, its dual alarm function proving invaluable on those days where important meetings were scheduled but late nights had preceded. In fact it has proved so useful I once took it with me on holiday simply because it’s one of the few alarms that can actually wake me, its tones seem to evoke some primeval instinct to wake up.

Yet despite this, it is one of the most annoying things in my bedroom, the screen which is a wonderful cyan OLED affair cannot be set to turn off - even when on standby. Being at the high end of the radio market - its functions include DAB and the more useful Internet radio functions as well as Last FM and optical outputs, one would of perhaps have thought that this function would have been a given. But alas it is not. It is almost enough to drive me back to buying a Pure radio - which along with being significantly cheaper now also has all the functions of the above. I would however miss the beautiful industrial design and the brash yellow backlight would only serve to infuriate me if I were to listen to my iPod in bed.

I would have even purchased Revo’s newest radio - the £300 K2 if it had had the ability to turn off the backlight yet sadly as the e-mail below states, Revo have no intention of doing so. It just seems so odd why a premium product which is otherwise perfect would neglect to include such a setting, it is not hard to add to the user interface nor interferes with how the product functions. Truly mind boggling.

Here is the email I received after enquiring:

“Dear Christopher, Thanks for your e-mail.                                                                 There is no way nor are there any plans for the display to be turned off on Heritage or K2.

The only product that this can be done with is our AXiS product.

Kind Regards,

Support Team Revo Technologies Ltd”

I must say I do find the part about the Heritage odd as I do have an email somewhere, that I shall try to dig out, which states that they did have plans to introduce it… I guess they changed their minds. Some of you may ask ‘why not just buy the Axis? Sadly it is not the same product as the K2 or Heritage and if I go with an Axis I may as well just get a Pure. I just find it hard to fathom quite how something as basic as a setting to switch off a backlight is so hard to program and include in a product, so much so that a company seems hell bent on not offering it on their flagship product.

So it seems that at least for now I shall continue to use my current approach of placing my iPad in its dock in-front of the screen of my radio as to minimise the light fallout which is a shame but in this case a necessity of me sleeping well.