As a semi-loyal ThinkPad fan, my love for the TrackPoint is no less than my love for Ms. Atsumi Tanezaki. So whether on the X230 or the X250, the TrackPoint has become my go-to pointing device. Sometimes even with a Bluetooth mouse connected, I’ll find myself using it for a while and then tossing the mouse aside to go back to the TrackPoint. So here’s the thing: my X230 has been in use for almost two years now, and its TrackPoint is battered—gray and no longer bright, and it seems a bit shiny too. So I figured I’d find a new one to swap in. I knew Taobao had them… but I didn’t know there were actually three kinds of TrackPoint:

The famous deal-hunting site SMZDM has a few headphone holy grails: Creative IE3, Creative Air, Creative Live2, AKG Q450, and whatever else I can’t remember. Basically, every time there’s a JD.com audio coupon, these earphones get trotted out and recommended, until almost everyone has a pair—it’s practically a recurring segment. As for the sound quality of these headphones, not many people actually talk about it seriously. Based on my own experience, I can only say some of them aren’t really for the masses. The typical one is the Creative IE3: its sound is too treble-heavy, the bass is just sad, and plenty of people who bought it hoping for thumping bass are probably disappointed. Another Creative product, the Creative Air, has been tagged as a “female vocal poison.” Oh great, female vocal poison again. After the last Phiaton, I thought I was done with female vocal poison, but people keep making the same mistakes. This time I got a 100-off-400 coupon, and my hand slipped and I bought the Creative Air, because the IE3 had already been taken by someone else. I have to give JD.com credit here: they deliver even during Spring Festival, and efficiently too, though the courier guy told me after delivering this that any order placed today would have to wait until after the holiday.

After picking up a ThinkPad X250 I paired it with a dock. The dock was an engineering sample. Cheap, but with its share of problems. Most of them I can live with — no triple-monitor output, for instance, which I don’t need anyway. The real killer is that when the machine isn’t plugged into power, external audio picks up a loud hum. People reported this on the official site and on Youtube. It turned out to be a hardware fault on Lenovo’s end, and only got fixed after Lenovo recalled the thing. Like I said, though, mine is a cheap engineering sample, so no recall for me. That doesn’t mean there’s no fix. Just get an external sound card…

I use my own laptop for work. It’s not that the desktop machines at the office are bad, they’re just a hassle to use. Over a year ago I bought a ThinkPad X230, and using it since then I’ve really come to appreciate how good ThinkPads are. If something goes wrong you can just find the parts yourself and fix it. Honestly, even if you smashed it, I could buy some bits on eBay and put it back together for you… Over the past year or so I’ve replaced the screen, messed with the cooling, and the machine runs fine. But there were still a couple of things that bugged me. One, the screen was the cursed 1366 x 768. Two, the battery life was bad. Even with a 9-cell I could only push power draw down to 11W at best, and it would randomly spike to 20W… So when I heard the ThinkPad X250 was announced and that it brought back the original trackpad, I just bought it. Why not a Mac? Because I don’t use OSX, and I think putting Ubuntu on an RMBP is too much hassle.

If I had to name the first time music truly got to me, it’d be my senior year of college. Back then my daily IEMs were the Audio-Technica CKM55, and I was listening to an Alan song. The rhythmic drumbeat paired with her sweet, slightly melancholy voice hit me with a wave of sadness. I remember thinking: how is this singer’s voice so clear, so sweet — it’s like the sound itself carries emotion, and I got infected by it. Later, the CKM55 that had been with me for so long had its cable snap, and then I found out the thing was discontinued. I’ve gone through plenty of earphones since, and it’s rare to find a pair that separates bass from vocals while keeping the highs clear. More importantly, that feeling of passion was gone. Even with booming bass, sweet mids, and crystal highs, there’s always something missing — that one bit of passion. I’m no good at the mystical side of this hobby. That “passion” is probably expressible in a frequency response curve, but how exactly you tune for it, I couldn’t tell you. Luckily, the Grado SR225 headphones gave me what I wanted.

Audiophile mysticism is mysticism because so much of it can only be felt, not explained, and often can’t even be put into words. The vocabulary grows with the years. Back when I was in high school, most of it was “bass extends moderately, highs are transparent, mids are sweet, good resolution.” Now it’s “wide soundstage, bass loose vs. tight, mids forward vs. too far back.” I don’t know about the rest, but “extends” is a word I haven’t seen in ages. Another trait of the mysticism is that it can’t be expressed precisely and has no unified standard. Plenty of gurus like to measure frequency response curves with pro gear, but nobody tells you what curve counts as “female-vocal poison,” what curve counts as a “wide soundstage,” what curve counts as “pop tuning.” And the funniest part: even if you produce the curve, someone will tell you music isn’t for looking at, it’s for listening to, and how it sounds is what matters… I don’t get it. I really don’t. There are also plenty of weird terms in this mysticism that can’t be explained, or you can’t even say what they mean. Recently I heard two of them: “musicality” and “monitor style.” Someone said the Sony D100 recorder isn’t suited for listening to music, and gave a reason. “Sure, this thing crushes the ZX1 in every way, but the sound is too cold, too dry, too monitor-flat, too compressed, no musicality. It’s not as smooth as the ZX1 and PHA-2.” I didn’t know sound could be heard as “smooth,” or that sound has a taste… and that it fails on taste even while crushing everything else on every count… So what exactly is musicality? What is monitor style? And how is the D100 as a music player, for a device that’s a voice recorder? After reading a pile of guru talk I got nothing usable out of it, so I had to listen for myself.

I used to be a Sony PHA-1 owner. For the longest time I ran it with my laptop as an external sound card, which nicely dodged all the noise coming out of the laptop’s built-in audio. Honestly, it worked fine. Then a few days ago some little bottom I used to gank over and over back in my World of Warcraft days — opposite faction, same server — forced me to sell him my PHA-1. So I had to buy a new one. I considered the Creative E5 first, but word is it’s crap. I also considered the PHA-3, until I found out it needs its own power supply, and my laptop doesn’t have that many USB ports. So the PHA-2 it was. It arrived, and sure enough: praise be to Sony.

Bought the ChromeCast on Black Friday. The point was to test EMS’s official overseas forwarding service. Turns out that forwarder is deeply unreliable — this $19 thing from Amazon US took a month to reach me, and it went missing a couple of times along the way. Anyway, it arrived. A lot of people probably want to know what this thing is good for, and how it can still be used in China in 2015. So let me run through it briefly.

The first time I worked up the nerve to spend over 1000 on earphones, I bought the UE TF10. I figured I’d already picked up an F807 and decided to listen to FLAC, so I ought to pair it with something decent. That TF10 stayed with me for a long, long time. I got to know its sound so well I couldn’t know it any better: strong instrument rendition, powerful resolution, rhythmic bass, and… vocals buried under the bass and instruments, plus a fit that was a struggle to jam in no matter what. Two years later, one side of my TF10 finally developed a problem, so I had to let it go. It was a US-market unit, and there were no new TF10s on the market anymore… I could only switch to the ER4P, though sometimes I couldn’t help missing that aggressive TF10 sound. Compared to the ER4P it wasn’t transparent at all, but it was genuinely great for rock. Later I picked up a cheap TF10 unit on eBay, put it on, and just shook my head. That cheap, it was probably foreign e-waste. The resolution was there, but the sound was far too muffled… So how does the TF10’s successor, the UE900, perform?

When it comes to buying earphones to listen to music, I’ve never considered myself an audiophile — just some poor bastard afflicted by OCD. In elementary school, I downloaded a song called 《爱就一个字》 from 商都信息港 at 33.6Kbps. It was only 3MB, 128Kbps if I recall correctly, and at the time I thought the sound quality was absolutely mind-blowing. Then in high school I bought Sony’s “perfume bottle” player and downloaded albums from Ukoo.net. 192kbps VBR was already considered good quality back then. I couldn’t really tell the difference, but one time I downloaded a 128Kbps song, gave it a listen, and something felt off. So I figured I’d buy a better pair of earphones. I saved up and got the Sennheiser MX500. Put them on and instantly felt I’d wasted my money: “This is no different from my old 10-yuan earphones!” I saw people online saying these had “good bass extension,” didn’t quite get what that meant, so I asked my classmate Lu Da. His answer: “Ah, that? It’s just the sub-bass effect, man. When it hits it’s not boom-boom-boom, it’s more like there’s a bit of echo and springiness to it — pong pong pong.” I sort of half-understood. Then one day one of the MX500’s drivers died, and I had to grab a stock earphone that came with a PDA. Maybe it was slightly better than the 10-yuan ones I’d used before. Put it on, turned on the music, and immediately something felt wrong. “How does this sound so different from my MX500?” And that’s how the tragedy began.