Personal Dork Assistant

Functional Requirements

GF needed a new pair of headphones for her MP3 player. The cheap POS phones she was using developed a bad connection, just like the cheap POS pair before that. And having a functional portable music system matters more now that she's taking the MRT to work every day instead of scootering to school. The conventional earbuds don't do much to block out the train noise, and she had to turn up the player way too loud to hear anything resembling music. So I wanted to suggest a earplug-type headphone to help block noise. However, the headphones must also be capable of acting as a lanyard for the MP3 player, hung around the neck. So in order of importance:

1. Worn as a lanyard around the neck
2. Block out ambient noise
3. Cost
4. Sound quality

Couldn't exactly take the GF running through the geek-warren of Nova. There's plenty of fancy boutiques on the Taipei east-side, but fancy is not what you need when you're looking for commodity electronics. The headphone selection at 燦坤 branch on 忠孝東路 was a bit less than pathetic, with only a few junky Chinese brands. Went to Mitsukoshi for dinner. There was a FNAC branch in the A9 basement so we went by after dinner to check it out. They used to have a pretty good CD selection, but they cut that way back to put in more high-end audio and specialty electronics like notebooks and cell phones. No point in selling commodity junk at a premium location. Their headphone selection wasn't great, either, but at least they had some reasonably decent Japanese stuff (made in China these days, oh well). I've been considering the Sony MDR-EX51, but it didn't have the neck-lanyard. Still, hanging the MP3 player or cell phone around the neck has been the Asian trend for a while and I expected that they'd have something for the market.

Finally after searching all over the store (and after one very scary but ultimately harmless call about GF's grandfather in the hospital) we finally found the Sony MDR-NX1 headphones, with the EX51's earplug-type design but with a neck cord. Perfect, except it was NTD1750 and they only had the red color. The color was fine with the GF, and it's been a while since I got something nice for her anyway, so what the heck.

Of course, when we did go to Nova with her mom on a shopping expedition we found out that the Sony headphones could be had for four hundred NTD less at any of the little audio shops in the tech-mall. Not to mention that Panasonic and Audio-Technica also had similar products available for a couple hundred NTD less than the Sony. Oh well, so long as the GF's happy with it, right?