snowpics

OK  – I have had more than enough of on-board audio! Not the soundcard that came with your motherboard, but the people who bring their audio on-board the bus. I take GO transit to work and spend another 20 minutes on the TTC. I get a nice peaceful ride all the way to Toronto on the GO even to the point where I get a chance to sleep most of the way there and back if I wanted. But…

Lately with the advent of satellite radio and other services like Spac from Telus, more people are listening to radio and music on their travels. This is in most cases done with the headphones supplied with their new $500 phone or satelite reciever they purchased. I guess though in some cases maybe didn’t come headphones. It has now become common place to play your music at whatever is a ‘Reasonable Volume’ for all passengers on the bus to hear. This is great, considering I enjoy most music, except when three people are competing for the same airtime on-board the bus. Did these people forget to budget headphones I wonder? Did the headphones fail? Do people just not give a crap that there are 35 other passengers on-board that probably dont want to listen to three songs at the same time?

My first question I guess should be – Why did the manufacturers of these portable music devices put a speaker on the device? And my second question is, why do people use them in public places? This gets worst than me just having to hear other’s music played over a crappy cell phone ring speaker, or portable sattelite mini output – When I was in Future Shop looking for my own personal music play from which to connect a pair of ‘personal listening device’ aka headphones, I saw a back-pack loaded with 6” speakers hanging out of the sid eof the pack, and you too for only $145 can own your own personal portable, wearable speaker / radio backpack from which to hang your favorite personal file sharing device and let everyone in your neighborhood know what music you enjoy. I guess hearing one of these backpacks may be better only in that the sound coming from the pack may actuallly sound better than that .025” sub woofer in your cell phone.

So this leads me to my last question – What causes a person to believe that playing THEIR music to eveyone else is going to improve our current noise polution? Is it only to ‘Improve’ the noise that we hear every day? Is this just because people must let everyone know they were stupid to buy such a device without headphones? Is this because we love our music so much that sharing it with everyone brings us so much joy and cheer? I can’t answer this – if you can, please post your comments!